I know. It’s been too long since my last post, and just to clarify; I’m not dead, nor have I been eaten by sharks or anything like that. I’ve just been busy rebooting my life back in Trondheim after coming back from Australia. I started working again in Trondheim in the beginning on January and went straight back on to a Windows Forms/WPF project I helped start up back in September 2007. It has been really fun to see how the code base has evolved over the year I’ve been gone. After getting back on the project I’ve spent most my time developing WPF components inside the Windows Forms client. It’s been an interesting experience, and I’m really happy with how well WPF integrates with existing Windows Forms applications. I will definitely be blogging about some of my experiences around WPF and Windows Forms in the weeks to come.

However, the main reason for the slowdown in posts is not work related. Hege and I just bought an apartment, and ever since we moved in all available time have gone to painting walls, shopping for furniture and all kinds of other things you need to get in order when moving into a new place. We are really happy with the apartment, and things are really starting to shape up. We finished painting the last room this weekend. I will be posting a “tour of the geek crib” once all the tech stuff (fun stuff) is in place.

Okay – enough excuses for not blogging. The more topic of this blog post is that I’m doing a series of talks on Silverlight 2 during the MSDN Live tour. First stop of the tour is Stavanger (05. March), before moving on to Bergen (10. March), Trondheim (12. March) and finally Oslo (19. March). I will be giving two sessions, one on developing data centric/business focused Silverlight 2 applications (similar to my Tech Ed Talk), and one on Silverlight 2 tips and tricks. The tips and tricks session will be 5-6 covering things like printing, deep linking, search engine optimization, design time support, continuous integration etc.

I’ve included the session abstract (in Norwegian):

Forretningsapplikasjoner i Silverlight 2
Silverlight 2 ble lansert nå i høst og legger et godt grunnlag for utviklere som ønsker å lage rike internett applikasjoner (RIA) basert på .NET. I denne sesjonen går vi i dypden på Silverlight 2 som utviklingsplattform og fordelene ved å velge Silverlight 2 som plattform for data-sentriske forretningsapplikasjoner. Sesjonen vil blandt annet dekke dataaksess via sikrede WCF tjenester, hvordan strukturere koden ved hjelp av Model-View-ViewModel patternet (MVVM), hvordan skrive kode designere kan jobbe med, og enkle Blend-tips for utviklere. Sesjonen vil bygges rundt en dykkeloggapplikasjon hvor koden vil bli gjort tilgjengelig etter presentasjonen.

Tips og triks for Silverlight 2-utviklere
denne andre sesjonen vil vi bygge videre på dykkeloggen og fokusere på en del konkrete tips og triks for Silverlight 2-utviklere. Tett integrasjon med nettleseren er viktig for en best mulig brukeropplevelse. Vi vil blant annet se på hvordan integrere med fram/tilbake knappene i nettleseren, hvordan optimalisere Silverlight applikasjoner for søkemotorer, hvordan bruke dyplenking i Silverlight og hvordan håndtere utskrift fra Silverlight. Presentasjonen vil gå i dybden på blant annet HTML-bridgen som brukes for å integrere Silverlight med JavaScript som allerede kjører på siden, eller for å aksessere nettleserens DOM.

One of the sad things about this round of MSDN Live is that Microsoft have to charge for it. Previously MSDN Live have been a free (and really popular) event, but Microsoft is feeling the financial crisis just like everyone else. So in order to be able to deliver MSDN Live this time they had to charge for it. Børge Hansen from Microsoft Norway and Jon Torresdal from NNUG Bergen have shared their thoughts on this decision. I was really bummed about this decision myself, but I really hope that you find the content presented at MSDN Live interesting, and that you get a chance to attend.

Since this post is about upcoming speaking engagement I figure I could finish the post by sharing a time lapse video of a Silverlight 2 presentation I did last week at the local university. The time lapse is created by Pete J Samuel, a colleague of mine at Capgemini Trondheim.

Hope to see you at MSDN Live in Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim or Oslo!