I just came back from Dallas where I spent a few days at the Dallas Day of .NET. I’d like to thank the attendees who attended my two talks on iOS Development and Designing Data Visualizations. It’s always great to hang out with the developer community in various cities and I also want to thank all the attendees who stopped by the Infragistics booth.

As promised during my talks, you will find below all the session material, including slides & demos. If you want to attend some of my talks in the coming months, I’m already scheduled for the following conferences & events:

• March 3rd – Stamford, CT: Fairfield Westchester .Net User Group at the UConn Campus
• March 25-29 – Las Vegas, NV: Visual Studio Live! at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino
• April 25-27 – Louisville, KY: Code PaLOUsa at the Louisville Marriott Downtown
• May 6-7 – Winnipeg, MB: Prairie Dev Con at the Viscount Gort Ramada Hotel
• May 13-16 – Chicago, IL: Visual Studio Live! at the Hilton Chicago

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.

iOS Development Survival Guide for the .NET Guy (or Gal)

This session is quickly becoming one of my most popular talks. More and more .NET developers seem to be considering iOS development. 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 talk from the “Executive Track” was 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