On the Road Again! The I-90 User Group Tour (Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse)

I’m on the road again for my second user group tour of 2013.  This time I am headed to the great state of New York.  I am calling it the I-90 Tour, mainly because all the groups I will be speaking at are located along the I-90 New York State Thruway. 

On March 26 I will be speaking at the Microsoft Developers of Western New York in Buffalo.  Then, the next day (March 27), I’ll be heading over to the Visual Developers of Upstate New York in Rochester.  Finally, I’ll be wrapping up my tour in the city of Syracuse at the Central New York Developers Group on March 28.

So what will I be talking a bout?  Well, in Buffalo and Syracuse I will be giving a session on “WPF for the Real World”, and in Rochester they have opted for my ever so popular “Building Composite XAML Applications with Prism” session.  You can read the session abstracts below to get an idea of what will be covered in each session.

Topic:  WPF for the Real World
Level: 100
Description:
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is becoming more and more popular as businesses begin to convert their legacy Windows Forms applications and write their new line of business applications using WPF.  WPF provides developers with a unified programming model for building rich Windows smart client user experiences that incorporate UI, media, and documents.  With WPF, you can create a wide range of both standalone and browser-hosted applications.  This session is aimed at giving you the knowledge required to get started writing line of business WPF applications so that you can become a more important asset to your employer.  There will be no spinning buttons, no rotating cubes, and no silly or impractical tricks.  This session will concentrate on the basic building blocks required to be a successful WPF developer.  By the end of this session you will know what XAML is, how to manage layout in your application, define controls in your views,  style and template your views, handle events, and manage data with data binding and the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) design pattern.  Come join me in this interactive and fun learning experience where you can control the direction of the talk and emphasize what you are most interested in.

Topic:  Building Composite XAML Applications with Prism
Level:  300
Description:
In this session you will learn how to design and build Windows Phone, Silverlight, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) desktop applications using loosely coupled components that can evolve independently but which can be easily and seamlessly integrated into the overall application. This is an introductory talk that concentrates on the basic concepts required to build a composite application with the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Prism framework which includes the boostrapper, regions, modules, view composition, and different techniques for communicating between loosely couple components.  Various development patterns and technologies will also be discussed including Inversion of Control (IoC), Dependency Injection (DI), Unity, MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework), commanding, event aggregation, and MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel).

Unlike my BAM! User Group Tour, I will not be flying everywhere, but instead I’ll be driving.  That should make for a much less stressful trip and I’ll get to sightsee out my car window.  I hope to see you there, but if you can’t make it, you could always request me to come speak at your user group.