BusinessRx Community

The last two days I've been speaking at the the MIX:UK conference that was held this week in London.  We had a sold out crowd of 500 people come to learn more about some of the new Microsoft web technologies.

I gave 5 talks at the conference, including the Keynote and 4 breakout talks: Building Silverlight Applications with .NET (Part 1 and 2), and Building ASP.NET 3.5 Applications with VS 2008 (Part 1 and 2).  I also had the chance to participate on 2 panels (including a really fun one where we sat around and drank tea, ate biscuits, and discussed technology trends).

Below are the slides + demos from my talks if you are interested in downloading them.

Building Silverlight Applications with .NET (Part 1 and 2)

This two part session drilled into how to build Silverlight 1.1 applications using .NET.  I really like the slide + sample approach of this talk (I first gave it at MIX:Hungary in June), and think it provides a really good way to learn the programming concepts of Silverlight 1.1 using .NET.

• Click here to download the slides from the talk. 
• Click here to download the samples from the talk.

Note: All samples are built using the current Silverlight 1.1 Alpha and VS 2008 Beta2 with the Silverlight Tools Alpha Installed. 

Building ASP.NET Applications using VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 (Part 1 and 2)

This two part session was primarily a demo driven talk that shows off many of the new improvements for ASP.NET with .NET 3.5 and VS 2008. 

• Click here to download the slides from the talk.
• Click here to download the samples from the talk (these require VS 2008 Beta2).

To learn more about VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta2 for web development, please also check out these recent blog articles of mine that cover some of its features in more detail:

General:

• VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Released
• Fixes for Common VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta2 Issues

VS 2008:

• VS 2008 Multi-Targeting Support
• VS 2008 Web Designer and CSS Support
• VS 2008 Nested Master Page Support
• VS 2008 Vertical Split View Support
• VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense
• VS 2008 JavaScript Debugging
• VS 2008 Code Editing Improvements
• VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense for Silverlight

ASP.NET in .NET 3.5:

• ASP.NET AJAX in .NET 3.5 and VS 2008
• ASP:ListView Control (Part 1 - Building a Product Listing Page with Clean CSS UI)
• Using ASP.NET AJAX Control Extenders in VS 2008

LINQ to SQL:

• Part 1: Introduction to LINQ to SQL
• Part 2: Defining our Data Model Classes
• Part 3: Querying our Database
• Part 4: Updating our Database
• Part 5: Binding UI using the ASP:LinqDataSource Control
• Part 6: Retrieving Data Using Stored Procedures
• Part 7: Updating our Database using Stored Procedures
• Part 8: Executing Custom SQL Expressions
• Part 9: Using a Custom LINQ Expression with the <asp:LinqDataSource> control

New Language Features:

• Automatic Properties, Object Initializer and Collection Initializers
• Extension Methods
• Lambda Expressions
• Query Syntax
• Anonymous Types

One last note...

I usually get at least 4-5 emails a week from people asking whether they can re-use some of my slides/samples for their own presentations (or books).  My answer to this is always "absolutely!"  Please do not worry about asking for permission on this - you can always re-use any of the content from my talks and blog postings (and feel free to re-use slides and decks wholesale).  I write this content to help people learn how to use .NET - so you helping spread the information is pure goodness from my perspective (my blog is technically not part of my official job, rather just a side hobby I enjoy and find useful).

Hope this helps,

Scott