This has been yet another exciting year for the developers community initiatives at ILM. The .NET User Group has held successful events this year on ASP.NET MVC, Identity Federation, Share Point CMS, Model based Testing, and WCF/WF working together. The SilverLight user group held its first three events attracting over 100 attendees for the first two events and around 45 for the third event. The first two events were focused on broad topics, whereas, the third event was focused on a specialty topic of search engine optimization.
I am now working to finalizing the speakers and sessions for the next few events. I am reaching out to all technology enthusiasts like you in the Twin Cities, Minnesota area, with the hope that you would be willing to contribute to these user groups by speaking at one of the upcoming events.
The sessions are generally 1 to 1.5 hours long and are usually given to a large audience in a seminar setting. I am very open to alternative ideas, however.
The .NET user group focuses on everything .NET and targets mid-level to expert level audience.
The SilverLight user group focuses on both developers and designers. I will be thrilled to see a few upcoming events on the designer focused topics. So, if you have something cool to show about your expertise with SilverLight, WPF, Expressions, or XAML I will be happy to talk to you about it.
If you are interested in speaking at either user group, please write a comment to this blog entry and specify the user group, the topic, and the approximate date that works for you. The .NET user group meets every first Thursday of the month from 5-7pm and the SilverLight user group meets every third Tuesday of the month from 12-2pm. You can visit both of the user groups at http://www.ilmservice.com/twincitiesnet and http://www.ilmservice.com/silverlight respectively.
I have some knowledge about creating custom controls for silverlight, specifically around the Media Element. We added a progress indicator, elapsed time, controls for play, pause, stop, volume control and tied this to a datagrid for use as a pseudo playlist.
For enhanced usability, we implemented custom templates, Visual State Manager, Custom events, and use of both Blend and VS2008. We feel this is as close to a winforms app we’ve been able to produce in a web environment.
I would be more than happy to talk about this for the users group if this is of any interest.
Matt, Thanks! I for one am very interested in hearing what you’ll present.
Bobbi
Sorry Matt, it took me a few days to read your response. Thanks for volunterring to speak a the SilverLight user group. It seems like Bobbi is already in touch with you. I have spoken with her regarding getting you on the agenda for a future user group event.