Glenn Conner
This August I'll be speaking at Web on the Piste with a session entitled "A Deep dive into Silverlight 1.1". Microsoft Silverlight is a very exciting technology that has the potential to allow developers to create a whole new generation of rich interactive .NET applications for the web. My session will go over my experiences in developing an application in Silverlight as part of the recently held Intergen Silverlight coding competition. During the session I'll go over the current state of Silverlight 1.1 alpha from a .NET developer's perspective, show off a few interesting points regarding Silverlight development, and last but not least, perform a demonstration of the application I developed, a physics-based book search engine that provides a highly interactive user experience.
Web on the Piste is held in Queenstown on 22 – 23 August.
Andrew Tokeley
I’ve been lucky enough to have presented some pretty cool topics at previous TechEds – “What’s New in the Framework for Version 2.0” (when .NET 2.0 was the new kid on the block) and last year looking at LINQ. This year I’ll be looking at something that is still smoking it’s so hot off the press: “WEB313 - Developing Data Driven Applications using the new Dynamic Data Controls in ASP.Net”. Despite the amazing progress Microsoft has made to ease the effort required to build web applications, the dream of Rapid Application Development is often elusive. Even for the most basic data driven website there are challenges that need to be overcome – data access, data binding, validation, CRUD… most of which have nothing to do with the specific problem at hand and certainly not the sort of thing most developers want to spend a lot of time on. Dynamic Data Controls build on the current ASP.Net experience to further increase the speed at which we can build data driven applications. The presentation I am doing will be packed full of demos, so come along, have a look and let me know what you think.
TechEd is held in Auckland on 13 – 15 August.
Mark Orange
Being a SharePoint Technologies MVP, it’s no surprise that my topics this year at TechEd are on SharePoint.
My first session is a big topic with a long title - “Document and Records Management Using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Clients”. In this session I will also be introducing the New Zealand Public Records Act. This is a hot topic at the moment and everyone is asking where does MOSS fit, what can it do, what can’t it do? One of the questions I’ll be trying to answer at TechEd is if a bunch of geeky developers even care about it. Maybe no one will turn up to the session!
My second session is focused on web content management in SharePoint and provides an end to end overview of how a website has been realised on MOSS. I have created this session and am co-presenting it with New Zealand’s only other SharePoint Technologies MVP. We’ve created everything for this demo site ourselves including the user interface design which is very green, so I hope people can focus on the journey and not the fact it looks like the Incredible Hulk.
We also get to host at an “Ask the Experts” session where you can get all sorts of weird and wonderful questions in your area of expertise. This is always a great way to hear about some of the challenges, cool solutions and applications people are working on out there.
Chris Auld
I’m going to be speaking at a couple of events in August.
My first session at TechEd focuses on Office Business Applications. This is basically the concept that Microsoft Office makes a fantastic place to surface typical line of business applications. I’ve long been a big fan of this sort of stuff (I’ve done several office dev sessions at previous TechEd events in Australia and New Zealand) because ultimately with computers so ubiquitous in the enterprise, these days it makes sense to leverage as much of the comfort and previous experience people have with ubiquitous toolsets such as Office. Anyway... should be a good session. Do come and say hi if you’re there.
The second session I’m doing will focus on how we went about building the exciting new product (that I’m still not allowed to tell you much about) we’ve been working on here at Intergen called ActionThis. I’ll be talking about our approach to architecture, user experience, and also giving you a sneak peek into how ActionThis works. I’ll also be talking quite a bit about the Software + Services model and how we surface key functionality in ActionThis through Microsoft Outlook and Project.... do you see a theme here?
Like most of the other Intergenites at TechEd, I’ll be easy to spot in my bright yellow gears... but I’m not going to let that cat out of the bag quite yet.