After speaking at the St. Louis Day of .NET last month on building WPF and Silverlight applications using Expression Blend, I had several people come up to me and, very excitedly, tell me how they wish there was more in-depth training available for not only Blend, but for XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language).

Well, your wishes have been granted.

I'm very pleased to announce that we'll be hosting a two day free training event called XamlFest at the St. Louis Microsoft offices from Thursday, January 29th to Friday January 30th. This will be a classroom style event led by fellow Softie John Pelak and, to a lesser degree, myself. We'll be going in depth on the XAML markup language and how it is used in both WPF and Silverlight 2.0 applications. We will also go deep on how to use Expression Blend to visually design application interfaces.

Here's all the information on the event:

Dates
The event will take place on Thursday, January 29, 2009 to Friday, January 20, 2008.

Attendees
This event is targeted toward software developers and designers who want to learn more about XAML, Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight 2 and Expression Blend 2. We can accommodate 40 people for this session and registration will be accepted on a first come/first served basis.

Venue
Microsoft North Central District: St. Louis, Missouri
3 City Place Dr., Suite 1100
St. Louis, MO 63141
Phone: (314) 994-1800
Fax: (314) 991-8762

Registration
To register for XamlFest, send an email with your contact information to xamlfest-stlouis@live.com. Only 40 seats are available, so be sure to register early if you want to attend. Also, we ask that, if you find you can't make it for the session, please let us know so we can let someone else come in your place.

Please register early, because we anticipate the seats filling up fast. I look forward to seeing at XamlFest at the end of this month.

I am an old school Windows developer. I spent a large percentage of my career actually writing software to run on Windows desktops, some of it for internal use at large enterprise IT shops, some for sale in the consumer market. Since the release of .NET earlier this decade, my primary outlet for delivering Windows solutions have been WinForm projects in Visual Studio, and while they are very practical and capable of delivering great functionality, incorporating an intuitive and memorable user experience tends to be difficult. Certainly I can leverage GDI+ or even DirectX to build some compelling UI features, but on a typical project timeline where the ship date was a week ago and the budget has long been in the red, we tend to settle for the status quo and deliver what we can.

This is one of the reasons why I was so excited when I first got my hands on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). This was truly a game-changing technology for developing rich, interactive experiences on the desktop. One of the most powerful aspects of WPF is that fact that the UI layer is designed and implemented in eXtensible Application Markup Language, or XAML. This XML-based markup language gives you with the ability to not simply mock up the UI, but to build the UI, exactly they way you want it to look. And what's more, XAML provides the capability to use transitions, timelines and event triggers so designers and developers alike can implement UI level effects and activities without this code residing in the business layer or even in the UI code behind files.

Sounds great, right? So why hasn't WPF taken over the world yet? It's very simple: WPF is new. Really new. And big. Really big. The object model for WPF itself is intimidating, but then when developers who've worked with standard visual design tools for the past fifteen years get their first look at XAML, the standard response is, "Wow, I don't have time to learn all that."

Enter <XamlFest />
<XamlFest />is a free two day seminar being hosted around the country to help show that XAML and WPF are not overwhelming or even particularly hard. If you live in the central part of the US, you can attend <XamlFest /> in Houston, Texas. Here's the 411:

Dates
Monday & Tuesday October 6^th and 7^th

Attendees
The capacity for this event is 40 people and registration is done on a first come/first served basis.

Venue
Microsoft South Central District: Houston, TX
One Briar Lake Plaza
2000 W. Sam Houston Pkwy. S. #350
Houston, TX 77042
Phone: (832) 252-4300
Fax: (832) 252-4545

Daily Agenda

Registration
You can register at the following link:

https://training.partner.microsoft.com/plc/details.aspx?publisher=12&delivery=253035

This program was originally intended only for Microsoft partners, but is now open to everybody. If you don’t have a Microsoft partner account, please send an e-mail with the names and e-mail addresses of your attendees to info@msregistration.com. Don’t forget to mention you are attending the Houston event.

<XamlFest /> Frequently Asked Questions
Q. What if I don’t have Visual Studio?
A. No problem, every attendee leaves with Visual Studio 2008 Pro!

Q. What if I don’t have Expression Blend?
A. Again, no problem! Everyone leaves with Expression Studio 2.

Q. What if I don’t have an idea for a starter project?
A. We’d like you to leave with something personal, but if nothing comes to mind that’s OK too. It’s the main reason we’re planning a few guided sessions where you can fallow along with us. These sessions should take no more than two hours, so if something sparks your interest you’ll still have time left for assisted development.

Q. What if I don’t have a laptop?
A. You can still participate in the training in the mornings and lunch, but assisted development in the afternoon is a harder problem to solve. We have no problem with people pairing up, so you might want to check with friends or co-workers to see if there interested.

Q. Can I just come for the training and skip assisted development?
A. XamlFest is about empowering designers and developers to deliver great user experiences and we believe a key component is hands-on assisted development. If you are unable to participate in the afternoon sessions please wait until the day before the event to register. This will give others the opportunity to sign up first, and if there’s still space available you’re welcome to join us.

<XamlFest /> -- Come as you are, leave Xamlized!

I'd like to thank everyone who came to the Next Web Roadshow event we held in St. Louis last week. The turnout was phenomenal and, based on your feedback, it looks like the material was very useful and on topic.

As promised, our presenter, Mike Henderson, has posted a set of links to resources from his presentation.

For the sake of simplicity, I'm re-posting Mike's links here:

WPF Information:
MSDN WPF samples
Code Project's WPF Pages
Vista x64 Forums on WPF
XCeed's WPF Wiki
Kazaml

Good WPF-related Blogs:
Josh Smith
Mike Hillberg
Beatriz Costa
Tim Sneath 

Silverlight Information:
Silverlight splash screen + dynamic content sample
Silverlight.net 
Silverlight Cream 
MSDN Silverlight Dev Center
Silverlight 2 Controls Source Code

Good Silverlight Blogs:
Brad Abrams
Expression Design + Blend
Joe Stegman
Mike Harsh
Mike Taulty
Scott Guthrie

ASP.NET Information:
ASP.NET 
MSDN ASP.NET Code Gallery
123ASPX Index 
4 Guys From Rolla

Good ASP.NET Blogs:
DotNet Slackers
Scott Mitchell

Books:
Programming WPF 
Essential WPF 
Apps = Code + Markup 
Professional ASP.NET 3.5
ASP 2.0 Website Programming 
Essential ASP.NET

"The Next Web." "The Next Generation Web."

What the hell is that, anyway? Just another buzzword? More "marketing techno-babble?"

I like to think of it as "Web 2.5." It ameliorates the technical innovations that drove the Web 2.0 movement and really takes them to the next level. If you consider the impact that AJAX has had on the way web applications are built, essentially making them behave more like desktop applications, next generation Web applications look and feel like desktop applications as well. In the Microsoft world, the technologies that are driving this evolution are Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight and the incredible advances in ASP.NET.

If you live in or near St. Louis, I encourage you to register for a great seminar we're going to be holding on Wednesday, June 11th at the Microsoft offices to talk about the next generation of the Web and how these technologies will play into it. You will take part in a technical exploration of the latest technologies Microsoft has to offer, and how you can take advantage of those technologies to provide a truly next-generation user experience in you Windows and web client applications. During the seminar, Mike Henderson from Pluralsight will guide you on a technical walkthrough of each technology, demonstrate the technologies' capabilities, and show the tools and techniques used to provide those capabilities.

Seating will be limited for this event, so I highly encourage you to register today if you would like to attend.

I try to avoid doing posts that simply announce upcoming events without providing some kind of value to the message. This is a blogging tip I got from my buddy Josh Holmes and it's really proven to work well.

But this time, I'm going to make an exception...

If you haven't heard already, Microsoft launched the Professional Developers Conference 2008 (PDC) web site. The conference will take place in Los Angeles from October 27th through October 30th. The registration site is now open and, if you possibly can, you should make every effort to attend this conference.

For those who aren't familiar with the PDC, this is not a conference that happens every year, like Microsoft TechEd that is taking place over the next couple of weeks in Orlando. The PDC only happens when Microsoft has something big coming that they want the development community to learn about.

What might you learn about at the PDC this year? Well, Ray Ozzie spent a lot of time at MIX last March talking about Software + Services and, not long after that, the Live Mesh CTP as released. S+S is surely going to be a big topic at PDC this year, but I'm also betting that we're going to see a lot great information about the future of the Windows Mobile platform, Silverlight and .NET as well.

If you're a senior developer, architect or technical decision maker responsible for helping determine the technical roadmap for your organization, you will want to be in Los Angeles this October for the conference. I'm definitely going to be there, and hope to see you there too.

Industry thought-leader David Chappell will be visiting four cities in the central part of the country throughout the month of May to present Undestanding Software + Services: A Perspective. David's talk will provide a clear explanation of what an S+S approach to architecture really looks like, an overview of building software with hosted "services in the cloud," as well as the tools and guidance Microsoft is providing to help development teams be successful in developing S+S oriented solutions.

David will be speaking from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM in the following cities on the following dates:

David is Principal of Chappell & Associates in San Francisco, California. David has been the keynote speaker for dozens of conferences and events in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. His popular seminars have been attended by tens of thousands of developers, architects, and decision makers in forty countries. David’s books have been translated into ten languages and used regularly in courses at MIT, ETH Zurich, and many other universities. In his consulting practice, he has helped clients such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Stanford University, and Target Corporation adopt new technologies, market new products, train their sales staffs, and create business plans.

I am coordinating David's tour through this part of the country. If you have any questions about the event or have any problems registering, please drop me an email or leave me a comment below.

If you've never seen David Chappell speak, you won't want to miss this opportunity to see one of great luminaries in the industry talk about one of the most exciting topics in software architecture today.