This roadshow will travel across 17-cities in the Central Region with a session focused on the IT Professional in the morning and digging into the Development side of the house in the afternoon.

You can find all the details by visiting my Event Calendar.

What??? You didn’t know I had an event calendar? Well, I do. The Event Calendar gives me the ability to keep you up to date on the developer events taking place without getting lost in the blogroll.

I just received word today that attendees of the Chicago stop of the MSDN Developers Conference (MDC) will be some of the first people to get their hands on Windows 7 Beta 1 DVDs! All MDC attendees will receive a copy of Windows 7 Beta 1, but Chicago looks to be the first. For the MDC events taking place before Jan. 13th, you will receive your DVD in the mail after Jan. 13th. Bob Familiar has more details on this.

What is the MSDN Developers Conference you might ask? Well, apparently you don’t read my blog as I’ve discussed this already. Don’t worry, I’ll let it pass *THIS TIME*.

Anyhow… MSDN DevCon is a “Best of PDC” show for developers that the Microsoft Evangelist team is bringing to 11 cities across the country.

The Chicago MDC will be taking place on January 13th, 2009 at the Chicago Hyatt Regency. Ron Jacobs will be kicking things off with the morning keynote followed by a number of sessions covering Microsoft’s Cloud Computing initatives, the latest in Client and Presentation development, as well as what’s new in Tooling, Languages and Framework. We’ll also be running a “Community Courtyard” series of sessions throughout the day as well.

Register now for the Chicago MSDN Developers Conference, or check for other MDC’s events happening in your area.

There is a $99 charge but that is peanuts compared to what PDC registration cost. :)

There’s also a group starting up in Indianapolis as a Special Interest Group of the Indianapolis .NET Developers Association (IndyNDA). Their plan is to meet every 4th Wednesday of the month. Here are the details of their kickoff meeting on May 23rd…

When:
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 @ 6:00PM

Where:
Microsoft Corporation
Parkwood Business Park, Building Four
500 E. 96th St., Suite 460
Indianapolis, IN 46240

Click here to register

As I was able to relay to some of you (Sorry, Indy), the Expression Web product discs are currently on the assembly line and should be shipping out around May 28th. If you attended the OnRamp240 session and filled out an evaluation, you should be receiveing your copy in the mail shortly thereafter.

There are quite a few resources I pointed out during the session and I promised all of you that I would post them here.

First and foremost, no one should miss ScottGu’s keynote from the MIX’07 conference. Scott lays out the full Silverlight story and invites a number of customer’s up on stage to show what they’ve been able to do with the technology in a short amount of time. Simply one of the best keynotes I’ve ever seen and not to be missed!

For the developers, Ihighlyrecommend viewing Omar Khan’s MIX’07 session on Using Visual Studio Codename “Orcas” to Design and Develop Rich AJAX Enabled Web Sites. The Javascript Intellisense feature and debugging support is enough for any Javascript developer to take notice.

Unfortunately we had a short amount of time to cover a lot of material. We weren’t able to go into ASP.NET AJAX as I would’ve like and some of you might have hoped. No worries, though. Head on over to the ASP.NET AJAX Community Site and check out Joe Stagner’s “How-To” video collection on ASP.NET AJAX.

For those of you looking to make the plunge into Silverlight. Everything you need can be found on the Getting Started page of the Silverlight community website. The Sprawl game, that seems to kick my butt everytime, can be found in the Silverlight 1.0 Gallery, whereas the Chess and Silverlight Airlines samples can be found in the Silverlight 1.1 Gallery.

Each month DevCares brings you the insight into the latest technologies coming out of Redmond. Through the generous support of our partners (Crowe Chizek, Information Management Group, Clarity Consulting and Inacom), we have now expanded to 6 cities and 3 states in the Midwest district.

This month we take a look at the upcoming release of Visual Studio Codename “Orcas”:

Visual Studio code name “Orcas” delivers on Microsoft’s vision for application development by enabling developers to rapidly create connected applications that deliver the highest quality rich user experiences. This next version of Visual Studio enables developers to rapidly create more secure, manageable, and more reliable applications that take advantage of Windows Vista and the 2007 Office System. This session will provide insight into the exciting new features coming in the next version of Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” and we’ll dive deep into the new programming features “Orcas” delivers such as those found in the Language Integrated Query (LINQ).

• Session 1: A Lap Around Visual Studio “Orcas”
• Session 2: Data and Programmability in Visual Studio “Orcas”

Chicago (Loop), IL, May 8th

Downers Grove, IL, May 24

Brookfield, WI, May 30th

Indianapolis, IN, May 22nd

Appleton, WI, May 29th

Madison, WI, May 30th

Each attendee will have a chance at winning a Zune. Who knows, it may even be the recently released Pink Zune!

To see if DevCares is coming to your neck of the woods, be sure to visit DevCares.com.

Internet Information Services 7.0 The future of Microsoft?s Web Server Platform is exciting for developers! The release of Internet Information Services 7.0 in Windows Vista and Server will dramatically improve the development, deployment and management of web sites and applications. This demo packed session will highlight an all new, distributed configuration system and administration tool, a new modularized core web server with powerful new extensibility support.

Most importantly, you will see how to plug in a variety of custom modules into IIS7 to enhance the functionality of your websites, as well as look at other ways to extend IIS7 including adding configuration sections to the IIS7 configuration files and extending the IIS7 management tool. The possibilities are endless for making IIS7 the web server that you need for your business scenario.

• Session 1: What?s new in IIS7
• Session 2: Extending IIS7

Also, for those of you in Wisconsin, April brings us new beginnings with the introduction of DevCares to Appleton, Milwaukee and Madison! Be sure to visit http://www.devcares.com to register for an event nearest you and the chance to win an Xbox 360!

• Chicago (Loop), April 10th
• Indianapolis, IN, April 24th
• Downers Grove, IL, April 26th
• Madison, WI, April 26th
• Brookfield, WI, April 27th
• Appleton, WI, April 30th

Come join us as we dive into what developers need to know to build applications on top of Windows Vista. This months sessions covers topics like User Account Control, Integrating Search into your applications, taking advantage of Vista’s built in RSS support and building RSS-enabled applications and building Gadgets for the Windows Sidebar.

All attendees with also have a chance to win a Zune!

What: Chicago (Loop) DevCares
When: Tuesday, February 13th, 1PM
Where: Clarity Consulting, 1 North Franklin, Suite 3400, Chicago, IL
Register for DevCares – Chicago (Loop)

What: DevCares – Downers Grove, IL
When: Thursday, Februrary 22nd, 1PM
Where: Microsoft, 3025 Highland Parkway, Suite 300, Downers Grove, IL.
Register for DevCares – Downers Grove, IL

What: DevCares – Indianapolis, IN
When: Tuesday, February 27th, 1PM
Where: Microsoft, 500 E. 96th St., Suite 460, Indianapolis, IN
Register for DevCares – Indianapolis

Next month, we will be extending the DevCares program into Wisconsin! Keep an eye here or on http://DevCares.com for the announcement of when and where.

If you’re interested in finding a DevCares in your area, head to http://DevCares.com for a listing of cities and dates.

Tuesday, November 28th brings our next session of DevCaresto the Indianapolis area. I'm really excited about this one as I will be one of the presenting speakers for an afternoon of disucssions around the version control features found in Team Foundation Server. Also, to celebrate the recent launch of our foray into the portable media device market, we'll be handing out a Zune to a lucky attendee!

Register Here