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.