CDC Alert! This is tour going to be sick

I’m hitting the road again for another awesome user group tour.  This time I am going to Ohio!  I am calling it the CDC tour.  As you can tell from the title of this post, I get to have some fun with a little play on words with this one.  It’s called the CDC tour because I will be speaking a four user groups in the cities of Columbus, Dayton, and Cincinnati.

My first stop will be at the Windows Developer User Group on Oct 21 in Columbus.  Then, I’ll hop into my rental car and drive down to Cincinnati on Oct 22 to the Cincinnati .NET Users Group.  The next day, on Oct 23, I’ll be heading up to speak at the Dayton .NET Developers Group in the great city of Dayton.  Finally I will head back over to Columbus on Oct 24 to speak at the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group.

I bet you are wondering what I will be talking about at these groups.  As I always do, I sent a list of various topics to each group and then the group chooses the topic they are interested in.  The Cincinnati .NET Users Group chose my “WPF for the Real World” session.  You can read the abstract below.

Topic:  WPF for the Real World
Level: 100
Description:
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is becoming more and more popular as businesses begin to convert their legacy Windows Forms applications and write their new line of business applications using WPF.  WPF provides developers with a unified programming model for building rich Windows smart client user experiences that incorporate UI, media, and documents.  With WPF, you can create a wide range of both standalone and browser-hosted applications.  This session is aimed at giving you the knowledge required to get started writing line of business WPF applications so that you can become a more important asset to your employer.  There will be no spinning buttons, no rotating cubes, and no silly or impractical tricks.  This session will concentrate on the basic building blocks required to be a successful WPF developer.  By the end of this session you will know what XAML is, how to manage layout in your application, define controls in your views,  style and template your views, handle events, and manage data with data binding and the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) design pattern.  Come join me in this interactive and fun learning experience where you can control the direction of the talk and emphasize what you are most interested in.

The Windows Developer User Group, Dayton .NET Developers Group, and the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group chose my extremely popular “Building Composite XAML Applications with Prism” session.  Although this is an introduction topic, it is still one of the more advanced talks I give due to the number of development patterns and concepts that is covered in such a short amount of time.  I often recommend my Pluralsight course titled “Introduction to Prism” as a supplement to this session as it has over 4 hours of detailed instruction.  You can read the abstract below to get an idea of what will be covered in the talk.

Topic:  Building Composite XAML Applications with Prism
Level:  300
Description:
In this session you will learn how to design and build Windows Phone, Silverlight, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) desktop applications using loosely coupled components that can evolve independently but which can be easily and seamlessly integrated into the overall application. This is an introductory talk that concentrates on the basic concepts required to build a composite application with the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Prism framework which includes the bootstrapper, regions, modules, view composition, and different techniques for communicating between loosely couple components.  Various development patterns and technologies will also be discussed including Inversion of Control (IoC), Dependency Injection (DI), Unity, MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework), commanding, event aggregation, and MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel).

I’m really excited about this tour.  Four user groups in four days; this CDC tour is going to be sick (pun intended).  I hope to see you there, but if you can’t make it, you could always request me to come speak at your user group.

Oh, and don’t forget about the Infragistics User group Contest.  One of these groups can be a winner!