.NET Rocker

I had a great time presenting at Houston Tech Fest this weekend.  As promised, below is a link to all of my presentations and the demos we covered during them.

The one change is, that due to size, the MIX 10 Collection data is not included in the PivotViewer demos.  I have moved the collection to be hosted and will post another entry detailing the post.  However, I did update the Uri’s in the projects to point to the new location of the data.

I really enjoyed the comments and questions during and after the sessions.  Please feel free to let me know if you have additional questions and things you would like to go over.

Houston Tech Fest Presentations

Sessions :

• Intro to Silverlight PivotViewer
• Intro to Windows Phone 7
• Building Windows Phone 7 Applications in Silverlight

[Update 07/25]

There are two important things to point out on this post (thanks to the guidance from the MVVM Light toolkit author Laurent).  First, if you are solely using the messsaging component and not using the DispatcherHelper, then there is no need to Initialize it.  The second is that your message class does not need to inherit from the MessageBase class.  You can, in fact, send any class thru the messaging system.

These two changes simplify this post quite a bit.  Which, in my opinion, only validates the power and flexibility of the toolkit messaging.

[/Update 07/25]

Being an avid Silverlight developer, I love the MVVM pattern and the benefits of using it.  That being the case, I have used several different frameworks to help with the MVVM plumbing.  However, I keep coming back to my favorite, GalaSoft’s MVVM Light Toolkit.  This toolkit does a great job of handling a lot of the MVVM plumbing code for you, making it much easier to get your applications up and running using the MVVM pattern.

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Since Silverlight 2, the binding in Silverlight has been truly amazing to build applications with.  It’s ease and power has allowed developers to build advanced relationships with very little code.

Silverlight 4 has extended the binding capabilities by adding indexed property binding.  In previous versions, you could bind to an object’s properties like such:

<TextBox Text={Binding LastName}/>

With the addition of indexed property binding, you can bind to indexed objects as follows:

<TextBox Text={Binding [LastName]}/>

The added features open up some new potentials in binding to dynamic values.

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