I presented tonight (10 July 2008) to the Richmond .NET User Group. We had a pretty good turnout, I'm guessing 40 to 45 developers. I gave this same presentation at my office today as a dry run and as a training opportunity within the company. It's so good to see the developer community eager to learn. I've attached my slides and the three demonstrations projects I used in this post. I'll be giving this same presentation to the Charlottesville .NET User Group next Thursday (17 July 2008). The abstract we put on both user group websites follows:

Silverlight is a client-side technology. So it’s not really a part of your SOA strategy, right? You may want to think twice about that. SOAP and WSDL support are coming to the web desktop via Silverlight. And Silverlight has good client support for REST+ JSON/POX and RSS/ATOM-based web services, too. During this discussion, we’ll dive into data serialization, security and cross-domain access policy capabilities inside Silverlight 2 Beta 2. We also talk about the nuances and pitfalls of provisioning your web services for an Internet audience. This presentation will be heavy on coding, demonstration and interactive discussion.

Powerpoint Presentation (289KB)

Twitter solution showing how to invoke a cross-domain RESTful service by way of an in-domain SOAP service bypassing the cross-domain access policy problem. (842KB)

REST solution showing how to create RESTful services in WCF and how to consume RESTful services in Silverlight (307KB)

Silverlight syndication solution showing how to consume cross-domain RSS and Atom feeds using the SyndicationFeed class. (11KB)

Here are my slides from the Richmond Code Camp 2008.1 talk concerning Silverlight.

Silverlight Version 2 - Hazzard - RCC2008.1 - April 2008.pptx (237.23 kb)

And here are some demo links that I used during the presentation: 

Deep Zoom
http://joestegman.members.winisp.net/DeepZoom/
http://www.neogeo.com/samples/SilverZoom/

Financial Management
http://www.cookingwithxaml.com/meals/financials/default.html

WeatherBug
http://sl.weatherbug.com/?zip=23060

Learning and Discovery
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/earlyamericas/readingartifacts/

Image Snipper
http://silverlight.net/Samples/2b1/ImageSnipper/testpage.html

Form Controls
http://silverlight.net/Samples/2b1/SilverlightControls/run/default.html
http://labs.componentone.com/Sapphire/

These are the slides and source code that I used in my Richmond Code Camp 2008.1 presentation called "Look Ma! No Proxy!". This presentation concerns the problems related to proxy generation for traditional web services development. In this presentation, I propose a model for the future where proxies are no longer needed, at least not pre-built proxies as we use today. A bit of dynamic code generation, some C# client code and a bit of IronPython to glue things together. Mmm, mmm, good!

Look Ma No Proxy by Kevin Hazzard.pptx (197.46 kb)

ProxyGen20080426.zip (818.56 kb)

I do a lot of demos: training, teaching, mentoring, etc. I get asked about my Visual Studio fonts and colors quite often. I use Tomas Restrepo's Nightingale scheme for Visual Studio 2008. Here's the link to his VS Color Scheme page. Scroll down to check out Nightingale and other nice schemes he's made available. I like the contrast of Nightingale and how colorful it is. I use a different font though called DejaVuSans Mono. It's clean and compact yet bold.

Here's a screen shot of the Nightingale theme with the DejaVuSans Mono font that I use. By the way, setting the vertical guidelines that you see in the image below is done through a registry hack. See the REG script below if you're interested.

Save the text below as a REG file, then right-click on the file and select Merge to update Visual Studio 2008 to show gridlines at positions 4, 8 and 80. Of course, if you want vertical guides at other positions, change the Guides string to your liking. Visual Studio 2005 respects this setting, too. Just change 9.0 to 8.0 in the path. Here's the REG merge script: