Today was the 2nd and final day of Microsoft’ Tech Days conference in Ottawa (the 6th city on the 7-city tour). I had the opportunity to speak about two great topics:
What’s new in Silverlight 3
This talk focused on new features in Silverlight 3. It was clear that many people have yet to take a look at any version of Silverlight. This made for a fun challenge – trying to explain new features, while also explaining Silverlight basics, and say how it compares to JQuery with HTML 5. Ottawa’s government-worker-centric population may explain the results of my straw-poll survey with the audience. The snow-storm in the morning made a little dent in attendance, and given the audience make-up, a general introduction session for Silverlight would likely have received a bigger audience (and would probably still do so a year from now when talking about what’s new in Silverlight 4).
Optimizing your apps for the Windows 7 user experience.
This session seemed to get a very positive response, most likely due to the fact that the Windows API Code Pack is available which provides managed wrappers to the Windows 7 native APIs such that making use of new Windows 7 features (like the Taskbar) is practically trivial.
It was a great experience working with the Microsoft Canada guys and my friends in the community. I look forward to doing so again next year on topics such as Silverlight 4, Azure, Office 2010, VS2010/.NET 4.0, and hopefully in multiple cities.
My buddy from work and I attended your Win 7 Usr Exp pres and it was very cool! You demo’d some cool stuff, made it look very interesting and very doable!
Ironically I just say today a blog on Coding4Fun about Jump Lists! Since seeing your presentation, I now have an other reference to try it out with confidence from your presentation I can do it!
Thanks!
http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2009/12/09/9933039.aspx
Comment by PHenry — Friday December 11 2009 @ 20:46