Silverlight User Group -- highlights from last night's RIA session

Last night's Silverlight User Group session here in London delivered an intriguing journey into some extremely useful hot topics in the development. (Follow the #sluguk timeline on Twitter).

Goodie-bag from yesterday's SLUG meeting

• Ian B's deck of slides are now available to download from his SkyDrive. This is a really nice overview of RIA Services, a devastatingly simple and powerful rapid development framework in .NET for client and server apps for the web. Why develop a web service when RIA Services can do it for you through the power of IQueriable?! Ian B's full set of materials are up on his blog.
• Ian S's slides, with a nice overview and concise digest of PRISM and the MVVM model for Silverlight development. Thanks to Mark Mann, SLUG 9 organiser, for posting these on his blog and updating this page.

This was a good event with a whole load of interesting people. I witnessed a lot of information and ideas being exchanged, and people getting solutions to problems. Special gratitude is due to EMC for providing an excellent venue for this event, Michelle Flynn for organising it, Ian Blackburn and Ian Smith for serving-up such useful, practical presentations -- especially the live on-screen coding demos! Thanks also to Microsoft for bankrolling the feast of pizza and beer, and Scott Guthrie who was wanted to be there but wasn't! Never mind; we can catch-up with the legendary Gu later at his MVC 2 event in London this evening. Busy week, eh!

Events like these really are the life and soul and beating heart of the UK tech community. It's a privilege to be a part of it. Thanks everybody!

30 September 2009

Tags: silverlight user group sluguk 9 ria services prism mvvm slides materials tutorials guide walkthrough training learning community meeting beer pizza ria