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Thursday, October 18, 2007

News of the Day

i3RDPARTY APPS

Over at Apple's news page they have announced an SDK for the iPhone and iPod Touch that will allow third parties to create native applications to be developed that will be installable on the two devices. The SDK should be available in February. These new applications will require some form of security or application signing for the applications to be installed in these devices.

Day of Dot Net This Saturday

The Day of Dot Net Event returns to Ann Arbor's Washtenaw Community College this Saturday.. It's a great even for developers. It's sponsored by the following .NET user groups.

Great Lakes Area .NET User Group
http://www.migang.org/
Ann Arbor .NET Developer Group
http://www.aadnd.org/
Northwest Ohio .NET User Group
http://www.nwnug.com/
Greater Lansing User Group .net
http://portal.artemis-solutions.com/glugnet/
West Michigan .NET Users Group
http://www.grdotnet.org/

This is a great event if you are an integrator or a developer, it's kind of disappointing there are no design tracks. That kind of tells me developers regionally haven't realized that they need to embrace the designer community more. I believe there should be more interaction between designers and developers. Last year I held out hope that they might see the light on this, but if the fact that there is no designer track this year, it probably means that the developers probably haven't "embraced" the designer community who is doing Windows UI development as well.

There is one introduction to Expression Blend, so at least there is a mention. It's sad to think that beyond design there is no User Experience or User Centered design track with the design stuff here. The guy doing the track is a C# MVP with Microsoft and is well known in the C# community.

If you are a developer you should be there, it's worth the time. If you are a UI designer, interaction designer, etc. I still suggest you attend our MichiganInteractiveDesigners.org meetings. You will get great information on user centered UI development and Expression Studio, Expression Blend, etc.

DevCares Event for October (Friday the 19th, 2007 from 8:30am to 12:30pm) Southfield Microsoft office

Presented by: Microsoft DevCares Series

Visual Studio 2008 & LINQ

At the core of most applications developed is the data. Although programming languages have evolved over the years to include features that allow developers to easily utilize object-oriented programming techniques in order to represent complex models, accessing and integrating the information for these models into our applications remains a complex and daunting task. Traditionally, developers have used multiple tools for exploring, understanding, and accessing data, and yet another tool for writing code that integrates that data into the application.

With Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5, a general purpose query facility is being introduced to alleviate the complexities of integrating data in our applications, known as language-integrated query, or LINQ. Join us for this event as we provide you with an overview of this exciting new technology, and show you how you can take advantage of it to reduce the complexities of data integration and improve your productivity.

Session 1: LINQ Overview

In this session, we’ll introduce LINQ, and provide an overview of its concepts and fundamentals, and how it can help developers increase productivity when working with data sources. The overview is followed by demonstrations of utilizing LINQ to connect with a variety of data sources using LINQ to Objects, including LINQ to Object, LINQ to File System, LINQ to Event Log, and LINQ to Flickr.

Session 2: LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities

In this session, we’ll show how to use LINQ to connect with our existing enterprise data architecture. We’ll explore the use of the object mapping tools available for LINQ, including LINQ to SQL, allowing us to work with Microsoft SQL Server databases, and LINQ to Entities, allowing us to query data exposed as objects through the ADO.NET Entity Framework across SQL Server and various third party data stores.

Session 3: LINQ to XML

In this session, we’ll explore how LINQ can be used to help integrate XML-based data in our applications. After covering the basics of XML construction, we’ll dive into XML Axes, Querying, Caching Namespaces, as well as some advanced topics including Extensibility and Load / Save Options.

Why you should attend:

I recommend this training session because the LINQ to XML session and LINQ to entities (which I have spoke about before with the Astoria CTP) is very important to data exchange and databinding with Silverlight.

New WPF book by Manning Publishing

I was lucky enough to get a sneak peak at this book and I really recommend that you pre-order this book right away. The 20 or so chapters of this book is great.. It's the first book to focus on WPF with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5's new features. The examples provided in the book is what makes this book great, from a simple calculator to a top of the line business application. It tells you everything you need to know about development. I highly recommend this book. Get it early.

Personal Note of Thanks:

This blog is getting a lot of attention. I would like to thank George Bolsch, who is helping to organize the User Experience track at Øredev 2007, for inviting me to speak at their conference in Sweden. This is Sweden's largest developer conference and it's well known and attended by many development folks all over the European continent. Sweden is famously known for it's design influence and it sounds like a great place to visit.

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