Awesome event great showing by our locals! I truly enjoyed this event and I hope you did as well.

#NwaCodeCamp was the best local event I have been to in a long time. I saw a lot of Very good sessions. I think Jason Vogel & @JaySmith ran an amazing event.

I had the opportunity to present on Silverlight DeepZoom. I wanted to post my PPT for anyone who attended and wanted the links. If you have any questions related to the event or to my presentation post away, I’ll either answer them or get you an answer.  I'm going to work on a blog post to go into some detail on using the Jellyfish Framework.

Silverlight DeepZoom PowerPoint Link: SilverlightDeepZoom.zip (382.51 kb)

**Also someone asked me what I was using to ZOOM on m desktop. Here is a link to that as well, it’s not in my PowerPoint.

Thanks
Jeremy

Join me at NWA Code Camp 2009 I have a session on “Silverlight DeepZoom applications with Jellyfish” (an open source library for DeepZoom). I will be presenting after lunch check out all the topics at the Agenda page. Still not sure if you want to make it? My session was inspired by @KENAZUMA talk at MIX this year. Cllick here to watch it. (DONT WORRY) my session will be different and just as informative.

Check out these random DeepZoom sites to get a better feel for the technology:

• http://memo.hardrock.com/
• http://DeepZoomPix.com

thanks,
Jeremy

My friends at Wonderstate Media, LLC have done it again. For over a year I have been addicted to their first creation FayettevilleFlyer.com. This is everything I needed to know about NWA and the surrounding areas. When reading there is no doubt that they take their job very seriously and work hard to give you very detailed information on the happenings of this growing area. The site has all the bells and whistles you would come to expect from a First Rate news agency.  Complete with RSS feeds, comments and the like. If you don't believe me go check out their site and let me know your thoughts.

  So you might ask “ok, now what?”

 Wonderstate Media today is announcing the long overdue arrival of a thorough listing of the businesses in Washington County. www.Local540.com - This online directory from day one appears to have everything you need in terms of navigating and locating businesses in Northwest Arkansas. Obviously a lot of work went into collecting data for what can only be described as an online phonebook++. Check out Local540.com for your self and let me know if you find your business. 

Wonderstate Media says:

Local540 serves up relevant, community-specific content unlike any other online local directory in our area – bringing consumers and businesses together. Every business gets their own website with a standard bundle of features. Paid options provide businesses with a fully integrated marketing platform that is organized and useful to consumers.

Each business comes standard with location, pictures, and times of operation, method of payments, Telephone numbers and even links to that local businesses website.

GREAT WORK GUYS, I look forward to using this.

It’s no secret that PDC will be where Microsoft announces their Microsoft cloud computing platform. But if you are like me you have heard that term abused throughout the industry. News on Microsoft's cloud computing platform as a back end for Silverlight applications will be some of the things I hope to key on throughout PDC. I wont be making the trip myself but have plenty of friends that are going.

Here is an interesting note I found on Bill Reiss blog that breaks down the PDC agenda for us: (http://www.bluerosegames.com/SilverlightBrassTacks/post/PDC-should-be-renamed-CDC-for-Cloud-Developers-Conference.aspx)

There are a couple of more Silverlight sessions, now with a total of 13, but what really struck me is that the category with the most sessions is Cloud Services, with 33. Windows 7 has 22, which is still a lot, but 33 is just incredible.

Microsoft’s platform has a collection of unannounced services that I’m sure will all come to light during the PDC keynote. Shortly thereafter I have no doubt someone will have these all listed out very nicely(more to come)!! 

Here are some links of some of the services if your looking to understand how and where Red Dog, Zurich, BizTalk Services and SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) all fit together, David Chappell’s White paper on  “A short introduction to cloud platforms: An Enterprise-Oriented View.”.  Is worth a look he does not mention Zurich & SSDS by name but there are details to help fill in the holes.

For those of you NOT wanting to dig into the 13 pages Mary-Jo Foley from ZDNET.com provides the cliff notes to Chappell’s white paper. Another nice link and picture provided from Mike Kavis – “The future is in the clouds”.

I woke up early this morning to start my exploration into this release and have already found people that could articulate this event much better than me…. So I have included links for the blogs I found most informative. I hope to have more information out this week walking through some of the guts of Silverlight 2. Hope you enjoy.

Check out a couple of these blogs to get a well rounded vibe on what's going on!

• http://wildermuth.com/2008/10/13/Silverlight_2_Released!
• http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Silverlight2IsOut.aspx
• http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/10/14/silverlight-2-released.aspx

If you would like the cliff notes for environment setup here it is:

• Visual Studio 2008 SP1 required
• Blend 2.5 has officially gone away and is to be replaced by Blend 2.0 SP1 
• http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/default.aspx

Honorable mention of things I didn't expect was a set of controls from Shawn Burk’s team (going to try to blog a follow up walking through these):

Shawn says: “We are currently working on a set of controls for a preview release at PDC 2008 in late October.”

• DockPanel
• WrapPanel
• ViewBox
• Label
• HeaderedContentControl
• Expander
• TreeView
• NumericUpDown
• AutoComplete
• Accordion 
  
  
  **All of these controls will use the new Visual State Manager templating model and be fully customizable in XAML by hand or through Expression Blend.  They will also ship with full, buildable source, unit tests, and an updated unit testing harness nicely wrapped up with a tasty OSI-Approved MS-PL license.

Happy researching, I know I will!!

-Jeremy

Bringing community leaders together

NWA very own Jay smith has started up a new site for helping community leaders be better assets to their community :) .. Don't take my word for it go to the site and check out the details.

Thanks,
Jeremy

Some great discussions in the FishBowl on TDD & BDD .. Then moved over to Inversion of control jump start and ended on advanced javascript & CSS session. Both of which were given by Ben Scheiman a Principle Consultant with Sogeti, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. (@subdigital)

BLOG: http://flux88.com/

About: http://www.flux88.com/AboutMe.aspx

laptop running out of juice notes will have to be inserted later.

John Teague talks about a business problem at his company Callaway golf that he ultimately solved with jQuery.

Notes:
--jQuery can be compressed to 12KB
--Easy to manipulate DOM
--TIP&TRICK: Essentially recommends combining your JavaScript files into one.
--Big fan of FireBug

Sites:

• www.VisualjQuery.com
• http://www.callawaygolf.com/Global/en-US/Products/Clubs/Drivers.html

Prescriptive Data Access in .NET 3.5
Brian Orrell

Description: Review the "right way" to develop data access and management applications using VS2008 and LINQ. Many things have changed with LINQ to SQL many developers have difficulty separating the hype from the real-world applicability of these new technologies.

BIO: Pariveda Solutions , Vice President
Brian Orrell is a Vice President with Pariveda Solutions. He has over fifteen years of technology consulting experience in a variety of industries and technologies. His emphasis is on the delivery of enterprise solutions utilizing Microsoft .NET. His areas of expertise include designing, developing and maintaining web-based and distributed object systems. Mr. Orrell has led large-scale development engagements for large utility companies, airlines, shipping companies, educational and non-profit organizations.

Notes:

• Do you check data during the time your user pulls it changes it and hits save???