If you’re looking to ramp up your skills in the land of XAML, I’d recommend adding these events to your calendar. Don’t worry if you can’t make the Live Meeting sessions as those will also be available on-demand.

Here’s a list of the great content you have to choose from…

XAML Continuum

XAML is the lingua franca of both Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation, Microsoft’s presentation technologies for the future. In this introductory session, learn how XAML empowers designers and developers to build rich Web and desktop applications. You’ll see how Blend can be used by designers to create assets and applications, and how Visual Studio 2008 to quickly implement an application’s functionality. What’s more, you’ll understand how Blend and Visual Studio work together to enable seamless workflow between designers and developers.

XAML for Designers

Throughout XAMLFest, you’ll participate by building a Silverlight application from the ground up. In this session, you’ll jump Microsoft Expression Blend to begin creating this demonstration app. You’ll learn the basics of project creation, see how to navigate within Blend, and how XAML defines an application’s user interface.

XAML for Developers

In this first session geared towards developers, use Visual Studio 2008 to create and explore a basic Silverlight application. You’ll gain a better understanding of Silverlight anatomy and architecture, and you’ll see how Resource markup extensions work. You will also gain a better understanding of the deployment model used by Silverlight, and the role of Silverlight’s cross-platform, plug-in-based CLR.

XAML Fundamentals

In this recorded session, you’ll gain a solid foundational understanding of how XAML is used to build applications. First, you’ll see how XAML’s layout containers can be used to create interfaces that scale and re-size cleanly and intelligently. Next, you’ll see how you can use a variety of built-in controls to quickly create a working user interface. Finally, you’ll understand the role of XAML in data binding, and you’ll see how you can bind controls and properties using markup or code.

Layouts and Controls in Blend

In this live session, you’ll continue to build the sample application that you started creating the previous day. Here, you’ll create your application’s layout and begin adding controls. You’ll explore basic element binding using Blend. At the end of the session you’ll have a working Silverlight application that exhibits some basic functionality.

Layouts and Controls in Visual Studio

This session will begin with an exploration of application layout in XAML, using Visual Studio. And although there is a lot of functionality built-in to the existing framework, API and controls, there are times when you need to add some custom functionality in order to get your application to behave just the right way. To that end, you’ll use Visual Studio to build a simple value converter that can be used by your sample application. Along the way, you’ll understand the role of value converters and you’ll see how you can use code-behind to create and manipulate XAML objects. 

Prototyping

With today’s emphasis on usability and appealing user interfaces, it’s more important than ever to prototype your applications. In this session, you’ll see how new tools in Blend 3 enable you to quickly create working prototypes that can provide a foundation for building the actual application. You’ll learn about SketchFlow, “Wiggly styles”, sample data, and you’ll see how you can create a prototype that allows you to easily gather user feedback. Finally, you’ll see how you can save hours and hours by using Blend 3’s spec generation tool.

New Prototyping Features in Blend 3

In this session focusing on practical guidance on prototyping, you’ll use Blend to add screens, compositions and navigation behaviors to the sample application. You’ll add sample data sources to screens, sketch prototype user experience, and generate a spec document. 

Building a Domain Model in Visual Studio

In this session, you’ll use the spec document that was generated in the earlier design session to build a domain model consistent with sample data. You’ll also add notification interfaces that enable consumers to subscribe to changes in the domain model. Finally, you’ll bind the user experience to the domain model.  Live Meeting on June 3, 2009 / 1:00 PM PDT (4 pm EDT)

Patterns and Practices

With the release of its Expression tools for designers, Microsoft has prompted a re-evaluation of user interface design and workflow distribution. Now that Expression is approaching its third major release, a number of patterns and practices have emerged. In this session, you’ll see an approach to workflow that plays to the strengths of both designers and developers. Also, you’ll understand the importance of the “integrator” role in making sure this workflow runs smoothly.

Styles, Resources, Templates and Animations

XAML makes it easier for designers to take on more responsibility when it comes to implementing user interface design. In the past, most everything beyond static screenshots and mockups required a developer to write behind-the-scenes code. In this session, you’ll see how Expression empowers designers to add styling, create templates, and define animations. You’ll see how the Visual State Manager is used to provide animation between element states. You’ll also see Blend 3’s new support for importing Adobe® Photoshop® content. Live Meeting on June 4, 2009 / 9:00 AM PDT (noon EDT)

Implementing the M-V-VM Pattern

The Model/View/ViewModel (M-V-VM) pattern is a modern variation of the classic Model/View/Controller (MVC) approach to UI design. In this session, you’ll use Visual Studio to implement M-V-VM for the sample application. You’ll bind the user experience to the view model, and explore templates and animations in both XAML and managed code. Live Meeting on June 4, 2009 / 1:00 PM PDT (4 PM EDT)

Upsizing

Up until this point, most of the work you’ve done in XAMLFest has been using Silverlight, with sample data. In this session, you’ll see how an application can leverage endpoints and Service-Oriented Architectures. You’ll also see how Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) fits into the picture – how XAML and .NET enable reusability between Silverilght and WPF applications, and how to leverage features that are unique to WPF. You’ll also get a sneak peek at some of the exciting innovations coming in .NET 4.0.

Using Blend to Create WPF Apps and Controls

You can build great Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) apps with Blend, too, and in this session you’ll see exactly that. You’ll build a rich desktop client to complement the sample application you’ve been working on, and in doing so you’ll learn how to migrate screens, resources, styles and assets from Silverlight to WPF. This session will explore the similarities and differences between Silverlight and WPF applications.  Live Meeting on June 5, 2009 / 9:00 AM PDT (noon EDT)

Code Reusability between Silverlight and WPF

In this final session of XAMLFest, you’ll gain a solid understanding of WPF application architecture and development. You’ll implement a service endpoint that provides a domain model that can be used by both Silverlight and WPF. In addition, you’ll get some hands-on experiencing developing controls and applications with Silverlight/WPF re-use in mind. Live Meeting on June 5, 2009 / 1:00 PM PDT (4 PM EDT)

The good news for those MSDN and TechNet subscribers is that Windows 7 will actually RTM in the 2nd half of July. It’s reasonably safe to assume that you as an MSDN or TechNet subscriber will have access to the golden Win7 bits come late July.

With the release date of Windows 7 fast approaching, it is part of my job to provide you with material and resources to help with your Windows 7 training efforts. The evangelism team has been visiting various developer communities across the country to share with you the new features developers and IT pros need to be aware of and how they can “light up” their applications on top of the new Windows 7 feature set. You can find where we’re coming next at http://MSDNEvents.com. Also, Bruce Kyle, ISV Technical Evangelist, provided a fantastic list of resources to prepare yourself for Windows 7. I’d highly recommend checking it out.

In addition, here is a list of some of my favorite resource outlets for the latest on Windows 7 for Developers:

• Windows 7 Developer Center of MSDN
• Read the Windows 7 Developer’s Guide
• Visit the Windows 7 for Developers Blog on the Windows Team Blogs site
• Check out the many Windows 7 videos and interviews on Channel 9
• Watch the video of Steven Sinofsky’s PDC 2008 Keynote
• Prepare your applications with the Windows 7 Application Quality Cookbook
• Participate in the ongoing conversations on the Windows Client forums on MSDN
• Check out the resources from our recent MSDN Unleashed events where we covered IE8 and Windows 7

If you have any additional resources that would be of valuable to your fellow developers, please share them in the comments.

Here are the steps to get up and running with Azure:

1.) Request your development tokens (requires a Windows Live ID)

2.) Download the Cloud Computing Tools

3.) Download the Azure Services Training Kit

4.) Try the Cloud Computing Tools Walkthrough

Here are some additional resources to help you along your learning path:

• Steve Marx’s Blog
• Windows Azure Team Blog
• Clemens Vasters Blog (.NET Services)
• Azure Sessions from MIX’09
• Azure Services Platform Forums and Blogs

Part of my job as a Microsoft evangelist is fostering developer communities across the region. It just so happens that my region (officially) covers Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. However, I like to help provide support to any and all developers communities where and whenever I can.

One of the areas of the region that hasn’t seen much action in way of community (at least that I know of) is the southern half of the state of Illinois. Well…that all ends now. Darrin Bishop, in partnership with Levi, Ray and Shoup, are bringing the Central Illinois SharePoint Users Group to Springfield, IL.

(You can read the full announcement over on Darrin’s blog.)

I’d like to see additional developers groups started in the southern area. If you’re interested in starting a user group, there are a few organizations like INETA that can be a valuable asset and resource. To learn more, check out INETA’s whitepaper on Starting and Running a User Group.

I don’t typically throw a job posting up on my blog. This a first and will *certainly* be the last. There are better sites and resources to help connect developers will employers, however this one is a special case.

An old friend of mine (well, he’s not old, we just go way back) is part owner of an exiting and fast-growing startup seeking some highly skilled .NET developers with a penchant for leadership. You can find all of the details on each position below. If you fit the job requirements to a tee, I’d suggest getting your resume in to the fold as quickly as possible. I don’t suspect these positions will be open long.  Good luck!

Job Openings:

• Director of Application Development
• Manager of Application Development

You can download the bits, submit feedback to the Connect site and participate in the ongoing conversations on the Beta forums. The documentation has been removed from the download for Beta 1 but you can find all of the documentation online on MSDN.

Once you kicked off the download, be sure to read What’s New in .NET Framework 4 and What’s New in Visual Studio 2010.

You can install Visual Studio 2010 side-by-side with other versions of Visual Studio or you can drop it into a virtualized machine with something like Virtual PC.

Once you have everything up and running, download the Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit to learning about the latest features and enhancements. There are also a number of walkthroughs posted highlighting some of these new features.

Enjoy!

We received quite a bit of feedback from the MIX’09 conference on why Microsoft was pushing WPF aside and focusing their efforts on Silverlight. This is certainly not the case and the WPF story is stronger than ever. This is evident in the Visual Studio teams strategy (and several product teams across Microsoft) to bet on WPF for their front-end technology for Visual Studio 2010. MIX’09 is a conference focused on Web design and development and WPF is specific to building client-based applications.

For the vast majority of enterprise developers, their day to day efforts are spent applying their skills in building and maintaining line-of-business applications. Prior to WPF, these types of client-side applications have been built using technologies such as WinForms. WPF is focused on bringing the client-side technologies forward and providing the necessary tools and technologies to offer our users a better user experience and building the next-generation types of applications. However, there is a significant (but short-lived) learning curve in bringing your .NET skills to targeting WPF applications.

Thankfully, Karl Shifflet and Jaime Rodriquez are hitting the road across 4 cities across the U.S. as well as London to provide a *free* 2-day training class focused on building line-of-business applications with WPF. Karl Shifflett is a former Microsoft MVP and current Program Manager for Cider (Cider is the code name for the WPF designer in Visual Studio). Jaime Rodriquez is a Microsoft Technical Evangelist focusing on WPF and Silverlight. You can’t find any better instructors than the ones who are actually building the technology! If you’re interested in learning more about WPF and how it can help you bring more engaging user experiences to your users, I highly suggest attending this event.

Date, Location, and Logistics

Los Angeles, CA, 4/24 -4/25

London, UK, 5/15 -5/16

New York, NY, 5/29-5/30

Chicago, IL, 6/12-6/13

Phoenix, AZ, 6/5-6/6

Agenda

Day One:

• Lap Around WPF
• WPF Tools ( Blend, Visual Studio 2008)
• Graphics Subsystem
• Layout
• WPF Fundamentals and new concepts (Application Model, Dependency Properties, Trees (logical & visual),  Events, Threading)
• Resources
• Controls
• Styling
• Templating
• Q&A with instructors at end of day

Day Two:

• WPF integration with Win32 and Windows Forms
• Data binding
• Introduction to Model-View-ViewModel
• Commanding in M-V-VM
• Views, Navigation and Transitions
• Data Validation
• Error handling, Model dialogs, Logging
• Unit Testing
• MVVM & LOB tips and tricks
• Q&A with the instructor

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=9e1142a3-c13e-4156-9bc4-1096f6145434" target="_new" title="Cannon P.I. - Title Sequence">Video: Cannon P.I. &#8211; Title Sequence</a>

For the Spring tour of the MSDN Unleashed events, we are focusing our discussion around Internet Explorer 8 and Windows 7.

In the first session, we discussed the story around the new Internet Explorer 8 rendering engine and the choices that were made to make IE8 a standards-compliant browser. Web authors, developers and administrators need to be aware of these choices and how they may impact your website. Head on over to the Internet Explorer Compatibility site for more details. We continued our IE8 developer overview with a look into three features that are going to allow web applications to extend their impact beyond their own web address. These include Web Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search. We also took a look at a great enhancement for developers (and a much needed one), the Developer Tools.

Resources for Internet Explorer developers:

• Official IE team blog
• IE Developer Center
• IE Compatibility Center
• MIX09 Sessions (On Demand)
• Girogio Sardo’s blog (IE Technical Evangelist)

Our second session covered what developers need to know for Windows 7. Unfortunately, we didn’t have nearly enough time to dive into all of the details. Watch for future sessions on Windows 7 development where we will dive into the particulars.

The session started off by me stressing the point that Windows Vista is a viable option for Windows 7 development. Microsoft made a lot of architectural changes in Windows Vista. These changes were necessary to make Windows the most secure and trustworthy platform that also performs to user’s expectations. Windows 7 builds off of these changes and carries the platform forward.

Windows 7 brings Multi-touch computing to the forefront as a first-class citizen. Developers will have opportunities to extend their application user-interface paradigms into a whole new direction. The Windows 7 SDK provides the API’s to bring touch to your applications. Moving forward, the managed code developers will get touch API’s in WPF 4.

There are a number of new enhancements to the Windows 7 UI that developers can take advantage of. One of the biggest changes are the enhancements to the new Windows 7 Taskbar. The new Taskbar brings a clean and lightweight implementation that includes some great features such as Jump Lists, Thumbnails, and Icon overlays that provide information such as notifications and progress. You can find more resources on developing for the taskbar over on the Windows 7 Taskbar Developer Resource site.

We carried the discussion further in highlighting the point on how the Ribbon control born out of the Office 2007 products was to become a first-class control in Windows 7. As well as the new Explorer enhancements with items such as Federated Search and Libraries.

A few of the items we didn’t have time to touch on was how Windows 7 is going to include Web Service API’s directly in the OS to make communicating with Web Services a native part of the OS. Some other interesting new features include the new Sensors & Location platform. This provides the ability to build location-awareness into your applications. Think of the possibilities!

Resources for Windows 7 developers:

• Windows 7 Engineering Blog
• MSDN Windows Developer Center
• Channel 9
• Windows 7 taskbar: Developer Resources
• Windows Ribbon Framework: Developer Resources

In my previous posts, we discussed the problem space and what the thoughts are in bringing social computing to the B2B space. Now let me touch on the meat behind Project MEBA.

To reiterate from previous posts, Project MEBA is about providing an efficient, secure, and economical way for businesses to do business together that is also highly reliable and can scale with the businesses needs. When the Azure Services Platform (AzSP) was announced at last year’s PDC conference, the technical means to address these requirements was finally realized. We’ve been specifically focused on the .NET Services side of the AzSP story.

With the .NET Services Bus, we have the means for business to exchange messages in the cloud without having to worry about some convoluted process to get the various business parties to talk with one another.

Going back to our portal and the aspect of creating a business collaboration, each party in a collaboration will play a particular role within the business process. The Project MEBA portal will provide instructions for each business party on how to implement the services required on their end and also provide them the endpoints in which they’ll use to communicate. These endpoints are managed (and owned) by the MEBA’s AzSP solution. With Access Control Services, we can define the claims needed for each of our business parties to have the authority to host an endpoint in the MEBA cloud solution. The means in which we’re to provide this authentication/authorization process with the MEBA backend is yet to be finalized. We’re looking to implement an X.509 certificate store that has a trust relationship with the Access Control Service. Once the trust is established, we should be apply the necessary claims to create an endpoint in the MEBA solution. More of this work will come down the road with the Geneva Framework.

Each business process will have an associated workflow within the MEBA portal to support the mediation of the business process. As part of these business arrangements, there may be agreements in place such as time to respond, providing the agreed upon information, etc. With the workflow in the middle, we can provide a mediation service that tracks business transactions and outcomes. We can then provide this data in a dashboard fashion back to the participating parties. Therefore, if there are any discrepancies in the business dealings, we have a 3rd party mediated service that can provide the proof necessary to resolve situations.

The diagram below shows a simple business process scenarios architecture. The buyer will open an endpoint to communicate with the workflow. The workflow implements a ReceiveActivity to process the message, perform any necessary routines such as logging, and than executes a SendActivity to pass on the request to the Seller. The Seller than respond to the request which passes through the workflow and onto the Buyer.

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In this architecture, we are implementing an on-premise workflow as opposed to using the .NET Services Workflow capabilities. The .NET Services Workflow just didn’t provide the activities and capabilities we needed to support our scenario. The .NET Services Workflow is changing rapidly with each new release of the .NET Services SDK. The team will revisit this once the functionality of the .NET Services Workflow has been expanded.

So there it is… simple enough, yet very powerful. With the capabilities of the .NET Services Bus, we have the opportunity to save business a substantial amount of money by taking the burden away of having to support an expensive infrastructure to perform business transactions with partners. This is just an idea that we’re playing around with. Taking a vision of a real work business problem and applying a solution that is now possible with the Azure Services Platform. Moving ahead, the team will continue to build this proof-of-concept and make it available to all of you. I would expect there are *many* things we can do to enhance the system and apply new means to attach the problem space. One idea already is to incorporate the recently announced support for routing and queuing in the service bus. Those two features will greatly benefit our solution.

Unfortunately, my time has come to end on the MEBA project. I have to get back to my REAL job in Chicago and continue to evangelize the incredible technologies and development platform that are continually evolving out of Redmond and beyond. This project gave me the chance to work with some of the brightest minds in the industry and for that I’m truly grateful. The team will muster on and I can’t wait to see how it all turns out in the end. If our vision is correct and the technology lives up to its promises, this will truly be an industry changing event and I can say I was part of it.