Chicago .NET User Group–The Shortest Prism Talk I have Ever Given.

This past week I was on the road again.  This time I was visiting Chicago, the “Windy City”.  Let me tell you… it was really windy!  What was I doing there you ask?  Well I was visiting my friends at the Chicago .NET User Group.  What did I talk about?  Well, Prism of course.

The Chicago .NET User Group is lead by Keith Franklin, and they meet every 3rd Thursday of each month at the Microsoft office in Downers Grove, IL.  This is a very large group.  This meeting had approximately 120 excited attendees.  What do you feed 120 excited attendees?  PIZZA!  And lots of it!

It only took 40 boxes of pizza and 21 two liter bottles of drinks to satisfy this group of enthusiastic geeks.  Wow, that’s a lot of grub.  Luckily, we at Infragistics not only love to talk at user groups, but we love to feed our user groups.  Infragistics has no problem picking up the massive pizza bill so that our attendees can learn on a full stomach. 

While everyone was stuffing their faces with that delicious Chicago style pizza, I spent some time meeting all the great people and running into some great individuals I have seen at other events.

I know what you’re thinking, and no that’s not Dr. Drew!  That’s my friend Erik Dahl.  I also met new friends such as Corey Miller.

Corey actually works with an acquaintance of mine named Rocky Lhotka over at Magenic.  Turns out we even lived in the same town of Goshen, Indiana during our high school years.  Now that is a small world.  Have you even heard of that town?

If you haven’t noticed by now, I speak at a lot of user groups around the country.  This meeting was different than the other user groups I have attended.  Let me explain.  My “Introduction to Prism” talk runs about 2 to 3 hours depending on how many questions I get and the level of detail the attendees want to go into Prism.  Well, it seems that there were two presenters for this meeting giving me only one hour to explain Prism.  Oh, and I was going first, so I had to be on time to give the next speaker his full allotted amount of speaking time.  So what did I do? I winged it!  We wrote a basic Prism application and in under one hour we covered the basic building block of a Prism application.  There was even time for questions.  I am confident in saying that this talk was the shortest, and fastest, Prism talk I have ever given.  It was a blast!

I would like to thank the Chicago .NET User Group for having me present and Microsoft for giving us a facility to spread the tech-gospel.  I also want to thank all the attendees for their time and all the great questions.

Since we only got to write an app, there isn’t much source code to get, but you can download what we were able to write in under an hour.