Eastern Michigan Day of Dot Net

by Don Burnett

Why Day of Dot Net is So Special for Local Developers..

The Day of Dot Net is a yearly event sponsored in part by the Ann Arbor .Net Developer's Group. The morning started off with an excellent presentation by Josh Holmes on the "user experience". Josh talked a lot about developing for an improved user experience. He shown several great examples including local.live.com's 3d Mapping, AJAX (asynchronous Javascript and XML), WPF, and SilverLight.

Josh showed off the incredible Silverlight Airlines Demo and talked about the CLR integration into SilverLight and the new DLR.

The day continued with great presentations all around including deep dives into such topics as architecture and the ubiquitous Linq. What makes this event so special is that it's a meeting of the entire local development community. It happens once a year. This year I think was the first year having designers in the audience were embraced. I was happy to see people excited about the new technology and how much they had already been following what was happening at Mix 07.

People are excited about the new technology (especially Silverlight) and are ready to start rocking with it and generating some next generation user experiences. I was amazed at the sheer number of ideas I heard when talking to the people about how they could improve their own application's usability.

If you haven't been to one of the "Day of Dot Net" Presentations you are sorely missing out. The day ended with lots of prizes and cool things given out. I came out with a sense that our community was a alive and well and moving forward at the local level. I believe it will also mean Dot Net 3.0 acceptance will be at an all time high.