Houston D2 SIG Meeting – 11/06/08 – Recap

I attended the inaugural meeting of the D2 SIG last night and I have to say it was a pretty good turnout for a first meeting.  I counted about 40 people in attendance. 

The D2 (Developers 2 Designers) Special Interest Group is being put on by EPS Software and Torque FKM.  It will always be on the first Tuesday of each month at the Microsoft Houston offices.  The plan is for the meeting to start around 6:15 with a 30 minute tip/trick presentation and then a break and the main presentation will start at 7:00 and go to 8:30 or so. Sounds like a great plan and I look forward to future meetings.

Markus Egger gave a great overview presentation on WPF, Silverlight and Surface.  Some of the high points are below.

• The User Interface Revolution
• Technologies involved: Silverlight, WPF, ASP.NET (Web forms, AJAX, MVC), MS Surface
• Visual Studio and Expression Blend are used for the design of WPF applications
• Why new UI technologies – limitations of older technologies like GDI
• XAML – Declarative language for WPF interface layout
• Silverlight is basically WPF for the web
• Silverlight vs WPF – Silverlight is cross-platform

Markus also gave an overview of Surface and showed a couple of quick videos showing how it works. 

• Microsoft Surface
• Microsoft Surface – Parody

In closing, it was a successful meeting and has great promise of becoming a great addition to the existing groups here in Houston.