Best of MIX 09

William Steele from Microsoft will be presenting an overview from the MIX 09 - Microsoft's Web Development and Design Conference held in Las Vegas in March.    This is the latest and greatest from Microsoft on all the web develoment tools and technologies so this will be a don't miss event!

Bill Steele
Illinios, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio
http://blogs.msdn.com/wsteele/

Bill loves creating the applications that often pop right into his head. Unfortunately, it takes his fingers a little longer to type them in. Bill is MCSD certified and has logged more than 20 years as a software developer. Previously, Bill worked for a regional consulting firm where he developed applications that managed internal business operations in areas including IT service management, transportation logistics, and financial management. Bill was responsible for building integration applications between various ISV's products and the client's IT infrastructure. He also spent more than seven years at StrideRite Corporation, where he honed his development skills in Visual Basic, C++ and a range of IT roles. Bill has been collaborating with Microsoft since 1992, and continues to prize his Visual Basic 1.0 Beta Thunder Clock. He's given over 300 presentations to date, and is currently developing software for a flight computer in NASA’s Small Aircraft Transportation System. One additional item, Bill is also a very active pilot. Want a good story? Ask Bill about his Hurricane Katrina efforts sometime. What's the toughest part of managing a 50-member team? "Those developer types always think they know it all," Bill says with a wink.

Meeting Info...

Tonight we had our best attendance in quite a while with about 20 people.  Thanks for coming.

William Steele gave us a quick run through on new features in IE 8 for developers and Silverlight 3 which is due out 'any day now'.

For IE8, the key takeaways are the vastly improved javascript debugger (very VS like), compatibility modes for browser and document model, developer tools for viewing structure, tags, styles, etc. accessed with F12.

For Silverlight 3, improved media support, out of browser execution, cool animations, and taking app offline for disconnected use were presented.

We'll post the demo code when we get it.

Next month we have Jim Holmes coming to give his popular talk on developer tips.

As I mentioned in the meeting, Nevron will give away a free copy of the Charting component to one lucky member.   See home page announcements for info.  First person to email me with a request wins.