LIVING WIKI: This means that this blog post will get updated frequently with more content.

We kicked off our roadshow with our first stop in New York City. Thanks to all of you who came!  We had close to 70 people.  I promised to follow up with my code samples, deck etc. etc.  This will be the spot where you will find it all – I am going to be posting it on code.msdn.microsoft. com and will include a link as soon as it’s all nicely packaged. I will also post content with walkthroughs to answer to some of the questions that you have asked during the session.

For those of you who wanted to get a copy of Microsoft Silverlight and Expression 3 trial DVDs, unfortunately it seems we did not them shipped to us in time. I know some of you have filled out your mailing address on the evaluation to receive the DVD. For those of you who did not, no fear, you can actually download the software here.

Come meet your Microsoft New York Metro Evangelism Team!

Join my colleague, Peter Laudati and I, for free pre-launch training – This is a big launch year for developers, so let us help you prepare to hit the ground running when .NET 4.0, Visual Studio 2010, Windows7, and SQL Server come out this year and next. 

Feel free to ask your questions in advance in the comments below and help us customize our talks for you!  Tell us what you want to hear and share your stories on what type of solutions you are building.

We will have a full afternoon of talks covering web development, security, and Silverlight 3.  The roadshows are free, but do require advance registration. 

1st Down: Tips and Tricks with ASP.NET 4.0
Whether you are coming from classic ASP or previous versions of ASP.NET, this session will help you understand what’s coming in ASP.NET 4.0.  We’ll provide tips and tricks on how you can leverage the newest features and design updates with ASP.NET Web Forms and controls. We’ll walk through the top tips for performance, caching, data access, as well as rich user interface creation. We’ll also cover the newest ASP.NET AJAX improvements and cover some tricks to help you take full advantage of all what’s available in ASP.NET 4.0 & Visual Studio 2010.

2nd Down: Dependency Injection/Inversion of Control

Do you hate being tied down?  Does your code yearn to be set free?  Hate being stuck to a particular database or back-end implementation?  Want some flexibility in your design?  Then Dependency Injection may be for you!

You’ve probably seen DI/IoC posts and articles all around the Interwebs lately.  This design pattern is popular, especially in the Agile and TDD communities.  What is it?  An official definition of DI is: the process of supplying an external dependency to a software component.  We’ll cover the problems this pattern solves and how it works.  We’ll also explore samples of the pattern being used by various Inversion of Control containers on the .NET platform, including: Unity, Spring.NET, Structure Map, NInject, and Castle Windsor.

3rd Down - Silverlight 3: Serious for Business!

Silverlight 3 was released to the web in July.  That seems so quick after Silverlight 2’s release in late 2008.  We’ll explore some of the new features in SL3 & the corresponding Expression 3 tools including: Out of the Browser experience, Sketchflow, advanced media format support, and new controls.

Many of you have seen the spinning rectangle demo in the past. This time we’ll get down to serious business and explore data-binding, and connecting to backend services on both the Microsoft platform and non-Microsoft platforms.  If you like what you see here on the Roadshow, be sure to stay tuned for an upcoming Silverlight 3 Firestarter event in the area!

4th Down: Score!

We’ll collect your surveys, and you just might score one of the day’s giveaways. In some locations the event will be followed by a local user group meeting - stay tuned for details at each location.