Earlier this week Australian Silverlight enthusiast Jordan Knight announced the Silverlight Designer and Developer Network initiative. This is a new user group starting up in Melbourne, focusing on the design and development aspects of Silverlight. First meeting is scheduled Thursday November 27 at 5:30 PM for a 6PM start. The venue is Microsoft Theatre, Level 5, Freshwater Place, Southbank. Microsoft User Experience Evangelist Shane Morris will be delivering a key note to kick off the group. I will be giving a presentation covering the current state of the Silverlight union. I will talk about any major Silverlight announcement from the PDC, what have been announced around the future, and some of the interesting community projects around Silverlight 2.

The SDDN is a great initiative for many reasons. Most importantly it creates a meeting forum to bring developers and designers together. Getting designers engaged is a key success factor for Silverlight. I really hope this initiative can help that happen. Secondly the Network-part of the name suggests this is more than user group meetings. The SDDN has ambition to build a strong online presence, with high quality recordings of all meetings. This is a great way to reach out to a wider audience, as well as developers and designers working in smaller/remote areas who might not have access to a user group like this. Big kudos to Jordan for making this effort!

Check out Jordan’s announcement post and the new (but still under construction) site for more details. Hope to see you at the first SDDN meeting!

With the SDDN announcement out of the way the next point on my agenda for this “what’s up” blog post is the PDC. I’m writing this while sitting at the gate waiting for my flight to Los Angeles. I will be attending PDC 2008! I had the pleasure of attending PDC back in 2005, and that was an amazing experience. This year I have high expectations to the PDC as it has been three years since last time. I tried to set up my agenda, and ended up with at least two conflicting sessions for each time slot! There is just so much great content. Thankfully Microsoft is putting a big effort into recording all sessions, so at least that’s a chance to catch up on the sessions I miss out on. I don’t know if the recordings will be made available publicly, but I sure hope so.

I’m looking forward to networking with fellow peers in the Microsoft and Silverlight development community. If you’re attending and want to catch up, drop me an e-mail at jonas@follesoe.no, or ping me on Twitter (@follesoe). See you in LA!