Next week I’m doing a presentation at the Ozark .NET User Group, in Harrison, AR. This is going to be my first presentation sponsored by INETA. I’ll be doing two talks:

• Tips and Tricks to Boost your Productivity
• Beyond the Core Concepts of OOP

The user groups leaders are doing a terrific job promoting the event, and they got some sweet prizes to give away: a bunch of software (Infragistics, ReSharper, CodeSmith), and even a laptop (dang, will I be eligible for that one?)!!  🙂

We’ve heard people within a hundred mile radius are coming, so make sure to come join us. I’m definitely looking forward to it, since there’s going to be a lot of people that I already know from the community there.

Hope to see you there!

UPDATE: I had the “composite app” and “linq” sessions flipped on the agenda before. I’ve fixed it now.

Next week I’ll be doing 3 online presentations for the MS TechDays event. This is an interesting event: about 100 live sessions presented online during a 24-hour period. The sessions I’m doing are:

• Using the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight (March 31, 7pm Central Time)
• Beyond the Core Concepts of Object-Oriented Programming (April 1, 10am Central Time)
• Intro to LINQ (April 1, 12:30am Central Time)

You can find more details about the sessions here.

The speaker with highest scoring session gets a speaking opportunity at either TechEd North America or TechEd Europe. So please, attend to my sessions and fill out evals!  🙂

UPDATE: Note that the event website has the time posted as GMT, whereas I’ve used Central Time in this blog. Make sure you translate that to whatever time zone you are in.

I’d like to thank everybody who showed up at the HDNUG last night for my presentation on Prism. I’ve concentrated mostly on the big picture, covering the core concepts. You can download the slide deck here.

Make sure you download prism and take the time to go through the docs as well as samples; there’s a lot of code there, unit tests, etc. Also, here are some other resources you might want to check out:

• My interview on Prism for the HighOnCoding Podcast (in that link you’ll find yet more links to other resources)
• Series of videos on Channel 9 (very good way to get started on it)

I can’t stress enough how important it is that you check out the documentation that comes with Prism! It’s easy to read, not too long, and provides great information regarding the patterns, motivation, design decisions, etc.

I’ll be doing a presentation on the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight (aka, Prism) tomorrow (March 12), at the Houston .NET User Group. Here’s the official description:

This presentation covers an overview of the Composite Application Guidance for WPF (codename Prism), its architecture and Composite Application Library (CAL), and how applications are be built on top of it. If you build any application that goes beyond "Hello World", it’s likely that you create composite applications. Prism allows for applications to be built with proper separation of concerns, promoting loose coupling, extensibility, and testability. It also helps with WPF’s goals of allowing developers and designers to collaborate more easily on the same project. The presentation also cover some dependency injection and Model-View-ViewModel patterns.

Hope to see some of you there!

Last week I was in Seattle for the MVP Summit 2009, and had the chance to record a new interview for the HigOnCoding podcast. You can check it out here.

In the interview we discuss a couple of things I’ve posted to my blog in the past regarding productivity tools, how to catch up with what’s going on, how to continue learning, and how to become a better developer.

A lot of that is part of what works for me, but I’m always looking for ways to improve on that, so please send me any feedback you may have; I’m always up for trying out new tools and techniques.