After getting up WAY TO EARLY and spending some quality time in an airplane I'm happy to have made to mix. I was suprised how helpful the "locals" at the Venetian Hotel were to find it! Now to find Expression and Silverlight!

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If you're a .Net usergroup leader, or invovled in some level of making user group events happen be sure to plan on attending the INETA Community Leadership Summit being held on Saturday June 2, 2007 in Orlando, FL right before Tech Ed.

More information about the summit is available on the INETA Community Leadership Summit web site http://Summit.INETA.Org

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In less than 24 hours I will be on an airplane heading towards Las Vegas to attend Mix07, the Microsoft conference that brings together the pocket protectors, turtle necks, and suits (Developers, Designers, and Business Decision Makers) of the world to discuss the future technology of the web and hear from "some of the most successful and innovative practitioners on the Web".

If you're not able to attend MIX07 which sold out early, be sure to pay attention to the www.visistmix.com website:

"Starting on Monday morning, we’re going to be updating this page continually – people at home will be able to see all of the news, fun, live keynotes, sessions and partner demos coming out of the show."

As I've said before, I'm really looking forward to MIX07. MIX06 was great, and provided me with a lot of inspiration to dig into the new technologues of WPF, WCF, and AJAX. It also opened my eyes to a world of opportunities developing for Media Center.

I truly think that WPF and Silverlight are going to positively change the status quo in computing today, allowing us as developers to truly write software that people love. And I'm not just talking about flashy special effects programs with little core value, but to allow us to really focus on make user interaction truly makes sense for a given task.

One of the many sessions I'm looking forward to is Scott Stanfield from Vertigo Software taking dive into their new WPF reference application Family.Show that was developed for Microsoft.

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The Triangle .Net User Group leadership (www.trinug.org) has just announced CodeCampRDU that we will be holding a Code Camp in the Raleigh Durham area of central North Carolina on Saturday June 23, 2007. If you're interested in seeing some of the best and brightest of the local .Net Developer Community, this is a must attend event!

More information on the Raleigh Code Camp event is available at www.codecamp.org . We are currently accepted speaker proposals and working with organizations wishing to contribute to the event which will be held at the ECPI campus in Raleigh.

Attendee registration is not yet open, but be sure to visit the site to subscribe to the RSS news feed

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The community site for Silverlight will go live (or "light up") on April 30th at http://www.silverlight.net/

At this time it also sounds like like a beta (Updated from the Feb CTP of WPF/E) will be released in conjuntion with Mix07.

A few Microsoft blog posts to pay attention to:

Introducing Microsoft Silverlight

Top 10 Questions about Silverlight and Media

Introducing Microsoft Silverlight

Introducing Expression Media Encoder

AGhost.. hiw did we miss that!? http://blogs.msdn.com/mharsh/archive/2007/04/16/microsoft-silverlight.aspx

Also keep and eye on the office site: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight

Yep.... Mix is gonna be fun!

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With the rollout of a new website, Micrososft shares more of the vision.

"Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web."

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

I look forward to MIX07 as more details are announced:

from Soma's blog: "Silverlight announcement at NAB is only part of the story, the rest will be unveiled at MIX including details about how Silverlight is a core component of Microsoft’s broader .NET platform. Keep your eyes on Mix07 as part of Ray Ozzie’s and Scott Guthrie’s keynote – be sure to check it out. "

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According to my countdown gadgets it's an amazing 14 days until Mix07 (and only 49 days until Tech Ed!) I'm really looking forward to the conference conversation this year. Last year was an amazing event, very different from the other Tech Ed and PDC conferences that Microsoft hosts.

If you're not registered, it's too late as the event has long sold out. Everybody can keep track of things though through the www.visitmix.com web site. It sounds like they are going to get a bunch of conference info online in [near] real time.

I'm very much looking forward to the latest on the WPF, WPF/E, AJAX, and Media Center fronts. So far my must see list of sessions includes:

• "Family.Show": I See Dead People, with Windows Presentation Foundation: Scott Stanfield - Vertigo
• "ZAP!, WHAM!, KAPOW!": Windows Presentation Foundation and the Next Generation of Online Comic Book Reading: Nathan Dunlap - IdentityMine, Robby Ingebretsen - IdentityMine
• Booyah! Designing and Developing Line-of-Business Applications That SIZZLE: Nathan Dunlap - IdentityMine, Darren Laybourn - Microsoft, Josh Wagoner - IdentityMine
• Ink for Designers and Developers: Sam Geroge - Microsoft
• Just Glue It! Dynamic Languages in "WPF/E": Jim Hugunin - Microsoft, John Lam - Microsoft
• The Emotion of Customer Experience: Lou Carbone - Experience Engineering
• Lessons Learned: Designer/Developer Productivity in Windows Presentation Foundation: Jonathan Russ - IdentityMine, Josh Wagoner - IdentityMine
• Building "WPF/E" Applications Using .NET: Jamie Cool - Microsoft, Nick Kramer - Microsoft
• Creating and Delivering Rich Media and Video on the Web with "WPF/E", Microsoft Expression Studio, and Windows Server Codename “Longhorn” : Brad Abrams - Microsoft, James Clarke - Microsoft, Chris Knowlton - Microsoft
• Deep Dive on "WPF/E" Media Integration: Mike Harsh - Microsoft
• Design in Motion: Video Production Workflow: Ben Waggoner - Microsoft
• Developing ASP.NET AJAX Controls with "WPF/E": Nikhil Kothari - Microsoft
• Go Deep with AJAX: Matt Gibbs - Microsoft, Jeff Prosise - Wintellect LLC
• Yahoo! on Microsoft .NET 3.0 and Microsoft Expression: Eric Burke - Yahoo!, Josh Jacobson - Yahoo!

I think I might need more than 72 hours!

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This month our feature speaker at the Triangle .Net User Group (www.trinug.org) was Brian Hitney, our favorite local Microsoft DE. We've all heard a lot about Vista's new wiz-bang features like Aero GUI, .Net 3.0, IIS7 and other exciting stuff, but Brian dug deep and took as on a guided tour of changes to the kernel in Vista. The presentation was great. Even convinced me to turn UAC back on!

We also had a number of people promoting job opportunities to group, most exciting of which was Galen from Veracity Solutions was in town promoting a number of WPF opportunities in the area. It's cool to see people specifically asking for skills that we have been working so hard on learning. Great inspiration to keep up on the learning front. If you're interested, check their web sire or drop me a note for contact info.

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