Yesterday evening I gave my first presentation in evening school for adults. The topic of the session was an introduction to WebMatrix. The reactions were great and it turned out to be that their regular teacher himself was a big fan of it for creating PHP based websites. It was the first encounter for the students with this technology stack but it clearly appealed to them.

For the second part of the evening, ranging from 7 till 10, I had foreseen a talk about Orchard CMS. A recap of my live meeting talk for Microsoft. Though that would’ve been interesting for them as well I found out during the break that there was also a big interest for an open discussion about career. I’m a master in Electronics (Industrieel ingenieur) but decided after getting my degree that I wanted to make web from hobby into real life work. The students that evening liked my talk how my career went as it could give them insight in a more traditional path with quite some ups and a couple of downs and what it could compare to their career path.

It was a great opportunity for me to talk about tools I came to like a lot and also to present for an audience I normally don’t get in front of me. Their regular teacher gave me as feedback that I did very well and hopes to see me again standing in front of his class. A great comment indeed.

Grz, Kris.

Well organized and in a great location last Thursday the fifth edition of Community day was held. I gave a presentation myself about giving applications a second life in the cloud. It was a lot of fun to do so and I already got some great feedback from people in the audience. For the people who couldn’t make it, here are my slides:

If you’re interested in getting me over for your community to talk about ASP.NET (MVC), Razor, WebMatrix, jQuery, Azure, … just drop me a note or follow me on twitter: @KvdM.

Grz, Kris.

Since several months now I’m one of the board members of Azug, the Belgian Windows Azure User Group. Feweb, the Belgian organisation for web developers/designers, loved to put several Belgian user groups in the spotlight and asked them to give a short presentation about their workings, their common intrest, … Since I enjoy giving presentations I signed myself up and gave the following slidedeck:

If you’re from Belgium, or passing by in our lovely country, and we have a meeting planned then simply sign up and come over. We like you to be there!

Grz, Kris.

On Wednesday I performed a presentation about WebMatrix and its components: Razor syntax, the WebMatrix IDE, SQL CE and IIS Express. All great products created by Microsoft.

Here are the slides:

Grz, Kris.

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.