Dan Maharry

Silverlight Masterclass UK (and how to win a place on it)

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The Silverlight Tour comes to the UK – and it’s called the Masterclass!

This 3 day hands-on training with both designer and developer tracks looks awesome and (uniquely) has two expert trainers per course.

Currently scheduled in London, Manchester, and the Midlands for June, all courses also come with the chance to win an xbox 360, and Silverlight Spy licences!

Early bird discount of £100 if you book in May, and if you are a member of #SLUGUK or #nxtgenug there are additional discounts to be had.

Full Details are here: http://silverlightmasterclass.net

In addition bbits are holding a raffle for a free ticket for the masterclass. To be eligible to win the ticket (worth £1095!) you MUST paste this text, including all links, into your blog and email Ian@bbits.co.uk with the url to the blog entry.  The draw will be made on June 1st and the winner informed by email and on http://silverlightmasterclass.net

Windows 7 Phone Dev Tools And Docs Now Available

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The MIX '10 keynote today was the usual mix of announcements and slick-ish demos. Scott Guthrie announced Silverlight 4 and Blend 4 RC available for download today along with the news that it will ship inside Visual Studio 2010 when that is released on April 12.

More interesting over here however was the announcement and subsequent release for download of the initial developer toolkit CTP for the new Windows 7 Phone OS that was launched last month at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The emphasis is definitely on enabling the whole dev lifecycle, so the toolkit released today includes:

  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone
  • XNA Game Studio 4.0 CTP
  • Windows Phone 7 Series Emulator for application testing
  • Silverlight for Windows Phone CTP

The direct link for this bundle is here (it's a web installer) but the home page for development is at http://developer.windowsphone.com/windows-phone-7-series/. If you do decide to install the tools, make sure you read the release notes. This release of the tools (if you decide against installing Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP which is part of the above bundle) works only with VS2010 RC build and only in US English.

Blend 4 For Windows Phone

Also released today, but as a separate download is a CTP of Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone. Christian Schorrman has the complete run down on the new and phone-specific features in this new CTP, which I'll leave you to read separately, but note the following.

For this preview, the Blend tools for Windows Phone are still a separate installer. In order to use the Blend 4 beta for developing Windows Phone applications, you therefore will need to install:

Personally, I think this is a really exciting time to get stuck in straight away and the best reason I have come across thus far to sit down and learn how to work with Silverlight as well. Oh yes, and another damn good reason for Windows XP Mode to exist.

Phone eBooks

If you do take the plunge, it looks like Windows 7 Phone development will be well supported with documentation that'll evolve as the SDK does. The MSDN library already has a section available, and there are several additional PDF guides available on the main dev site for you to read.

Microsoft Press have also released a draft preview (153 pages) of "Programming Windows Phone 7 Series" by Charles Petzold (no less) on their blog. It's available as either a PDF or an XPS file. No sign of other such previews from Wrox, Manning et al, but it can only be a matter of time.

Windows Phone Developer Team

There are also many places to follow Windows 7 Phone developments, aside from the MIX site which will undoubtedly cover all the phone-related sessions at the conference.

And if you manage to digest everything in this post this week, well done you. You're officially a Phone Dev addict mainlining caffeine. To the rest of us mere mortals in the meantime, happy coding!

UK Events Of Interest (March\April 2010)

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Scott Guthrie is coming to the UK for two days. He’ll be in Glasgow and Birmingham on March 25 and 26 respectively. Registration opened today, so click quickly for Glasgow and Birmingham tickets before they are sold out. Both events are free.

If you can’t make either of those, Microsoft are running a week of tech days in London to mark the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and to promote the new Windows 7 Phone platform. They are all in the Vue 6 Cinema Broadway in Fulham. [ Twitter tweme: #TechDays ]

  • April 12 : Visual Studio 2010 – A Path to Big Ideas (for Heads of Development, Dev Managers and Software Architects
  • April 13 : Getting started with .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 (for developers : wait list only)
  • April 14 : The Essential MIX – Highlights from MIX ‘10 with sessions on ASP.NET 4.0, Silverlight 4 and Azure (for developers)
  • April 15 : Best of Breed Client Applications on Windows 7 – Windows 7 API, Building Rich Clients with .NET 4 and a bit of Azure (for developers)
  • April 16 : Windows Phone – Developing for the Windows 7 Phones Series (for developers : registration not up yet)

If you’re a Silverlight fan, then Microsoft’s Silverlight Geek Jesse Liberty is doing a 9 day tour of UK with an extra in Dublin for those in Eire.

Overviews of the talks he’ll be giving can be found here on his blog.

Of course, if you’re in the US then you’ve also got MIX 10 (March 15-17), An Event Apart (April 5-7), the IA Summit 2010 (April 7-11), and Chirp : The Twitter Dev Conference (April 14 –15) to attend, so it’s not all bad really, is it?

Tutorials

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Note to self, there are some good tutorials and 101s out there which should help a lot in a few areas. Make time to get through

I'm looking for a good one on Ruby and on Javascript as well. Anyone got anything good? The new Wrox First wiki on Javascript frameworks looks good, but it does cost.

[Update: Aug 1]