April 2009 Entries

Switching expertise: From Client App Dev to Silverlight

At the last MVP summit in March, some of us were informed that a new MVP expertise had been created for Silverlight. They asked a small number of existing MVPs with strong Silverlight competency (including yours truly) if they would agree to switch to that new expertise. I must admit that I have not always been very happy with the thought of a new expertise dedicated only to Silverlight. In my opinion, it is very important to keep Silverlight close to Windows Presentation Foundation, and to make...

The #techdays presentations screencasts are online (French only)

Update: The German version of the presentation is online too. I was just notified that the screencast for the session I gave at TechDays in Geneva a few weeks ago is now online. You can see this presentation (in French) at http://www.microsoft.com/sw... The slides are also available at this URL. Have fun...

Posting the source code for #techdays (Switzerland) talks

Update: I updated the installation instructions to make it clearer that you need the WPF toolkit and SQL Server express before you can run the application. TechDays Switzerland is always a very nice venue, and this year in Geneva and in Bern were no exceptions. For me it was a special occasion, because I gave the same talk in French in Geneva, and in German in Bern, and I had never done this before. I think it went well. Altogether approximately 450 people saw this talk. I think I will possibly reuse...

Using a Behavior to magnify your WPF applications

At MIX 2009, the Expression Blend team cam up with a new concept called Behaviors. In fact, the only thing new is the way that the Behaviors are packed. WPF developers have been doing what we called "Attached Behaviors" for quite some time already: see this thread (dated July 2008) to read a discussion around this topic at the WPF Disciples group. Attached Behaviors leverage a feature of WPF called Attached Properties, that allows you to add a property to an element even if this element doesn't implement...

Two days FREE training: WPF LOB

Get some of that: Microsoft's Jaime Rodriguez and Karl Shifflett are on tour and will come to a number of locations to give a two days training packed with WPF training for building Line of Business (LOB) applications. "That must cost a lot", you think? (well maybe you don't if you read the title of this post) No it is FREE, yes you heard me, no costs, no commitment, no strings attached. You can even choose to follow one day only, or both, as you want. And believe me, you get two of the best WPF...