June 2011 Speaking Schedule

June is settling down a little bit, but I am excited for my destinations. I have a real mixture of topics this month, too!

Portland Code Camp, June 4

First trip is this weekend, to the Portland Code Camp. Leanne Lappe and Greg Lutz are coming, too. I have never been to Portland before, and we have a lite Sunday flight out, so we’ll get to spend some time exploring the city. I’m presenting Connecting WP7 and Azure with WCF and Rocking Webforms with jQuery. Greg is presenting Learn MVVM Basics, and all three of us will be working the ComponentOne table.

Birmingham .NET User Group, June 14

After having lived in Tuscaloosa (Roll Tide!) and Birmingham for many years, I’m excited to be going back. Birmingham is the first stop in my “Tour de Que”—can I eat BBQ in two states, two days in a row? It’s a challenge I’m up for. I’ll be presenting my Rocking Webforms with jQuery talk.

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.

Hub City .NET User Group, June 16

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in Mississippi, and I imagine there will be some football talk mixed in with the demos. I’ll be presenting Webmatrix Onramp:

Microsoft's WebMatrix is a new, lightweight website development suite. The development environment includes tools for creating new websites, installing applications from the Web Gallery, creating/managing databases, and analyzing a site for SEO and performance issues. In addition to the IDE, the suite includes IIS Express, SQL CE 4 and Razor view syntax. In addition to databases, WebMatrix includes resources to provide simple support for OData and Azure Storage. The functionality of WebMatrix-built websites can be extended with a number of partner-provided or custom built helpers, and additional functionality can be added with NuGet packages. In this session, we'll dive into the features of WebMatrix, and look at how to get started managing databases and building websites.