3rd Annul Back To School Event Presentations
First of all, thanks to everyone whom participated in this year’s event! It was a blast interacting with everyone and see a lot of new faces in the crowd!
The event went off very well …and the only issue seemed to be my laptop and the wireless playing nice together….oh well maybe @PerpetualTech will but me a new laptop with solid state drives so I can run everything virtually:) As always, I had my trusty backup ..my tethered Blackberry non-3G network. This actually worked in my favor because when the questions came about performance of things like SQL Azure and BING maps I could just point to the phone and say….I just pulled down 300 geocode points and put them on a BING map through the phone!
The first of my presentations was an overview of CRM 2011. The group was small but asked a TON of questions so obviously people are interested. In retrospect I should have probably got in touch with the local Windows Users Group in order to ensure that they knew about the event. This presentation went well though although I could not demo the Outlook client because for whatever reason my local copy won’t synch with the ‘mothership’ to initialize it. Oh well, I will get it fixed and then maybe work up a couple of webcasts to go over everything in much more detail. Here are the Powerpoints for everyone involved and if you want details on how to get the beta then drop me a line.
The second presentation was on SQL Azure. My tactic in this presentation was to educate everyone in the interface and the complications that come with using this newer technology.. So no real flashy demos…even though I sneaked in one at the end showing Silverlight – RIA Services hooking up via SQL Azure database..Mwahahahaha! Everyone seemed to be really generally interested as again there were a TON of questions … even some really challenging ones that made me carefully choose my words:) So here are the files and also the sample application….
Everything Your DBA Won’t Tell You About SQL Azure
My last presentation came at the end of the day. Normally, this is a difficult spot to fill and they usually try to keep the best speakers for the beginning and then end so that people will stay for the whole event. The pressure was on but the crowd was pretty packed and I tried to make it a little more interactive by making everyone yell ‘Show us!’ before I showed a demo:) Everyone played along and I hope they felt they were rewarded appropriately with a set of good demos. I had three demos which consisted of the following:
1. World of Warcraft Card Play: this consisted of a WoW themed table which demonstrated drag & drop and print functionality. So it functioned so that I took a bunch of WoW card images on my local laptop and ‘threw’ them onto the deck. Press a button and reordered them with background code. Pressed another button and created a print out of the deck….pretty snazzy.
2. WoW Fan Locator: this was a BING maps Silverlight control demo as well as using RIA services through the code behind. So I demoed how to interact with the maps control doing a couple of very basic things. Then the really cool demo occurred when I showed the group how to programmatically call back to the RIA service attached to the app and add layers and points onto the map in order to map where the WoW fans were located in the U.S.A. Push a button and 600 points appeared on the map…you zoomed down into the map a little closer… and mysteriously, all the WoW fans were in one place. You zoomed down to street level and you found out why….they were all at the building where my presentation was occurring and they were watching a video of the WoW Burning Crusade intro on the map … and yes it did also play sound too! Lastly, I demonstrated the totally cool Silverlight PIVOT control. For this one I took a deck of 350+ WoW card images and joined it with some data to a local database and created a collection…the pivot control displayed the card deck via with complete Deep Zoom capability and even filtering built in….awesome technology!
So enough gabbing…here are the file for the Silverlight session…now this is minus the WoW video and also the WoW card collection….the files are just too big for me to host them all…gosh I don’t have a file servers that Microsoft has!
Burning Down the Web with Silverlight 4.0!
Thanks again for everyone whom attended again and remember to hit me up if you have any questions!
Cheers!
AJ