MS Midwest -- Next Web Road Show

Thanks to everyone that attended Microsoft’s Midwest “Next Web Roadshow” last week! It was really interesting and exciting to see the momentum that WPF and Silverlight are gaining both with commercial projects as well as some great “intranet” and inter-corporate projects.

Those folks that won the 80GB Zune Originals are welcome to mail them to me if you find them to be too much to handle…

As promised, here is a list of some resources for your consumption on the topics we discussed.

WPF Information:
MSDN WPF samples
Code Project's WPF Pages
Vista x64 Forums on WPF ('Avalon')
XCeed's WPF Wiki
Kazaml (the cool, free Xamlpad replacement)

Good WPF-related Blogs:
   Josh Smith
   Mike Hillberg (WPF + Silverlight)
   Beatriz Costa
   Tim Sneath (WPF + Silverlight)

Silverlight Information:
Silverlight splash screen + dynamic content sample
Silverlight.net (great jump-off point for everything Silverlight)
Silverlight Cream (awesome aggregate site of cool SL stuff around the net)
MSDN Silverlight Dev Center
Silverlight 2 Controls Source Code

Good Silverlight Blogs:
   Brad Abrams
   Expression Design + Blend
   Joe Stegman
   Mike Harsh
   Mike Taulty
   Scott Guthrie

ASP.NET Information:
ASP.NET (Microsoft’s official page on ASP – lots of samples/tutorials here)
MSDN ASP.NET Code Gallery
123ASPX Index (A good site to find samples and tutorials on ASP.NET)
4 Guys From Rolla

Good ASP.NET Blogs:
DotNet Slackers
Scott Mitchell

Books:
Programming WPF (great learning & practical reference, make sure you get the 2nd ed.)
Essential WPF (very good as an intro to WPF book)
Apps = Code + Markup (Charles Petzold's book – it has some very good explanations on WHY things work/don't work, not just showing you how to do things)
Professional ASP.NET 3.5
ASP 2.0 Website Programming (Don’t be dissuaded by it being a 2.0 book – all the topics are still quite relevant, as 3.5 is 90% 2.0…)
Essential ASP.NET (This is the book I learned with and still use when things get foggy)

And, of course, Pluralsight’s aggregate blog will give you blog entries on all of these topics… ;-)

Thanks again for attending, and for being attentive as well. As a little last-minute advertisement: Check out Pluralsight’s Open Enrollment class schedule for the latest dates on classes in these areas. Also, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have a larger gaggle of devs interested in us coming to you for training.

Now get coding!