The Beantown .NET User Group has rallied community forces to present a special additional stop for the Northeast MSDN Roadshow's Fall series! 

Join Microsoft's Jim O'Neil and Chris Bowen for a free afternoon of developer goodness at the Microsoft New England Research & Development (NERD) Center in Cambridge, MA.  See below for the agenda.

After the Roadshow (around 6:00), we'll adjourn to a nearby establishment for an informal geek gathering to relax, network, and continue the discussions. 

The Fall 2009 Northeast MSDN Roadshow:  Food for Thoughts Tour

After a long summer, you’re probably hungry for more tools and techniques to feed your development efforts.  Touring the northeast this fall for the tenth Roadshow, road and code warriors Jim O’Neil and Chris Bowen have cooked up a select menu of sessions that are sure to please the heartiest of appetites.  From current tools and technologies to practical insights, there is plenty to digest!

You’ll see how Chris and Jim handle the heat of the demo kitchen, dish out knowledge, and pepper guests with half-baked humor, all the while being grilled by audience questions.

The Agenda – A Four Course Meal for the Mind:  

12:30 - Doors open for registration 

1:00 - Essential Patterns, Practically Served

Design patterns, they’re important but often presented with unappetizing formality, like getting only the oat bits from a box of marshmallow cereal.  We’ll sample a small set of key patterns, but also show you how free frameworks and tools (such as Enterprise Library, Prism, Unity, Velocity, and others) put each of those patterns directly into practice – so you can too.  You’ll leave with a mind full of practical technology and a healthy understanding of how to turn underlying patterns into recipes for success.

2:15 - 7-Up(grade) Your Applications

Refresh your existing applications by pouring in some the new features of Windows 7 via the managed-code Windows API Code Pack.  We’ll quench your thirst for how to incorporate the Taskbar, jumplists, and Libraries by taking the cap off an existing Windows Forms application and adding new capabilities, all the while retaining compatibility for your XP and Vista users.  We’ll have you bubbling with excitement, able to give your applications that extra pop.

3:30 - Silverlight Snacks that Satisfy

There’s a generous amount of delicious ingredients in Silverlight 3 and we’re going to focus deeply on some of the most enriching.  We’re going beyond the standard fare in this code-heavy session to create an application that leverages the new out-of-browser and offline execution features, local and remote connections, local data storage, and more.  You’ll see that Silverlight 3 applications can be fortified with features so they can go well beyond being eye candy.

4:45 - Chips off the .NET Block

As seasoned developers, we know there’s a mix of options on the trail to implementing requirements.  From staples like value types vs. reference types, interfaces vs. classes, Strings vs. StringBuilder, to other more exotic ingredients you may have yet tried, this session will dip into ways to leverage .NET, offering a taste of the impact they have on code execution, performance, and extensibility.

5:50 – “Check Please!”

We’ll box any leftovers, collect your comment cards, and distribute an array of giveaways.