DevDays St. Louis

Just finished my two talks at DevDays in St. Louis. I spoke on the attributes of Smart Client applications and on deployment. Both sessions went fairly well and almost all the demos worked :) Looking forward to doing the same sessions in Kansas City on March 11. For folks who'll get the CD with the source code for the IssueVision application you should check out the IssueList user control, the serialization helper that uses the DPAPI, and the IssueSubject component. A nice little application that illustrates some fundamental smart client techniques using the .NET Framework.

All the Microsoft folks who setup for the event were very accommodating and the other speakers including Quilogy's Jon Box were fun to talk to as usual. Heading back to KC tonight and will do some consulting tomorrow.

I especially liked that the first sessions discussed design patterns and implemented both the Observer and Command patterns in the UI. The second session used the AppUpdater component that's been out on www.gotdotnet.com and www.windowsforms.net for some time to do application updates. The Updater Application Block is more robust however and so I would recommend it.