Prairie Dev Con 2012 - Regina

Conferences

Home on the prairies! PrDC is the first event that I spoke at and have been doing so regularly since.  It’s great to be invited again to speak in my home province of Saskatchewan, and I’m looking forward to reconnecting with some folks I’ve met at previous sessions, talks, conferences and meet-ups.

imageThis year promises to be a blast with two days of hacking before the conference even starts.  Make sure you bring a laptop (or a friend who has one!) and get ready to dive into some great tech with some great folks:

  • Saturday September 29th
    *   Yuep! I’m getting up early (like 4am early) and making the hike out to Regina to be a part of the all day Hackathon. We’ll get together in groups of people smarter than me, then take advantage of APIs, open data sets and whatever we can get our hands on to make The Next Big Thing, or at least have a little fun trying to. <li>**Sunday, September 30th**
*   I’ll be helping out at the Windows 8 Workshop and labs from 1-5pm.&nbsp; We will be taking over the Delta with the biggest ever Windows 8 coding session _**ever**_ to be held between Pilot Butte and Moose Jaw! You won’t want to miss out on this!

 

During the conference I will be presenting a few times and running an MVC 4 Dojo. I’ve had a lot of fun in the past working with 5 to 45 people in the Dojo dating all the way back to when people still used MVC 3…my how time flies! Winking smile  I’ve diversified a little this year…I’m covering Windows 8, Azure, Windows Phone and some web technologies that I’ve been doing for years. Here’s a run down of my sessions:

A Cloud-Based Backend for Your Apps – Integrated in Minutes (Really!)

Azure, Data-BI-Cloud, Windows 8, SoftwareDev

The best apps need a backend, and the best backends are Cloud-based. In this session, you’ll learn how you can leverage the new Windows Azure Mobile Services to add structured storage, integrated authentication, and even Push Notifications in literally minutes to your Windows 8 Store apps. > #### Application Design for Windows Phone > ##### Mobile, .NET, Windows Phone

In the past year, we’ve worked with hundreds of developers and designers interpreting the “Metro” design system for their own purposes. We’ve seen great interpretations, and others that aren’t so great. In this session, we’ll share with you the foundations of great Metro application design for Windows Phone, and how to use them to build outstanding applications that will stand out and get noticed… for good reasons. We will also be providing some general best practices for building great mobile experiences.

A Tour of the ASP.NET Web API

Web, ASP.NET MVC, SoftwareDev

Join us for an overview of the Web API on the Asp.Net stack and find out why developers from several disciplines - web, server, and mobile - are jumping on board. We’ll take a look at the difference between RPC-style web services and approaches that are RESTful, talk about why the Web API is important and where you can use it, and cover the differences (and similarities!) between MVC-style and Web API-style routing, authorization and authentication. We’ll have examples of model binding and serialization as well as content negotiation and media formatters and we’ll try to have a little fun along the way.

ASP.NET MVC 4 100mph Dojo

Web, ASP.NET MVC, Dojo, SoftwareDev

Fear not, tireless web warriors, you too can get started in the MVC Framework, it’s as simple as File -> New -> Project! Bring your laptop and take a break from Web Forms while we walk through the key components and add them to your battle arsenal. Know Ruby? Great! Cross train for a bit and get a good feel for what your .NET brethren are up to. A hands-on lab that will walk you through Razor, routing, model binding, filters, authentication and authorization, the MVC tool chain (including NuGet) and complimentary bits (like jQuery) to make your . We’ll build a site with all of the above. Come for the pattern, stay for the framework!

I look forward to seeing everyone out!  As always, I’ll share my slides, code and contact details at the end of the sessions, so you can dive in and start learning right away and always connect afterwards if you have any questions. It’s not too late to register if you haven’t already, you can do that here.