The session catalog for Tech Ed Australia and Tech Ed New Zealand has been available online for a few weeks now, but I haven’t gotten around to blog about me speaking at TechEd. I will be speaking about “Silverlight 2 for Developers”, as well as sitting on a panel discussing “Web Futures - the next 18 months”. The panel will also be comprised of Scott Hanselman, Nigel Parker, and Trent Mankelow. In Sydney I have a 10 minute quest appearance in the Visual Studio track showing my favorite .NET 3.5 SP1 feature.

The abstract for my Silverlight talk goes like this:

Silverlight 2 enables you to build some stunning web applications. But it's not all about eye candy. Silverlight 2 brings the power of .NET to the browser. This requires some new thinking in the way we build web applications. In this session we will focus on Silverlight 2 from a developer's point of view. This session will show you how to write code that both you and your designers can work with, by separating out business- and data access logic and leveraging the power of data binding in Silverlight. The session will also cover development practices such as unit testing and continuous integration, as well as more technical topics such as network- and data access, local storage and more. You will also learn a few tips on how you as a developer can leverage Blend 2.5

As you can see by the description I don’t want the session to be yet another “introduction to Silverlight 2” presentation. I will cover concrete things such as how to build a data driven CRUD application in Silverlight, talking to web services and using features like data binding and the visual state manager. However, I also want to cover design patterns and development practices that can help you build more flexible, testable and designable (as in UI design) code.

The day before Tech Ed the New Zealand development community is putting together Auckland Code Camp 2008. Since I’m in town I got invited to do a presentation, and I had such good time at CodeCampOZ earlier this year that I couldn’t say no to that invitation. Robert Fonseca-Ensor is doing a TDD and DI/IoC talk in the morning, so I will use part of my session to build on that and show how to use Ninject to do dependency injection in Silverlight 2. I will also cover some more advanced Silverlight 2 testing scenarios, such as writing asynchronous tests, before finishing up with some HTML Bridge fun.

Tech Ed New Zealand, Auckland (1– 3 September 2008)

WEB304 - Web Futures - the next 18 months (02/09/2008 10:45AM-12:00PM)
Where is the web going over the next 18 months and what is in the pipeline from Microsoft to cater for and drive this? Is Microsoft up to the challenge? How is Microsoft working with the part of the web that is not MS based? How is Microsoft changing to cater for emerging trends? Submit your questions and hear the answers from the experts.

WEB309 - Silverlight 2 for developers (03/09/2008 9:00AM-10:15AM)
See description above...

Tech Ed Australia, Sydney (2 – 5 September 2008)

WEB309 - Silverlight 2 for developers (04/09/2008 8:30AM-9:45AM )
See description above...

WEB304 - Web Futures - the next 18 months (05/09/2008 10:15AM-11:30AM)
See description above...

DEV210 - The Hour of Power: 6 of the Best - Best of the Best in VS2008, Fx 3.5 inc SP1 (05/09/2008 8:30AM-9:45AM)
Rock on up to the “Hour of Power” this will be a fun energy packed session presented by 6 speakers each speaking for 10 minutes on their favourite feature(s) in Visual Studio 2008 and Fx 3.5 including SP1. It’s a must see session and a great way to pick up a few new tips and tricks!!

Going to TechEd Australia or New Zealand? Or got any questions, suggestions or ideas to things you want me to cover? If so, it would be awesome if you drop me a comment.