This week, I’m lined up to deliver a couple of MSDN webcasts: Introduction to Silverlight and Introduction to ASP.NET AJAX. Both of these sessions are billed as 100-level which could prove to be quite challenging. I’m used to the 300-400 level discussions where we can get down and dirty with the code. 100-level discussions are more overview than anything. Introduce the technology, provide the high-level points and point your attendees to the resources they need to continue on their quest for knowledge.

The Silverlight webcast will prove even *more* challenging as the glitz & glamour of Silverlight won’t show through as ideally as one would hope on a webcast stream. What I’ll most likely do is have the attendees follow along on some publicly available sites while I point out some features.

Join me… will you?

Introduction to Silverlight
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008, 12:00PM CST/10:00AM PST

Introduction to ASP.NET AJAX
Friday, April 11th, 2008, 11:00AM CST/9:00AM PST

Not only have we seen a number of Visual Studio launch events taking place across the region of late (and more to come!), but we have a number of community-led events popping up like crab grass in the summertime.

This weekend (April 5th) is the 6th annual (or is it 7th now? I can’t keep ‘em straight anymore) Deeper in .NET 2008 event in the land of Arthur Fonzarelli and the Happy Days gang. Scott and the Wisconsin .NET Users Group always do a great job in putting on a world-class event, and this year is no different. For DiDN 2008, they pulled out all the jobs by getting a couple of folks from the mothership in Redmond, Scott Wisniewski (Visual Basic team) and Charlie Calvert (C# team). DiDN 2008 also welcomes Jason Beres to walk us through the ins/outs of Silverlight 2, along with the always entertaining Mark Miller and Richard Campbell of .NET Rocks and Mondays fame.

Larry and I will be there trying to squeeze in as many Thirsty Developer interviews as we can muster up. If you’d like to join in the fun, track us down and we’ll roll the mics.

Also coming up on the horizon on April 26th is the first Indianapolis Code Camp. They have over 24 sessions on the schedule ranging from topics on Agile development practices, WCF, WPF, Team System, ASP.NET practices, Test Driven Development (TDD), ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight. That’s a full day with a lot of great sessions. And these sessions aren’t being delivered by any marketing drones. This is a Code Camp afterall. These are your peers. Developer discussions by Developers for Developers. Nix the slideware and show me the code!