I had the pleasure of speaking at the Visual Studio Live! conference last week, located in the Royal Pacific Resort at Universal Orlando and part of the Live! 360 overarching conference. It was a fun week, I got a chance to meet many great attendees and also catch-up with old friends.
I was presenting on a wide range of topics, including mobile development and building native apps for the Windows Phone 8 and iOS platforms, and also a brand new session on designing data visualization dashboards. As promised during my talks, you can find below all the material I showed, including all the slides and demos for my 3 talks.
What's New in Windows Phone 8 for Developers
In this session I discussed how Windows Phone fits in the overall mobile ecosystem along side Apple, Android, Blackberry and HTML5 apps. We looked at why you should care about Windows Phone, what makes these devices unique, where the store is at, and then I presented a demo on getting started with Windows Phone 8 development in Visual Studio 2012. We then dove into the brand new Windows Phone 8 features for both consumers and developers, the upgrade story for WP 7.5 devices, and explored some of those new features in greater detail, such as the new text-to-speech and voice recognition APIs.
Download the slides and demos here
Noteworthy Links from this talk:
- Windows Phone 8 Jump Start Training: http://bit.ly/wp8jump
- Windows Phone 8 @ \\Build: http://bit.ly/build12wp
- dev.windowsphone.com
- Windows Phone Developer Blog: windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev
- Windows Phone Blog: windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone
- Windows Phone Toolkit: http://phone.codeplex.com
- Nokia Developer Wiki: www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Category:Windows_Phone
- Nokia DVLUP: www.dvlup.com
- Jerry Nixon’s Blog: blog.jerrynixon.com
- Jeff Blankenburg’s Blog: www.jeffblankenburg.com
- NetAdvantage for Windows Phone Controls: infragistics.com/mobile
iOS Development Survival Guide for the .NET Guy (or Gal)
It’s obvious that .NET developers are interested in iOS development too. This was the third time I presented this talk, and once again I had a full house. This session is targeted at developers that know nothing about iOS development, Xcode or Objective C, and everything is presented from the perspective of people already knowledgeable about .NET, Visual Studio and C#. We looked at why you should care about building native iOS apps and I provided a quick intro to the Apple world. I presented everything you need to get started with iOS development (yes, you need a Mac) and we built our first iOS project. I made several comparisons with the Visual Studio world to explain iOS principles, we took a peek at the many iOS frameworks, the many options for third-party iOS controls, and where to go from here.
Download the slides and demos here
Noteworthy Links from this talk:
- Register at developer.apple.com
- Watch Official Getting Started Videos at developer.apple.com/videos/ios
- Watch WWDC Videos at developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2012
- Watch Pluralsight iOS Training at www.pluralsight.com/training/Courses#ios
- Follow my list of iOS dev bloggers at twitter.com/ActiveNick/ios-dev-bloggers
- Download NucliOS, the native iOS controls from Infragistics at www.infragistics.com/ios
- Recommended Books:
- iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Edition 3 (Conway, Hillegass)
- Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Edition 3 (Conway, Hillegass)
- iOS Programming for .NET Developers (Josh Smith)
- Beginning iOS 5 Development: Exploring the iOS SDK (Mark, Nutting, LaMarche)
Designing Data Visualization Dashboards
This was a really exciting session, and also the one with the largest turnout. What originally started as an idea for a developer session eventually turned into a talk focused on data visualization design principles. I started with a discussion on just what is data visualization, why should we care, and what makes for effective visualizations. I presented examples of noteworthy visualizations including electoral maps and the periodic table of the elements, as well as several live dashboards. We looked at the various attributes of data visualization dashboards, the UI capabilities, the widgets and the functional capabilities. I then explored the various steps to design beautiful visualizations and the many paths you can take to build those visualizations into dashboards. Lastly, I dove into the importance of maps in data visualizations and showed a live sample demo of a Twitter map built in WPF.
Download the slides and demos here
Noteworthy Links from this talk:
- Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data through the Eyes of Experts (Theory in Practice), by Julie Steele & Noah Iliinsky
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward R. Tufte, 2nd edition
- Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data, by Stephen Few
- Designing Data Visualizations, by Julie Steele & Noah Iliinsky
- ReportPlus dashboard building app for iPad: http://bit.ly/igrplus
- Sample Dashboards from Infragistics
I will be speaking at the next Visual Studio Live! conference at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, March 25-29 2013, I hope I will see you there.
If you have any questions about the topics discussed in these sessions, you can post them in the comments below or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick.