Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Microsoft Tech Days 2010

It's official (well it has been for a while, but it's been published by MS now), I'll be putting on two presentations at MS Tech Days. The key one will be Expression Blend - Putting it into Practice which myself and a colleague Francis created and will be putting on across all of the Canadian TechDays events.

Right now I'm just finishing off my demo(s) code. Next week I will be in Vancouver presenting this material. I really think Expression Blend will change the Designer and Developer relationship. If you come out to my presentation I'll explain how!

But I've been into web development for the nearly the last 15 years of my life. I started early as a graphic/web designer, team lead, project lead, technical lead and eventually a web architect and now a dev manager specializing in web technologies. What does this mean? I've seen designers and developers interact a lot. Heck, I've seen good designers and bad designers, I've seen designers that have bridged the gap significantly and I've worked with designers who have just handed you a colour printout (and an emailed PSD file) and said 'go'. This is where expression blend will change how we do things... It will change your dev process if you do it right.

On a side note, I was also asked last minute to do a quick 30 minute 'turbo talk' on IE9.