Last week I held a presentation about WPF for Microsoft Student Community at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology).

As I’ve mention before in my blog; Microsoft Student Community is an organization for students with interest in Microsoft related technologies and especially .NET. The organization is driven students on voluntarily basis. 44 people had registered for the event and I think and 30 of them came. The content of the event was WPF and LINQ which my friend Jonas Follesø held. If you continue to read you will find Q&As from the session. And If you fingers are itching to touch XAML and WPF you can download the source code I posted in the "NNUG WPF presentation" post.

In my presentation I focused on XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) and some basic WPF; standard controls, triggers, data binding style and templates. During my speech I got a lot of questions. The students particularly seemed to care about XAML. No doubt they saw the trade off by developing the user interface in a markup language.

Someone also asked about the deployments scenarios. Here is the full overview of the scenarios. Scenario 1; compile a WPF application as a standard EXE. Then the application will be run as a process on the OS with security context from the user that started the application.

Scenario 2; compile a WPF application as XBAP (eXtensible Binary Application Protocol). These applications can run inside a web browser but they will run in sandbox mode. This means that you will get limited access to different APIs. For instance you will not get access to the hard drive. Both of these scenarios require .NET 3.0/3.5 installed.

Scenario 3; use Silverlight. Silverlight is a browser plugin and it’s almost cross platform. It works on IE, Safari (yes on Mac OS X) and Firefox. The Open Source community (Mono project) is also working with porting this technology to the Linux platform. You can read more about it on the Mono-Project site. What I almost forgot to mention is that Silverlight contains a subset of the WPF API. It's like .NET microframework for .NET.

If you attended the session and have any question please post me a comment or send me an e-mail.

Microsoft Norway has finally announced the dates for the next MSDN Live event. The tour starts in Stavanger 31.Januar. Then it’s Bergen, Trondheim and last but not least Oslo.

I’m invited by Microsoft as a speaker on this tour. This time I’m going to give two sessions. The first is on WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and seconds is on ASP.NET MVC. I’m really looking forward to this! I’ve worked with WPF for the last couple of months and it has been lots of fun. It’s a rock solid technology and it’s a must have utility for your “utility belt” – Especially if you are a user interface developer. I describe it as a utility because it can really gain your productivity as a developer and satisfy your customers because you can visualize their business data in such was they have never imagined.

ASP.NET MVC is really promising, as everything Scott Guthrie is involved with at Microsoft. It really changes the way we implement Web Applications today. Go and read more about it on Scott Guthrie’s and Scott Hanselman’s blog.

Anders Knudsen from BEKK that delivered a smashing session on AJAX back in February 2007 is also invited. This time he is going to talk about ADO.NET Entity Framework and ASP.NET Futures.

Last but not least the famous Jon Jahren going to give a session on SQL Server. I’m not sure but I think it’s SQL Server 2008 “Katmai” and developer tools for SQL Server he is going to focus on.

Hope to see you there. This is going to be lots and lots of fun!

You can get more information about this on Rune Grothaug's blog.