August 2011 Schedule

This is my 100th blog post for ComponentOne, and tomorrow is my one year anniversary here. Three of my coworkers also have their C1 anniversaries in August, and we're celebrating on Thursday with a nice lunch. Kind of fitting I'll be on the road for my anniversary lunch, but oh well. We're getting back into conference season with this month's schedule! St. Louis Day of .NET (Aug 5-6) My first trip out is also my first ever to St. Louis. No speaking at this one, I was originally going to be on vacation this week, but those plans changed. We have a couple of free tickets to give away, so drop me a line richd [at] componentone [dot] com if you'd like one. I'll be manning the ComponentOne table, and I'll be happy to show you the amazing new products we have. devLink (Aug 16-19) This is my first devLink, but not my first time in Chattanooga, which is a fun little city. I am an aquarium nut, and the Tennessee Aquarium is very nicely done. I am really looking forward to this event, I get to catch up with a lot of friends, and meet a lot of people I respect. I'll be giving one talk:

Connecting WP7 and Azure with WCF Windows Phone 7 and Azure are hot topics this year, and the two together is a winning combination. In this session, we'll have a short overview of Azure and WCF, then look at the free tools and guidelines used to build applications for WP7 (you don't even need a phone to get started). We'll then dig in and create a Windows Phone 7 application which utilizes data stored in SQL Azure and accessed via WCF web services.

This talk will be updated greatly. When I started giving this talk almost a year ago, I had a WP7 test phone and it was like sharing some holy relic at that time. Now that the phones are widely available and people are actively developing, the old content wasn't so impressive. New content coming. Depending on the shipping schedule, we may have some new swag! Also, we have a nice announcement regarding our participation in devLink, so stay tuned, we'll make it soon. Pittsburgh SQL Server User Group (Aug 25) Back home for this talk. This is a fun talk, it turns very interactive very quickly.

Is Azure Right For My Applications? What is Microsoft Azure? Is Azure right for my applications? Do I have to use .NET, or can I develop in PHP or Java? What level of calculus do I need to figure out the billing? These questions and more answered by an experienced enterprise developer and co-author of “Microsoft Azure: Enterprise Application Development” from Packt Publishing. In this talk, we'll look at the features of Azure, how they can be used together or individually, and we'll examine the libraries and tools useful in building, debugging and managing applications on the Azure platform. We’ll also examine some of the changes to the roles of developer, administrator and DBA in a move to Azure. By the end of this session, you'll have a solid understanding of the services available in Azure, how to get started developing for Azure, useful tools to use, and how to decide if Azure is right for your applications.

MSDN Webcast: Rocking Webforms with jQuery (Aug 30) To round out the month, I'll be presenting my second MSDN webcast. There is a huge investment in WebForms, and a lot of people don't know that jQuery can be used to enhance an existing WebForms site very easily. In this talk, I show you how to add jQuery to a WebForms site,

Reports of WebForms' demise are very premature; in fact, WebForms still rock! And by adding just a little jQuery UI magic, they can rock even more. Whether you're beginning a new WebForms application, or maintaining an existing one, it's very easy to add a little UI razzle-dazzle that can both make your code cleaner and the application more user friendly. In this session, we'll look at what jQuery is, how to use it in ASP.NET WebForms applications, and what it can do for our WebForms applications. If you've used the ASP.NET Ajax Toolkit in your applications, you'll want to see what is replacing it.