Guest blog post by Jeremy Likness
Project Manager, Senior Consultant – Wintellect
Twitter: @JeremyLikness
Jeremy Likness was named Silverlight MVP of the Year in 2010. Now Senior Consultant and Technical Project Manager for Wintellect, LLC, he has spent the past decade building highly scalable web-based commercial solutions using the Microsoft technology stack. He has fifteen years of experience developing enterprise applications in vertical markets including insurance, health/wellness, supply chain management, and mobility. He is the creator of the popular MVVM framework Jounce and an open source Silverlight Isolated Storage Database System called Sterling. Likness speaks and blogs frequently on Silverlight, MEF, Prism, Team Foundation Server, and related Microsoft technologies.
I was one of the first developers to download the Release Preview. After so much speculation around the new platform, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I could still run my old Silverlight applications right on the Windows 8 desktop. Even more exciting was the built-in support the platform has for C# and XAML, the same languages I’ve used to develop dozens of Silverlight and WPF applications. I quickly reached out to my publisher with the proposal for a book that would teach developers how to design Windows 8 Metro applications using C# and XAML. I purchased a Samsung Series 7 slate and began writing the book and developing applications directly on the tablet.
I believe the platform has many amazing features that developers will love, ranging from the flexibility of programming language to the support for well-known technologies like XAML and HTML5. In my upcoming talk, the Top Ten Features Windows 8 Developers Will Love, I will cover these features and write live code samples to demonstrate just how easy it is to author applications on the new platform. One of the features I love about Windows 8 is the native support for icons and the newly tooled Segoe UI Symbols font. While there are dozens of premade icons to choose from, the potential for applications is endless. That’s why I’m excited to share that Syncfusion, a company that provides a broad range of enterprise-class software components and tools for the Microsoft .NET and Windows 8 platforms, is giving away free access to their Metro Studio for anyone that registers. This is a collection of over 600 Metro-style icon templates that can be easily customized and used for any Metro-style application, whether it is Windows 8, Windows Phone, or any other application that provides a Metro-style interface. In addition, my company Wintellect will raffle a single virtual training pass from those who register for the event.
Change is coming, and you don’t want to miss out. Join me on June 20th to learn about the Windows 8 Metro platform, receive your access to Metro Studio and a chance to win a free virtual training pass. I look forward to “seeing” you online! Details for the event are online at: http://lidnug-wintellect1.eventbrite.com/.
