Day 1: Visual Studio Live! Orlando 2010

This is my 3rd Visual Studio Live (formally VSLive!) and I am enjoying it as much as ever. If you ever get the chance to attend one of these events (Orlando, Las Vegas, Redmond, etc.) try and do it. The information is terrific and the insight from experienced presenters, peers in our industry, and general networking make it all worth it.

Today I attended the workshop named "Making Effective Use of Silverlight and WPF" with Rocky Lhotka (@RockyLhotka on Twitter) and Billy Hollis (http://slmasters.net/). Talk about (2) all-stars of our industry. Billy's knowledge of UI design with Silverlight and WPF (and other UI technolgoes too WinForms, etc) combined with Rocky's experience being an experienced OOP and Architecture engineer (research CSLA.NET) makes for a wonderfully informative day.

I had the pleasure of being on the front row for the presentation and enjoyed the back and fourth complimentary knowledge of .NET technologies. Unfortunately for me, I asked a question regarding a .xap being downloaded to the client, potentially exposing sensitive code (for a small % of shops, or developers still using antiquated architectures with wayyy too much code in the UI including sensitive connection strings, password, etc.) and made me sound like a noob. People were coming up to me at break telling me, "Just leave that code on the server and make a WCF call..." Yep, I know. Just was trying to raise a quick conversation for ex-web developers to understand Silverlight's deployment. Ow well. :)

Rocky (4th time attending presentations) and Billy (2nd time hearing presentations) can offer a lot of knowledge for those wanting to a lot about A+ presentation design (Billy) or OOP and .NET Technologies (Rocky) and should be checked out this week. If you are attending Visual Studio Live I highly recommend any presentations by either these (2) presenters. Nice job gentlemen.