Expression Blend for Developers
Published May 9, 2011 | 
On April 28th I was given the opportunity to speak at the Microsoft DevDays in The Hague in the Netherlands. My session about Expression Blend for Developers was chosen by the community to fill one of the Wildcard slots.
The idea for this session came when I saw a coworker tinker with XAML in visual studio to create an animation when he had Expression Blend available through his MSDN subscription. It turned out that a lot of Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone 7 developers didn’t know they could use Expression Blend. “Expression Blend is for designers”, they thought.
The first part of the session I explained Sample Data. I demonstrated how to create it and how to use it to create bindings. I demonstrated how to use the Visual State manager and set them by using behaviors. In the last demo I showed a couple of my favorite features of Expression Blend (including the gradient picker).
The recording of my session is available online and for download at Channel9. Although the slides are in English, the session itself is spoken in Dutch.
The slides contain all content shown in the demos. You can download them here.
Last but not least I would like to thank everyone for coming to my session. I hope I was able to send you home with little more knowledge that you had when you came in and inspired you to start using Expression Blend in your job.
Posted in Expression Blend, Presentation, Slides | 
DevDays, Expression Blend, Slides | 
Leave a commentUnit testing MVVM in Silverlight – SDN Event–Code and Slides
Published December 14, 2010 | Yesterday I gave a talk at the SDN Event in Zeist about Unit testing MVVM in Silverlight. I talked briefly about how MVVM works in Silverlight and dove deeper into the Unit Testing Framework which is available in the Silverlight Toolkit. After going through the various attributes used in the framework I gave a demonstration on how to use StatLight, a command line tool for running tests.
I would like to thank anyone who attended my session for coming and SDN for organizing and hosting this great and informative day.
Posted in Presentation, Silverlight, Slides | Code, MVVM, Silverlight, Slides, UnitTesting | 1 CommentHTML5 – An Introduction – Code and Slides
Published November 23, 2010 | Today I gave a talk about HTML5 at the UNIT4 DevDay. Thanks to UNIT4 for giving me this opportunity and thanks to everyone who attended my session!
Although HTML5 far from completed, it is a lot of fun to work with. Not all tags used in HTML5 are supported by the browsers. You can try the demos on different browsers to see if they work.
For those at UNIT4 who missed this presentation, I will repeat it at UNIT4 Internet Solutions and at UNIT4 Oost Nederland. So maybe I’ll see you there. The dates this will happen follow as soon as they are known.
If you have any questions, ideas, suggestions or a shout-out, just let me know by writing a comment below this post, sending me an email or contacting my though twitter @Sorskoot.
Sildes and Code – Devnology Community day
Published November 7, 2010 | Yesterday I gave a talk at the Devnology Community Day about Unit testing Mvvm in Silverlight. Although only a handful of people came to my session, we had some nice discussions about writing tests using various frameworks.
I would like to thank Devnology and VXCompany for organizing and hosting this great and informative day.
One last note. Tuesday, November 9th Sixin is organizing a user group meeting about Design and Development Experiences in Silverlight at Macaw in Schiphol-Rijk in the Netherlands. There are some places available.
Code & Slides – SDE – What’s new in Silverlight 4
Published May 21, 2010 | Last Tuesday the Software Developers Network – SDN organized another SDE. I’ve had the opportunity to present a session about Silverlight 4. I talked about lots of new features in Silverlight 4 and Expression Blend 4, focused on the Out-Of-Browser features.
![DSC_0083[1]](http://geekswithblogs.net/images/geekswithblogs_net/tkokke/WindowsLiveWriter/CodeSlidesSDEWhatsnewinSilverlight4_E5D4/DSC_0083%5B1%5D_thumb.jpg "DSC_0083[1]")
The slides of my presentation can be downloaded here.
In my presentation I demonstrated a couple of features from my new pet project “SilverAmp”. This project is based on the legendary WinAmp, but made entirely in Silverlight. I use it to try out many new Silverlight 4 features. It’s not finished yet, but useful already. It runs outside the browser with elevated trust. It reads your local MyMusic folder and uses the TagLib library to read the ID3 tags of the mp3s it finds. SilverAmp is using MEF for extensibility. It uses a custom Window Chrome, designed in Expression Design. And it shows a notification window when a new song starts to play.
In the future it is going to get song information from Last.FM, will be able to show YouTube videos inside itself and it will tweet about what you are playing. The project will be fully documented to function as a reference implementation for the new Silverlight 4 features.
You can download the source on http://SilverAmp.codeplex.com
Below are two screenshot of SilverAmp.
If you have any questions, comments, issues or feature requests let me know.
Code and Slides – Dutch Code Camp 2009
Published November 22, 2009 | Code Camp
Thanks!
Thanks everyone for coming to my session about Modular Silverlight applications with Prism at the third Dutch Code Camp last Saturday! I hope you learned something useful from it.
Special thanks to SDN, Stichting dotNed en VBcentral for organizing this event.
Code & Slides
The slides can be downloaded here.
But more important, the source for the demo can be found over here.
Links
Here are a few links mentioned in the presentation:
A few other places with great information about Prism are:
Questions
If you have any questions about the presentation, the code or anything else, feel free to send me an email, tweet or approach me at a future event.
Posted in Presentation, Silverlight | CodeCamp, Presentation, Prism, Silverlight, Slides | Leave a comment
