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Upcoming Webinars
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Past Webinars
Latest and greatest in Windows 8.1 for developers
| Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt / .pptx)
Microsoft has created a huge update for Windows 8, known as Windows 8.1. While the OS is definitely feeling much more polished, for developers, a lot has changed as well. The good news is that your apps still run without modification. The bad news is that, if you don’t take advantage of the new stuff, your users will get a less-than-optimal experience.
In this webinar, we’ll take you on a tour of all what’s new in Windows 8.1 for developers. We’ll take a look at the updates to XAML (WinJS isn’t covered), the updated Search, the new tiles, the new screen sizes, the great new features in Visual Studio 2013 and much more.
These 75 minutes will make sure you’re back on track for Windows 8 app development!
Working in the background in Windows 8
Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides | Demos
Windows 8 introduces a new process lifecycle management. No longer does the user have to close an app explicitly. Instead, Windows manages everything. But how can we then run code in the background, is this even possible in Windows 8?
Turns out there’s a specific API that we can use to build processes (or tasks) that run in the background. It offers quite a few options, varying from simple using push notifications, over RAW notifications to more complex scenarios using the ControlChannelTrigger. In this session, we’ll take you through the several options offered by Windows 8.
Applied MVVM in Windows 8 apps: not your typical MVVM session!
| Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides | Demos
For some time now, the community has been touting the MVVM pattern as being the best way to build XAML-based applications. By now, you should be convinced that MVVM is really the way to go. But then, you start building a real-world Windows 8 application and you encounter all kinds of challenges you hadn’t thought about before. How do I properly structure an application? How do I implement navigation? How do I manage tiles or contracts from MVVM? And how do the new data controls in Windows 8 work in combination with MVVM? A whole list of questions that this session will aim at answering!
NOTE: This is an advanced session.
Deeper Dive into the Windows Phone 8 SDK
| Speaker: Michael Crump | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt / .pptx) | Demos
This session is a deeper dive into the Windows Phone 8 SDK. We will dive right into Near Field Communication (NFC), Native Code (C++), In-App Store purchases and Wallet transactions. We will also look at what it takes to leverage the new Maps introduced in the Windows Phone 8 SDK. So, if you already have a basic knowledge of Windows Phone 8 and want to dig deeper, than this session is for you.
An Overview of the Windows Phone 8 SDK
Speaker: Michael Crump | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt / .pptx) | Demos
Microsoft is flooding the market with new stuff. Developers are having a hard time keeping up with all these new goodies. Just recently, a new version of Windows Phone is released: Windows Phone 8. Of course, a new SDK is available. This SDK is probably an early The Windows Phone 8 SDK brings along many new features that could benefit your next Windows Phone app. Come take a look at several of these new features including: Tiles and Notifications, Changing Lock Screen, Speech Recognition and Multi-Resolution apps. We will also discover the additional tooling support and templates covered with this release.
This is definitely a session to get you up to speed quickly with this new and exciting platform.
MVVM in Windows 8
Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt / .pptx) | Demos
With Metro-style apps, Microsoft is pushing MVVM with a built-in solution in some of the templates. But what if you’re now 100% clear on the concepts of MVVM? Fear no longer! In this session, we’ll explore the MVVM pattern along with its benefits (and let’s be honest, disadvantages as well) from the Windows 8 perspective. Next to the core principles, we’ll dive deep in how we can apply the pattern for Windows 8 app by building an end-to-end app based on the pattern. We’ll be using the excellent MVVM Light toolkit for our discussion.
Windows 8 Metro apps and the outside world: connecting with services and integrating the cloud
Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt/.pptx) | Demos
Windows 8 Metro style apps will give users a great experience. Apps promise the user to be alive and connected. Being connected means interfacing with services and the cloud. But what options do we have to make the connection to the outside world?
In this session, we'll explore how WinRT apps can connect with services (WCF, REST...) and the cloud to offer a great experience. We'll also see how internals like roaming data can be used in your apps.
Advanced Windows 8 Metro - Part 2
Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt / .pptx) | Demos
Windows 8 is just around the corner! As developers, we need to be ready to build Metro style applications. In the last couple of months, we got a lot of information already, although most of it covered the basics. It’s time to move beyond that. Therefore, we are doing a two part Advanced Windows 8 Metro webinar.
This webinar picks up where the intro talks (see the recordings of earlier webinars on Windows 8) stopped, so expect coverage of topics you may have seen some content about or even none at all!
In the first part of this webinar (watch the recording of part 1 here), Gill Cleeren discussed periodic tiles and push notifications, a lot on data and services (including data binding, WCF, REST, Live SDK, oData…), and much more!
In Part 2, Gill talks about localization, async, building WinRT reusable components and more.
The level for this 2-part webinar session is 300.
Advanced Windows 8 Metro - Part 1
Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt / .pptx) | Demos
Windows 8 is just around the corner! As developers, we need to be ready to build Metro style applications. In the last couple of months, we got a lot of information already, although most of it covered the basics. It’s time to move beyond that. Therefore, we are doing a two part Advanced Windows 8 Metro webinar.
This webinar picks up where the intro talks (see the recordings of earlier webinars on Windows 8) stopped, so expect coverage of topics you may have seen some content about or even none at all!
In the first part of this webinar, Gill Cleeren discussed periodic tiles and push notifications, a lot on data and services (including data binding, WCF, REST, Live SDK, oData…), and much more!
The level for this 2-part webinar session is 300.
10 Things Silverlight Developers Should Know About Windows 8
Speaker: Michael Crump | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt / .pptx) | Demos | Q&A
In this session, Silverlight MVP Michael Crump will look at how Silverlight developers skills translate over to WinRT. He will dive straight into 10 things that he has discovered while working with WinRT. You will quickly find out just how much you will need to learn to work with this new platform.
Prism and WCF RIA Services: Two Great Toolkits that Work Great Together
Speaker: Brian Noyes | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt / .pptx) | Demos | Q&A
In this webinar Silverlight MVP Brian Noyes will give a quick overview of what Prism is and what its feature set includes. He'll do a very quick review of what WCF RIA Services does,and will focus on how you can build a Silverlight Prism application and factor your functionality into modules while still making the RIA Services functionality available in multiple modules. Attendees will find out how to leverage the Repository pattern to pull all the RIA Services client side code into one place, expose the data from a Repository service that you can then pull into any scope in the application that wants to consume it.
Live Tiles and Notifications in Windows 8
Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides | Demos
Live tiles were introduced with Windows Phone 7 and are one of the most unique user experience elements of the platform. Their success is probably why Microsoft introduced them in Windows 8 Metro apps as well. The concept is the same as in Windows Phone 7, the options are however much more extended. Notifications and push notifications also found their way from Windows Phone into the Metro platform.
In this new SilverlightShow webinar, Gill Cleeren will explore these exciting features together with you to introduce you further into the world of Windows 8.
Contracts and Charms in Windows 8
Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides
In Windows 8 Metro, applications don’t communicate directly with each other. The OS has built-in contracts available out-of-the-box which make it possible that applications interact with each other without knowing each other. This way, one application can expose its own data for others to read. Another contract makes it possible to expose a common search functionality from within an application.
This new way of using these contracts is something that Metro application developers need to learn in order to build a killer application on Windows 8. In this webinar, Gill Cleeren will explain you the available contracts and how to use them to their limits in your application.
Advanced MVVM for Windows Phone Developers
Speaker: Peter Kuhn | Webinar page | Slides | Demos
A ton of articles on MVVM have been published over the last years, and various frameworks exist to aid developers. But even when you're familiar with MVVM on other platforms like WPF and Silverlight, Windows Phone and its inherent mechanisms and programming paradigms can cause some surprise when you start working with the platform.
In this webinar we take a closer look at some of the issues that arise on Windows Phone when you're using MVVM, and how to elegantly solve them. We also talk about how the limitations of a mobile platform can cause additional problems for the MVVM pattern that are not relevant on other platforms, and how to deal with these situations. To watch this webinar, you should have basic knowledge on MVVM already, as the pattern itself is not explicitly introduced in detail again.
10 Best Practices for Windows Phone Developers
Speaker: Samidip Basu | Webinar page | Slides
Windows Phone is starting to gain traction, with its innovative user experience and focus on content/people over chrome. As consumer base & Marketplace grows, we developers need to keep the momentum going in churning out more Apps/updates. Also, important is to build up the vendor outlook for individual developers & be answerable to producing quality Apps for our user base.
In this webinar, we draw from our Windows Phone developer experiences and discuss some best practices & tips/tricks of our trade. What are some of the best Frameworks & Toolkits in your arsenal that make Windows Phone development so much fun! Short & simple – 10 Best Practices in an hour, with some easy-to-follow live coding demos/examples & plenty of resources.
Windows Phone Raw Camera Access
Speaker: Peter Kuhn | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt / .pptx) | Demos
Starting with the "Mango" release, developers have programmatic raw access to the cameras on Windows Phone devices. This enables a whole set of new possibilities for application authors, for example to capture video and stills, to perform real-time manipulation of the camera feed, and to create augmented reality scenarios.
In this webinar, we will learn how to access and integrate the camera feed in our applications, work with some of the related features like choosing between the main and front-facing cameras, adjusting focus and using the flash, and see how to access and manipulate raw image data. We will also learn about limitations and potential problems you will run into when you work with raw camera access.
Windows Phone 7.5 Background Workers
Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt / .pptx) | Demos
With the release of Windows Phone 7 Mango, a lot of extra features were added to the platform. One of the most anticipated ones is the possibility to create code that runs in the background. This way, applications can perform tasks such as polling a service, updating a live tile and much more. It's also possible to create audio agents that allow you to build media players that can play audio without the app on the foreground.
In this webinar, we'll do a deep dive on all options we get to do background processing in WP7 Mango.
Metro and WinRT for the Silverlight/WPF Developer: Part 2
| Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt / .pptx) | Demos
With this webinar we continue the extensive coverage of the topic: Metro and WinRT for the Silverlight/WPF Developer (also watch the recording of part 1 of this webinar).
In Part 2, Gill talked about styling and templating, data in your Windows 8 apps (getting data, data binding),the application lifecycle, tiles and more, and IO’ing in Metro apps.
Level 250-300
Metro and WinRT for the Silverlight/WPF Developer: Part 1
Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt / .pptx) | Demos | Q&A doc
Are you currently building XAML-based applications using Silverlight or WPF? And are you afraid that all you’ve learned in the past is now suddenly obsolete? Then you should really attend this webinar and be amazed!
We’ll see how you can transfer your knowledge to the new Metro-way of building applications. We’ll do this by looking at a
working application that contains most of the features you’ve come to love in Silverlight.
You’ll learn that things like data binding, styling, controls and much more can be leveraged to build applications in Windows 8. After this webinar, you will see that all of a sudden, you are already an experienced Metro app developer! A big smile is guaranteed after this talk!
Leveraging Windows Azure for the Windows Phone Developer
Speaker: Samidip Basu | Webinar page | Slides | Demos
Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute, storage, networking and content delivery capabilities to host, scale and manage Web applications on the Internet. The Windows Azure platform can be used both by applications running in the cloud and by applications running on local systems.
Windows Phone 7 is the latest smartphone OS from Microsoft. Built from the ground-up, Windows Phone 7 brings together what you care about most, and brings it to you in an innovative and simple Metro UI interface. You and your content are at the center of it all through the Start screen experience with Live Tiles and integrated Hubs which provide rich & continuous user experience.
In this webinar, we took a close look at how Azure & Windows Phones could play together; and in general, why cloud support is needed for most well-designed mobile solutions. We discussed techniques on how a Windows Phone developer might consider leveraging Windows Azure for cloud infrastructure needs. Attendees were able to gain solid understanding & real-world examples on how to use Windows Azure to augment Mobile solutions, specially on Windows Phone.
Unit Testing for Windows Phone
Speaker: Peter Kuhn | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt / .pptx) | Demos
To many, unit testing is a mystery for normal desktop applications already. The concept is not hard to understand and seems great, but writing unit tests for the correct code, and ones that test correctly, requires a lot of experience. Now, unit testing on the phone? Is that really necessary?
In this webinar the webinar presenter Peter Kuhn, Microsoft Community Contributor for 2011 and trainer, talked about the possible scenarios of unit testing for Windows Phone. We will saw how to set up your development environment for this, because even when you are willing to and interested in writing unit tests for your mobile application, this is not exactly straight forward, and comes with strings attached and certain limitations.
Introduction to XAML Development on Windows 8
Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt/.pptx) | Demos
At BUILD 2011, Microsoft announced Windows 8. This upcoming version of Windows is probably the biggest change the OS ever went through. Windows 8 focuses on web, apps, touch and the tablet form factor. For developers, things will change as well. They need to be ready to build applications, called Metro applications, tailored for Windows 8 or adapt their existing applications for the new OS. Together with Windows 8, Microsoft announced Windows Runtime (WinRT), a new way of working with Windows.
As you can see, that's a lot of new stuff to get your head around! To help you, Gill Cleeren, Microsoft Regional Director and Silverlight MVP will explain you the new strategy that Microsoft is taking. In this webinar, we'll see what WinRT really is, how we can use it to build Metro applications with and how we can leverage C# and Silverlight knowledge to build Metro applications. We'll take a look at a fully working application as well to give you a clear picture of all the knowledge you'll gather during this hour. By joining this webcast, the developer story for Windows 8 will have less secrets for you!
Networking with Sockets in Windows Phone
Speaker: Peter Kuhn | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt/.pptx) | Demos (see note below)
Windows Phone comes with several built-in options to do networking, for example to access web services or conveniently make http requests. But with the recent "Mango" update, several new options have been added that enable additional scenarios like multiplayer gaming or instant messaging – all of which were hardly possible before, or only with several limitations in place. In this webinar we will take a look at these features and learn how you can use them to enable performant, custom networking in your application.
Note: The full source code to the SNTP client demoed in the webinar is now available as part of the open source project "Phone Net Tools" on CodePlex: http://phonenettools.codeplex.com/. In particular, the parts that resemble what has been shown live are the "Sample.Ntp" project and the implementation of the SNTP client which is located in "PhoneNetTools/Ntp/SntpClient.cs".
WCF RIA POCO Domain Services
Speaker: Brian Noyes | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt/.pptx) | Demos | QandA document
WCF RIA Services makes it simple to query and update data from your Silverlight application, as well as invoke other functionality on the server side. But most examples show using it with the built-in support for directly querying Entity Framework domain models where the entity classes are code generated for you. In this webinar, Brian will explain how you can mix WCF RIA Services with the new Code First features of Entity Framework 4, or just get your data from somewhere else such as flat files, but still benefit from the power of RIA Services for the client side.
Deep-DIVE in Silverlight FIVE
Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt/.pptx) | Demos
With Silverlight 4 out for over a year now, some amazing applications have been built with it. It’s time to take a look at the next version, which is due late 2011. In this session, Silverlight MVP Gill Cleeren will take you on a tour of the advanced new features available in the platform. Be prepared to see what you’ll be using in 2012 for all your Silverlight needs!
XNA for Windows Phone 7
Speaker: Peter Kuhn | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt/.pptx)
In this webinar, Peter Kuhn presented some the key features of game programming for Windows Phone 7, explained how it is different from creating normal applications and what your options are. You can see how the upcoming Mango update simplifies a lot of the tasks that were rather tedious in the RTM release, and what new opportunities that creates.
Blend for Silverlight Developers
Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt / .pptx) | Demos
Blend a designer's tool? You're partly right, partly wrong. Yes, the designer on your team should use Blend, but so should you when building Silverlight applications. Did you know Blend has rich data binding capabilities? And do you know how to create custom controls using Blend? All this and more was explained in this session aimed at developers!
Secure & Personalize Your Silverlight App with WCF RIA Services
Speaker: Brian Noyes | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt / .pptx) | Demos
In this webinar Brian Noyes explains how to secure both the server and client sides of your application. He demonstrates how your Silverlight application can join a secure session of a hosting web site or set up its own security context by logging in the user from the app. And much more...
Crash Course in Windows Azure with Windows Phone 7
Speaker: Evan Hutnick | Webinar page
In this webinar, Telerik Developer Evangelist Evan Hutnick brought you on a quick tour through the Windows Azure platform and how you can start utilizing it when building your Windows Phone 7 applications. This involved a high-level overview of the Azure platform and why Azure makes sense for the Windows Phone platform. Then he did a quick walk through creating a sample SQL Azure database, a service you can call to the database with, and how to incorporate that data within your Windows Phone applications utilizing the Telerik RadControls for Windows Phone 7.
Getting started with the Silverlight 5 Beta
Speaker: Michael Crump | Webinar page | Slides (.ppt / .pptx) | Demos
This webinar made a quick intro to all new features in Silverlight 5 - XAML Debugging, OOB - Multiple Windows Support, SoundEffect Class for Low-Latency and more.
Switch or no switch: Can I build my business apps in LightSwitch?
Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides | Demos
In this webinar Gill Cleeren showed how to build professional LOB applications quickly using LightSwitch. He covered why you should look at LightSwitch, binding to data, and building out the user interface.
Switching on the Cloud for Silverlight
Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides | Demos
If you combine the capabilities of Windows Azure with the rich UX of Silverlight, you are capable of building great... what we are saying: exceptional web applications. In this webinar, Gill Cleeren looked at building an app in Silverlight running from Azure and discussed the topics of interest that you may encounter when hosting services in the cloud to be consumed from Silverlight, considerations for Windows Azure Storage if used from Silverlight etc.
WCF RIA Services Validation
Speaker: Brian Noyes | Webinar page | Slides | Demos
In this session Brian dived in depth into the validation features of WCF RIA Services. You will see how to leverage WCF RIA Services validation mechanisms when editing data with validation that is part of the entities, server side validation when updates occur, and asynchronous validation on the server from the client. And more...
Building LOB Applications with Silverlight and WCF Data Services
Speaker: Emil Stoychev | Webinar page | Slides | Demos
In this live session Silverlight MVP Emil Stoychev went through the basics of the OData protocol, dived into WCF DataServices client for Silverlight and focused on key scenarios in LOB applications like lazy loading, dynamic queries, filtering/sorting/grouping/paging on the client and on the server, change tracking.
Using RadControls to Build Windows Phone 7 Applications
Speaker: Evan Hutnick | Webinar page | Slides | Demos (login required)
In this webinar, Telerik Windows Phone Evangelist Evan Hutnick explained how you can start utilizing the Telerik RadControls for Windows Phone 7 in your mobile Silverlight applications today. See how the RadAnimation framework can help bring life to your navigation experience by both animating individual items as well as providing rich, native OS-like transitions with the RadPhoneApplicationFrame. Also see how rich controls like the RadDataBoundListBox, RadJumpList, and RadGauge, all new with the WP7 Beta version, can add value, performance, and phone-friendly style and interaction to your applications.
Querying and Updating Data From Silverlight Clients with WCF RIA Services
F Speaker: Brian Noyes | Webinar page | Slides | Demos
In this session Brian gave a quick introduction to WCF RIA Services – what it does and when to use it. You will get a solid understanding of how to query complex data from your Silverlight clients using WCF RIA Services, as well as how to perform updates to that data on the back end. And much more...
Building a Silverlight 4 Application End-to-end
Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides | Demos
Once you start building real-world Silverlight applications, things may start to get a bit more complicated than in the demos. How do you start a complete application? Do you just start coding or do you first think about what you are going to build and how you are going to build it? Should you think about architecture? In this webinar, Gill Cleeren looks at some common questions developers have when building real world Silverlight applications.
10 things you didn't know about Silverlight 4
Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides | Demos
Silverlight has since its birth about 3 years ago grown substantially. It's now a enterprise-ready platform. Just like the full .NET framework, there's a lot to be discovered. In this session, Gill Cleeren made this daunting task a bit easier, by showing you 10 things you didn't know in Silverlight!
Let's MEF: overview of the Managed Extensibility Framework in Silverlight 4
Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides & demos
MEF (aka Managed Extensibility Framework) allows building dynamic applications. An implementation of MEF is available for Silverlight developers. MEF allows us to build loosely coupled applications that are composed at runtime. Also, MEF is a great way to add extra functionality to an application on the fly by downloading components as they are needed. In this webinar, Gill Cleeren looked at how MEF works and how you can put it to your use.
Sketchflow in Real Scenarios
| Speaker: Braulio Diez | Webinar page | Slides & demos
In this webinar Braulio Diez (read SilverlightShow interview with Braulio) went beyond the basics of Sketchflow, covered in the two parts of his SilverlightShow articles (part 1, part 2), and discussed scenarios, questions and advanced issues submitted by SilverlightShow members.
Running Silverlight Outside the Browser and with Elevated Trust
Speaker: Chris Anderson | Webinar page
In this webinar, Chris Anderson talked about Silverlight OOB vs WPF XBAP, explained how to take your Silverlight application outside the browser (to run in sandboxed mode) and discussed some new features available to sandboxed OOB applications. He also took a look at enabling elevated trust for OOB applications, some new features available to OOB applications with elevated trust and signing your Silverlight OOB application.
Silverlight's Power Features: Data Binding in Action
Speaker: Gill Cleeren | Webinar page | Slides & demos
Building enterprise applications with Silverlight almost begs for rich data binding features. While Silverlight 2 already had an extended set of features available to enable data binding, Silverlight 3 and 4 add on these and extend the databinding platform. In this webinar, Gill Cleeren started with a complete overview of the data binding features Silverlight 4 has to offer. Then he took a look at how data binding is the enabler for applying the MVVM (ViewModel) pattern and commanding as well. Finally, he opened Blend and demonstrated its support for data binding, including the use of design-time data.
Silverlight Behaviors for Designers
Speaker: Zhivko Dimitrov
In this live webinar sesion the UX designer and consultant Zhivko Dimitrov explains how to add interactivity with Silverlight behaviors, and bring your designs to life without writing a single line of code.
Unit Testing for Windows Phone
Leveraging Windows Azure for the Windows Phone Developer
Leveraging Windows Azure for the Windows Phone Developer