I attended the November Unplugged WPF & VS2008 developer session on Tuesday.
JD’s talk was well balanced, and covered the basics of what WPF is, how the UI and UX work. He avoided only showing the shiny demo screens and dug deeper into Command and RoutedEvents and how the UI and UX are decoupled.
WPF is so big, and a bit of a mind shift from VB6 drag and drop that I’m not sure there is much more that can be demoed to a general audience.
Kirk’s Visual Studio 2008 talk was fantastic. Lots of keyboard short-cuts for tasks I’m currently doing via the mouse, so I’m very pleased to learn the key combo’s.
I’m torn between Crtl + . and F8 being my absolute take-away gems, both will be used heavily. Nice to see a talk about using the tools better.
There were some good give-away’s, an office 2007 license, a wireless mouse and a 22” wide screen panel. Of which I didn’t win any.
This has made me more keen to port CotAB to Silverlight, just for the experience of it.
Before the event I attended a MS feedback discussion group. So funny to see who of the .Net CHCH scene turned-up. It was good to talk about issues, impressions, and opinions. I hope Microsoft guys got the value they were hoping to get.