One of the problems with living in the South West of England is that it is no where near the North East of England and Scotland. I’ve been wanting to speak at user groups in this area for some time but it is fairly impractical to travel this distance for one meeting. So the solution is to do a tour: 4 User Groups In 4 Days (hopefully the name says it all). I’m really excited about this; I get to go to 4 user groups that I’ve wanted to go to for some time and see 4 communities and spend time talking to them and seeing how they run their communities. And I get to catch up with user group leaders Andy Westgarth, Gary Short, Colin Mackay, John Thompson, Craig Murphy and Phil Winstanley. Like I say I’m looking forward to it. Here’s the schedule:-

1. Monday 1st October - VBUG (Newcastle) - Subjects: Astoria and Visual Studio 2005 IDE Tips And Tricks
2. Tuesday 2nd October - North East Of Scotland User Group (Dundee) - Subject: Visual Studio 2005 IDE Tips And Tricks
3. Wednesday 3rd October - Scottish Developers (Glasgow) - Subjects: Astoria and Using ClickOnce and XBAPs To Deploy Windows Forms and WPF Applications
4. Thursday 4th October - VBUG (Manchester) - Subject: Astoria

Here are the abstracts:-

• Microsoft Codename "Astoria"
  The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies has brought new opportunities and caused us to solve old problems in new ways. AJAX and SilverLight applications need read/write access to data and business objects without performing full page refreshes and without dumbing down the data so much we are just left with primitives. Microsoft’s answer to this problem is Microsoft Codename "Astoria". In short "Astoria" is a data access layer for client-size technologies such as AJAX and SilverLight. This session shows how it works, how you can write "Astoria" data servers and how you can customize "Astoria" to your applications requirements.
• Visual Studio 2005 IDE Tips and Tricks
  Visual Studio is a treasure trove of functionality and productivity. The problem is that many developers don’t know what’s there. In this session we will cover some simple and not so simple tips and tricks and improve your productivity and enjoyment of Visual Studio 2005.
• Using ClickOnce and XBAPs To Deploy Windows Forms and WPF Applications
  ClickOnce provides the ease of web form deployment for Windows Forms applications. The same technology is used in XAML Browser Applications (XBAPs) which are Windows Presentation Foundation applications that are hosted in a browser. This session introduces the ClickOnce technology and demonstrates its use in many scenarios including: zero touch deployment, one touch deployment, reversion to previous versions, uninstallation. We also cover deploying WPF applications through the browser (known as XBAPs) and illustrate the similarities and differences between XBAPs, MSI-deployed WPF applications and Windows Forms applications deployed using ClickOnce. This session represents an opportunity to understand how to get the ease of web deployment together with richness of Windows Forms or WPF.

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