This month we're heading back to Shoreditch and will be hearing from Sam Bourton who will be providing an introduction to Expression Blend for Developers and also from Gergely Orosz who will be talking about the performance challenges faced in real-world WP7 applications.

Expression Blend for Developers (with Sam Bourton)

Not many Silverlight developers seem to be using Expression Blend yet; but those that are, couldn't do without it...
In this presentation we will be looking at how to use Blend in everyday design and development tasks to rapidly create visually engaging User Interfaces and controls, and dramatically increase productivity in building Silverlight front-ends. 
We will cover real-world practical tasks such as: How to use the Blend environment, access key functionality, and use the different types of controls; Create and manage Resources and resource dictionaries within Blend; Create, edit, and apply Styles and Control Templates to different controls; Bind controls to sample and runtime ViewModel data and Commands; Make your applications stand out with Animations, Visual States, Effects, Fluid Layouts, and Behaviors; and some random tips and techniques I've learnt along the way.

About Sam:

Sam Bourton has over 12 years software development experience and has been using WPF, Silverlight, and Expression Blend since the first beta's, designing and developing applications for a variety of clients and industries throughout the world.
He co-authored the “WPF Recipes – A Problem-Solution Approach” book for Apress (published September '08), and teaches training courses, workshops, and tech presentations on Expression Blend, WPF, and Silverlight, and on Architecting WPF/Silverlight/Surface applications using the Model-View-ViewModel design pattern.
He works as Lead Engineer at QuantumBlack, a boutique strategy, design, and technology consultancy.

Performance challenges faced in real-world WP7 applications (with Gergely Orosz)

The talk will be focusing on performance challenges I've come across when working on real-world WP7 applications using Silverlight. These challenges include optimizing startup time of applications, using ListBox with a large number of items, serialization / deserialization, working with images, accessing the network and realtime drawing on the screen.

About Gergely:

Gergely is a .NET developer at Visiblox, who produce data visualization components for Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone. He has been working with Silverlight the past two years on a day to day basis and developed for WP7 since day one. He has been involved in developing of Cocktail Flow, one of the top rated applications on the Marketplace and Visiblox Charts, a very performant WP7 / Silverlight / WPF  charting library.

As ever we'll also provide the opportunity for people to share details of apps they've developed and any lessons learned in the process. If you have something you wish to show or talk about please get in touch. 
 

There will be people from Microsoft in attendance so you'll also have the chance to ask some of those burning questions you have after the Nokia announcement and details which came out of Mobile World Congress. - We can't promise any special announcements or extra details will be shared though.

There will also be an opportunity for socialising, later into the evening, as we'll keep the bar open once the presentaions and demos are finished.

See you there.