On Thursday ( 12/3 ) I have the opportunity to speak at the Wisconsin Azure User Group.  I want to first say *thank you* for the invite, Wade and I had a blast talking with everyone.

We managed to cover a great deal of information.  I am going to try and just hit the high points, attach some demo’s, etc.

PDC Roundup

Wade covered Azure and specifically:

• Windows Azure
• AppFabric
• Dallas
• SQL Azure

Rather than going into each of the different topics just check out Wade’s blog post for everything he covered. 

During my part of the talk ( i.e. what Wade decided to leave me ), I covered the Silverlight 4 announcements along with a number of random .NET announcements.  You can see all of that in the presentation below:

DEMO’s DEMO’s DEMO’s

I couldn’t do I also did a few demos, specifically:

1. A printing technique in .NET and WPF.
2. Basic MEF, or Hello World with MEF
3. ASP.NET MVC in concert with MEF.  Here we used MEF to dynamically load a portion of the MVC site.

You can download the source for those demos here:

Printing Demo: Source
MEF Demo: Source
MEF and MVC Demo: Source

But wait that’s not all….

Zune HD. Seriously, if you have not seen this device you just have to. Hit up Zune.net.

Bing Maps.  This past week we released the beta of the Silverlight, DeepZoom, and Photosynth.  Make sure you visit our new maps @ http://www.bing.com/maps/explore/#

If you were a bit early to the UG meeting you might have noticed the following video playing on the screen.  As a very handy guy who has always built his machine you just have to love this video.

As always please feel free to reach out.

Been catching up on the ole blogs when I ran across a post from Scott Guthrie about a new ASP .Net 2.0 feature with a file called App_Offline.htm. 

"One of the new features I talked about was the "App_Offline.htm" feature in ASP.NET 2.0, which provides a super convenient way to bring down an ASP.NET application while you make changes to it (for example: updating a lot of content or making big changes to the site where you want to ensure that no users are accessing the application until all changes are done)."

From: Scott Guthrie, App_Offline.htm and working around the "IE Friendly Errors" feature

I must admit thats pretty awesome and very welcomed.

Internet Links

How To Links

Books

Bloggers

Mark Seemann recently published a great post demonstrating the use of anonymous methods in unit testing events.  Testing Events Using Anonymous Methods

That just rocks, thanks Mark!

Paulo Reichert posted a GREAT walkthrough / sample using the new Configuration Management features of .Net 2.0.