Being a pimp with Silverlight (using ASP.NET MVC2 and jQuery) was my first presentation for the Belgian user group Visug.

Yesterday I had the pleasure to deliver my first international presentation in Lebanon. The talk was about ASP.NET MVC 2 which got recently released topped with some jQuery. Since I knew that most people didn’t have hands on experience with MVC I made a more entry level presentation, explaining why it was introduced by Microsoft and what it was. Then I used several demos especially crafted to demonstrate some of the handy and powerful additions like data annotations and the interaction with jQuery validation, templated helpers, partial views, using a JsonResult together with jQuery to fill up html elements dynamically, …

For me it was a great experience and I got several felicitations from the spectators. I myself would like to thank Bilal Haidar for getting me into contact with the Lebdev user group and Samer Chidiac from Microsoft Lebanon for organizing this event at Berytech.

The slidedeck that I used can already be found on slideshare:

Grz, Kris.

Last week I attended an interesting presentation about version control with Team Foundation Server. Yves Goeleven presented about the different patterns when it comes down to branching and merging.

If you're interested you can watch the presentation online divided in 3 different pieces (taken from Katriens blog):

• Introduction: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/nl/chopsticks/default.aspx?id=461
• The Basics: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/nl/chopsticks/default.aspx?id=463
• Increasing Quality & Managing Risks: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/nl/chopsticks/default.aspx?id=464

Grz, Kris.

Last Thursday I attended a Visug seminar about WCF. This session was presented by Juwal Lowy, a dedicated and well known employee of IDesign. The session was great, really great. Juwal's a great presenter that could even make the belgian crowd to laugh on several occasions. That might seem strange but most foreign speakers know how hard it is to interact with a Belgian audience that mostly doesn't make sound and watches the presentation with a lot of interest. I've already followed several WCF presentations during the last years (TechEd, tech days, ...) but this one was actually the one I liked best. Most presentations show a host and a client and then dive right into the config files. Not this one. We got shown little chunks at a time and more about the architecture. Not so much configuration but small samples which showed the stuff. I liked this approach a lot.

Grz, Kris.

Another nice give away from Microsoft: Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit.

Grz, Kris.

I'm already subscribed for that event and if you would like to come to you can go to this page: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032340308&Culture=en-US.

Hope to see you there!

Grz, Kris.

Yesterday evening I gave a presentation about ASP.NET AJAX. About 30 attendees came to see some small demos about the UpdatePanel, giving precedence to certain async callbacks or cancelling one. Apparently everyone liked the demo material and the response was good.

I also used ZoomIt, a free utility that's really helpfull during presentations, during the session. No more changing font sizes etc. You can download it here.

I'll post the demo + slides after some cleaning up and providing somewhat more detailed information to better understand the demo's without the explanation of the speaker.

This evening I'll also be attending the talk provided by Scott Guthrie so I hope to see some familiar faces there too.

Another interesting thing to note: the source code of ASP.NET AJAX Extensions has been made available. Grab the bits here.

Another thing to note: Apparently there's a small issue with the current release of ASP.NET AJAX but there's a workaround. Take a look at the following article: How to work around the "Access denied" cross-domain frame issue in ASP.NET Ajax 1.0.

Grz, Kris.