Update 11/1/09: Session schedule is posted!  20 sessions to choose from.

The Tech Valley Code Camp is almost here!  This year’s camp will be taking place on Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at SUNY Albany from 9am-3pm and is absolutely, 100% free for everyone to attend.  So far we have 18 sessions scheduled for everything from LINQ to Silverlight to iPhone development to Ruby on Rails.  I encourage all of our local developers to attend this event, and furthermore, present something to the group!  This code camp is platform agnostic, so practically software development topic would be great to present.

I’ll be presenting two sessions on Silverlight which I recently presented at VSLive Orlando 2009:

Getting Started with Silverlight
Room: CC 367
Time: 1:00pm

Microsoft Silverlight allows developers and designers to build rich cross-browser and cross-platform applications for the Web using the same tools and technologies that are familiar to .NET developers.  This session will cover the basics of Silverlight, including basic XAML, the tools that can be used to create Silverlight applications, the controls available in the Silverlight framework, and pros and cons of Silverlight vs. other web technologies, all while building a few very simple applications demonstrating the power of the framework.

It appears the fantastic Waegis spam filtering site used to block blog comment spam has been down for over a month as the author tries to find hosting and figure things out.  Sadly, that leaves a lot of Community Server users with no decent comment spam blocking solution since Waegis was perhaps the only spam blocking engine which actually provided a working plug-in for Community Server 2008.5.

So, as the community around Community Server gets more and more fragmented, and as Telligent leaves its non-paying, hobby/personal use customers in the dust, I decided to write a simple Akismet spam filter for Community Server 2008.5.  Please note that this works ONLY with Community Server 2008.5.  Any previous version will not recognize it.

This wound up being pretty simple because the Waegis filter, written by Keyvan Nayyeri, had its source code included, and Joel Thoms had written an Akismet library for .NET, available on CodePlex.

I had the extreme pleasure of being invited to and attending the Windows 7 Launch Party in New York City on October 22nd.  I went down to the city with fellow MVP Bill Pytlovany, author of the popular WinPatrol security software.  You can watch a video of the entire launch below or at the official Windows 7 press site.  Be sure to watch to the end to get a glimpse of some super-awesome hardware that takes advantage of all Windows 7 has to offer.

All in all, It was quite a day, from getting a picture with Steve Ballmer himself to meeting segment producer and occasional on-screen Late Show with David Letterman character Brian Teta who was amazed I recognized him.  Mr. Ballmer was just on his way out of the bathroom only 15 minutes before show-time when Bill and I accosted him and begged for a picture.  Frazzled though he was, he agreed and Bill snapped this...

The fourth episode of my Coding4Fun Show, the second show live from Las Vegas, is now up on Channel 9.  In this episode I interview interview Jeremiah Morrill who has written WPF MediaKit, an amazing library to quickly build DirectShow and MediaFoundation media player controls in WPF.  It's amazingly powerful and, as a developer, can be used with just a few lines of XAML.  In fact, you can create a full-blown DVD player or webcam capture control in your application each with a single XAML tag!  Learn all about this great project, how it was written, and how to use it in your own creations.

You should see the video below if you have Silverlight installed, otherwise head over to the episode on Channel 9 to watch and download in a variety of formats for offline viewing.

The Coding4Fun Show: WPF MediaKit with Jeremiah Morrill

Thanks to everyone who came out to my two VSLive sessions today.  You can find the slide decks and full source code posted in my download section.  Please note that in order to save some bandwidth, I didn’t include the 125MB video file I used in my examples, but you can download that separately here.  Just unzip and copy to the Media and GPUAcceleration sample directories and build the project.

I welcome any and all questions, and especially comments/critiques.  As a speaker, I rarely, if ever, receive any formalized feedback from the session organizers, so I’d love to hear what those in attendance thought of my sessions.  Good or bad, please send it along!  Thanks!