Kathleen Dollard Visits Ireland

The very famous Kathleen Dollard is visiting Ireland!  Kathleen, who is well known for her book Code Generation in .NET, her “Ask Kathleen” column in Visual Studio Magazine, and much more, is doing a tour of Ireland and the UK.

She will be speaking at user group events in both Dublin and Cork as well as at the MIX Essentials event next week, and while she’s here she’ll be covering a variety of topics.  Kathleen is a fabulous speaker and you definitely need to make sure you attend one of her sessions.

Dublin MTUG: Windows Presentation Foundation: Beyond the Bling (200 level)
Wednesday, June 24th at 7:30pm
Dublin Hilton Hotel, Charlemont Place, D2 (right next to the Green Luas Charlemont stop)
Register: http://www.damtug.mtug.ie/Events/EventInfo.aspx?ID=524bded0-b3e7-42de-965f-793a1fbf7dfe

Abstract:
Have you seen Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) portrayed as a way to spin photos on cubes and wondered what this had to do with you? Windows Presentation Foundation does take us into a new realm of graphics, but it also offers a radical new UI model that's well worth exploring. This session focuses on how you can use WPF to make business user interfaces. We'll focus on the underlying model and separation of UI into discrete pieces that can be expressed in different ways. We'll build UI's with grids and stack panels for layout and explore databinding, templates and triggers. You'll see how to create an application that's logically organized and you can customize both in look and feel on a global basis -either to customize for individual clients or to keep your application looking fresh through future UI fashion changes.

Cork MTUG:   .NET 4.0 Language and IDE Features (200 level)  
Thursday, June 25th at 7:00pm
Imperial Hotel, Cork
Register: http://cork.mtug.ie/Events/EventInfo.aspx?ID=335a3f52-30ef-4b2b-a3fa-2ff405a98df5

Abstract:
Unveiling the next version of .NET lays out new language features building on the trend increasing the dynamic characteristics of C# and VB.NET. New language features will fall into categories of new features to support the current drivers, cross-over of features between the languages, and IDE improvements to ease your programming experiences. The current drivers for the languages are declarative coding, dynamic programming and concurrency. You'll see how a vision of the languages is evolving from these driving forces - building on the dynamic features separately developed for LINQ and in the DLR. You'll also see how the combined language team is balancing distinction and parity in areas such as late binding, XML and lambda expressions. The next release will present a major overhaul of Visual Studio itself. This offers exciting possibilities for improving your coding and debugging experience, including changes to document mapping and visualizing the structure of your object models and code dependencies. You'll leave knowing what you can look forward to in the next version, as well as a better feel for the overall direction of the languages.

MIX Essentials: The Challenge of Silverlight Architectures (300 level)
Wednesday, June 24th at 2:30pm (Conference runs from 9:30am-5:00pm)
Dublin Hilton Hotel, Charlemont Place, D2 (right next to the Green Luas Charlemont stop)
Register: http://www.microsoft.com/ireland/mix09

Abstract:  
Silverlight represents a sweet spot between rich client WPF and WinForms applications and the ease of web deployment. Now that .NET code runs on the browser client, we’re confronted with the many differences between the two versions of the CLR. A valid question arises about what code should run on the client. This talk looks at the mechanics of the problem – how to reuse code across the two platforms, how to pass data between the platforms, and how to support databinding. Then it launches into issues of validation, authorization and calculations. You’ll see a DTO (Data Transfer Object) approach and understand the alternative mobile object solution and touch on some of the great support for visualizing data using the Visual State Manager. This talk presents Silverlight from the perspective of a rich client programmer demanding all the functionality and ease of coding inherent in the stateful, intelligent Silverlight model.

Cross posted from Martha's Blog.