I have quite a few things lined up for 2007 so far. Of course I’m still — always — looking for other opportunities, so if you’d like me to to a session at your user group, conference or other event, please feel free to contact me! Here’s what I have so far:

January 16th

The Developers Group

Introduction to LINQ

.NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is one of the technologies that will be released in the next version of Visual Studio (Orcas). It promises to be an important new development in the world of data querying and handling, as it provides unified language extensions that span many different usage scenarios. Whether you’re currently working with ADO.NET, XML or arbitrary collections of objects, LINQ will make your life easier. This session provides an overview of the technology and comprehensive demos.

January, preliminary planning

London .NET user group

Validity checking? Business Rules?

Not all data is equal, as everybody will tell you who’s been developing business applications. There are rules for the validity of information, and these have to be checked and the end user must be provided with helpful information through the UI. But exactly when do you do this? And how? And what about the next customer who wants everything to work just a little bit differently? This presentation introduces a framework for validity checking and answers all these questions.

February 19th

NxtGenUG Birmingham

Extensible LINQing

LINQ to SQL, LINQ to XML, … we’ve all heard these, but what about LINQ to “my own source of data”? LINQ is, above all, an extensible technology, and so it is possible to use the same convenient language extensions known from the main LINQ projects to query information from any arbitrary data source. This presentation explains the theory behind it all and includes a live code demonstration of using LINQ to query information from a web service. LINQ to web service?

February 26th - March 2nd

BASTA! 2007 Spring Edition Germany

Object/Relational Mapping in der wirklichen Welt

Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) ist ein Thema, das in den letzten Jahren an Bedeutung gewonnen hat, nicht zuletzt mit Microsofts Engagement durch LINQ. Zum Einstieg wird in diesem Workshop beleuchtet, ob und warum ORM eine gute Idee ist und welche Ziele damit verfolgt werden. In der Praxis empfinden viele Programmierer und Softwarearchitekten es schwierig, ORM in ihre Konzepte einzubeziehen. Der Workshop zeigt ORM im praktischen Einsatz und versucht viele wichtige Fragen zu beantworten: Wie ist die Beziehung zwischen Stored Procedures und ORM? Welche Rolle spielen Kommunikationstechniken wie XML Web Services, .NET Remoting oder Windows Communication Fondation? Was ändert sich an einer Anwendung für Windows Forms oder ASP.NET, wenn ORM verwendet wird?

DataGridView für Fortgeschrittene

Das DataGridView als Grid-Komponente für Windows Forms in .NET 2 ist ein recht flexibles Bedienelement, das über einige Möglichkeiten zur Erweiterung verfügt. Diese Session zeigt anhand einiger praktischer Beispiele, was alles möglich ist.

April 4th

NxtGenUG Oxford

WPF and WCF - a combined introduction

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) are two important pillars of Microsoft’s next generation development platform. Newly christened as .NET 3, these technologies are available today, but they will get much more important as Visual Studio Orcas comes closer. This session provides an overview of both technologies by demonstrating their combined use in a network enabled Connect Four game.