Silverlight Bootcamp at MIX11

Mike Taulty and I are on the road again at MIX11 next month for a reprisal of our Silverlight bootcamp. Last year we had a full house and discussed Silverlight 3 … hard to believe that was a year ago!This year we’ll be talking about Silverlight 4 and 5. We’ve decided to shake things up a bit this year and talk about topics that we feel that are crucial to building solid apps with Silverlight. Me being the data guy at heart, of course this involves solid practices for data access, binding, validation, templating with data, retrieval of data, REST, WCF, LINQ, serialization, isolated storage, OData, RIA Services, and visualizations of data. Probably much more, but I think you get the idea.

Mike and I will spend time not talking about the data so much as we will be talking about how to use it properly to get some great effects. Most if not all apps need data, but once you get it how do you make it shine? How do you accept data? How do you create visualizations with it? Where does Blend come in? We’ll talk about a lot of this and discuss how some of the features of Silverlight 5 make this easier and more robust.

Of course, any talk around solid application architecture done by me always involves some patterns. With Silverlight I like to use MVVM … so our bootcamp will also provide a great guide on how to tackle MVVM with Silverlight for the desktop and Windows Phone 7. I’ve been tossing some ideas around how to build a demo with and without MVVM to show the differences side by side. Some of this might be in the talk, but certainly I will include lots of MVVM topics including how to get started … and most importantly, how to solve programming problems with MVVM and other patterns. I don’t choose patterns to be cool, I choose patterns to solve real problems. And if they don’t solve a problem, I don’t use it. Simple as that. But we won’t just be talking basics, there will be plenty of common real world problems we solve with patterns in this bootcamp.

What we hope folks will walk away with is an understanding of how to make your dog data jump, roll over, and speak. Attendees will  also walk out with a solid understanding of how to get going with MVVM and how to solve real common problems with patterns.

Mike and I really enjoyed last year’s bootcamp. We tried to keep it lively, fast paced, and fun. And we have some great give aways for those who come early … first come first serve!

BTW - If you have already registered for MIX, you can still go back to your registration and register for our Silverlight bootcamp.