I will be speaking at Visual Studio Live! in Orlando this December 5-9.  The conference is a full 5 day event and there’s still time to register!  The two sessions I’m presenting are:

TH2 - XNA Games for Windows Phone 7
Date: Thursday, December 8, 2011
Time: 8:00 AM – 9:15 AM 
Level: Introductory to Intermediate

You have Silverlight on Windows Phone 7 under control, but what about XNA? If you're looking to create a more advanced game with better performance than Silverlight, XNA is the platform for you. In this session, developers will learn how to build an XNA game targeted for Windows Phone 7. The basics of the platform will be demonstrated while building a simple Space Invaders-type game that would be Marketplace acceptable. Specifically, this session will cover how to deal with user input, play sound effects and music, display animated 2D graphics, and how to create a game that's ready to be sold on the Marketplace.

TH12 - Multi-touch Madness!
Date: Thursday, December 8, 2011 
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM 
Level: Introductory to Intermediate

Multi-touch technology is popping up everywhere, most recently in Windows 7 and various .NET technologies. Windows 7 has been designed from the ground-up with multi-touch in mind, and the newest versions of WPF and Silverlight are multi-touch capable as well. In this session I will take you through the 4 biggest areas of Microsoft multi-touch technology: Windows 7, WPF 4, Silverlight, and Surface, including the forthcoming Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch. You will learn how to make your applications multi-touch aware and capable using each of these platforms, how to handle gestures and manipulations properly across platforms, and learn where multi-touch is heading in the future with regard to Microsoft development.

We will also be playing another round of Developer Duel on Wednesday night during the Wild Wednesday event.  Join us for the event and have a chance to win fabulous prizes while playing a game similar to one you’ve seen on TV for the past 30 years…

Get more information on the conference at:

• VSLive! Website
• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn

Hope to see you all there!

Update: Slides and source for my sessions are posted over on my Events page.  Have a look!  Thanks to everyone that came to my sessions!  Comments and critiques are welcome.

I have been selected to speak at the Visual Studio Live! conference in Orlando.  In addition to presenting two sessions at the conference, I’m also coordinating a special event on Tuesday night which we’re calling Devopalozza.  I have created and will host a team Jeopardy! style game-show which will pit three teams of speakers and attendees against each other for fabulous prizes.  I previously created the hardware and software for the Visual Studio Live Redmond conference, which turned into an article on Coding4Fun for those that might want to create a game-show at home or the office.

The two sessions I’m presenting are:

M15 What's New in Visual Studio 2010 Debugging
Date: Monday, November 15, 2010 
Time:  3:00 PM – 4:15 PM
Level: Intermediate

Visual Studio 2010 contains a variety of new debugging features to aid developers in creating bug-free software. In this session, we will explore many of these new features including IntelliTrace (historical debugging), breakpoint enhancements, new tools for debugging multi-threaded and parallel applications, enhancements to DataTips and watch windows, and new tools to better visualize and debug WPF applications and events. With these tools in hand, bugs don't stand a chance!

W13 Multi-touch Madness!
Date: Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Time: 1:45 PM – 3:00 PM
Level: Introductory to Intermediate

Multi-touch technology is popping up everywhere, most recently in Windows 7 and various .NET technologies. Windows 7 has been designed from the ground-up with multi-touch in mind, and the newest versions of WPF and Silverlight are multi-touch capable as well. In this session I will take you through the 4 biggest areas of Microsoft multi-touch technology: Windows 7, WPF 4, Silverlight, and Surface, including the forthcoming Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch. You will learn how to make your applications multi-touch aware and capable using each of these platforms, how to handle gestures and manipulations properly across platforms, and learn where multi-touch is heading in the future with regard to Microsoft development.

  Get more information on the conference at:

• VSLive! Website
• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn

Hope to see you all there!

Tonight I hosted the Devapalooza event for Visual Studio Live in Redmond.  For the event, we played a Jeopardy-like game using software and hardware I created.  You can find an article on how the software was created, how to build the hardware, and full source/binary downloads over at Coding4Fun and CodePlex  This can be a fun way to host training at your office, or a way to liven up a user group.

A huge thanks to Dan Waters and Clemens Vasters from Microsoft, VSLive speakers Rocky Lhotka, Deborah Kurata, and David Platt, and our three attendees who played the game.  I think it was a great time.  Hopefully you did too if you were in attendance.

After playing the game tonight for real, I have a few ways to fix up the software and make it a bit easier to use, especially on the scoring side.  Also note that the code isn’t the best example of great coding.  With this being a side project and the deadline looming, I took a few dirty shortcuts.  But, it got the job done.  It looks like we might be playing this again at Visual Studio Live Orlando in November, so I should have those changes posted to Coding4Fun/CodePlex before then.

We had a few arguments over questions and answers tonight with the ultimate argument taking place during Final Jeopardy.  The category was “.NET History” with the following clue:  Prior to being known as the Common Language Runtime, the CLR was known by this “flashy” moniker.  The two answers that were given that caused a stir were  “Universal Runtime (URT)” and “COM+”.  The official answer I wrote was “Project Lightning”.  Carl Franklin of .NET Rocks fame did an interview with Jay Roxe back in 2005 in which he explained a bit of history of .NET.  Jay, a member of the early team, says this in the interview: “I joined what is now the .NET Framework team, or the Common Language Runtime team, back in November of 1997. [This was] back when it was called Project Lightning, then it became COM+, then it became Project 42….”  Wikipedia lists all of these names, along with Common Object Runtime (COR) and Universal Runtime (URT).

So…do I have any insiders reading the blog that were part of the original team have a timeline on the naming of the CLR?  Only Project Lightning fits the clue of “flashy” moniker, and the interview does indeed claim COM+ was a later name, but an official timeline of names would be interesting to know, especially if URT preceded Lightning.

Tomorrow I’ll be presenting my Multi-touch Madness session and I will post slides and code by Friday.

Update: Here’s a video of the Final Jeopardy argument, thanks to John von Rosen.

VSLive Gameshow Final Question

Thanks to everyone who came out to my two VSLive sessions today.  You can find the slide decks and full source code posted in my download section.  Please note that in order to save some bandwidth, I didn’t include the 125MB video file I used in my examples, but you can download that separately here.  Just unzip and copy to the Media and GPUAcceleration sample directories and build the project.

I welcome any and all questions, and especially comments/critiques.  As a speaker, I rarely, if ever, receive any formalized feedback from the session organizers, so I’d love to hear what those in attendance thought of my sessions.  Good or bad, please send it along!  Thanks!

Anyone out there heading to VSLive! Orlando this week?  I will be giving two introductory sessions on Silverlight as listed below:

Getting Started with Silverlight
Tuesday, October 6, 10:30am

Microsoft Silverlight allows developers and designers to build rich cross-browser and cross-platform applications for the Web using the same tools and technologies that are familiar to .NET developers.  This session will cover the basics of Silverlight, including basic XAML, the tools that can be used to create Silverlight applications, the controls available in the Silverlight framework, and pros and cons of Silverlight vs. other web technologies, all while building a few very simple applications demonstrating the power of the framework.

Silverlight Controls and Animations
Tuesday, October 6, 12:00pm

The Microsoft Silverlight framework contains an assortment of pre-built controls that can be used directly by your applications.  Developers can also create their own custom controls to fit their requirements.  In addition, Silverlight can be used to create animations that are simple or extremely complex, from pulsing buttons to 3D movement.  This session will demonstrate how to use the most common and important controls, as well as how to create custom user controls, along with demonstrating how XAML, Visual Studio and Expression Blend can be used to create animations that will spice up any application.

If anyone will be attending the conference, let me know so I can say hello!