Friday Night Presentation: Drinking & Thinking
Description:
With your drink in hand and new associates at your side, kick off RIApalooza with insight into the current and future state of RIAs: Where we’ve been, what’s happening now, and what to expect from the future as the market call for RIAs and experience-driven software applications becomes louder and louder.
Not only will this kick-off give you a feeling for what will be covered during Saturday's full-day at RIAPalooza, it will also provide valuable information about the future of RIAs, Rich “Connected” Desktop applications and digital user experiences in general. Meeker will talk about several key concepts related to the future of user experience and give a quick peek at some new and rather compelling technologies.
About The Speaker:
Dave Meeker is a user experience strategy lead at Roundarch, and RIA Community thought leader. At Roundarch, Dave is responsible for the strategic direction behind client engagements and manages aspects of relationships with both Adobe and Microsoft.
Dave has been leading digital design and development projects for 14 years, and has been focused on "rich client" technologies and the importance of user experience since 1995. In this time, he has worked to start-up an early-internet dial up service provider, to convert a traditional design shop into an interactive powerhouse, as an advisor on early streaming media technologies and served as director of Information Architecture at Chicago's Web Design Group.
Prior to joining Roundarch, he was Managing Partner at EffectiveUI, winner of the 2007 Adobe MAX awards in both the "people's choice" and "Best RIA" categories. Before EffectiveUI, Dave lead the RIA development team at Whittmanhart where he managed the Macromedia/Adobe partnership, allowing Dave and his team to design, build and deploy some of the first Rich Internet Applications in Adobe Flex.
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RIA for Designers & Developers (Keynote)
About The Speakers:
Tim Heuer is a program manager for Microsoft Silverlight working on the developer community team. Tim has worked with Microsoft developer tools and technologies since the early 1990s. Tim is extremely passionate about Microsoft, but also enjoys learning new technologies and frameworks that exist. His main passion lies in the web technologies and loves working with software developers to share and learn knowledge in this space. He's inflicted with the unfortunate disease that his work is also his hobby and he loves technology. You can usually find him behind the keyboard trying to learn something new. You can find him online sharing his findings of technology at http://timheuer.com/blog/.
Corrina Barber is a user experience designer at Microsoft with a background in both user experience design and computer science. She has worked on various aspects of Visual Studio since 2001 including editor and code navigation, languages, Visual Studio Team System, and now Silverlight. Prior to joining Microsoft she worked as an independent contractor designing and developing websites with a particular focus on creating rich interactive and aesthetically pleasing user experience sites.
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Agile Flex Application Development: How Mammoths Stay Slim
Description:
In this session, Ka Wai will discuss smarter and more efficient RIA development techniques. The talk will focus on keeping your development staff slim by combining a few philosophical "truths" of application development with well-proven techniques like code generation and data-oriented design. He will also showcase X2O, a web-based data modeling framework for Flash and Flex applications. Using X2O, Ka Wai will build a database-driven, content-managed RIA by his lonesome in just minutes.
About The Speaker:
Ka Wai Cheung is a partner at We Are Mammoth, a privately-held company in Chicago specializing in Flex RIA development. He co-authored the book Flash Application Design Solutions (Apress, 2006) and has written for Digital Web Magazine, Actionscript.org, and HOW Magazine online.
Ka Wai works on more efficient, agile processes for developing database-driven software applications using Flash and Flex. He has spoken on the topic of agile Flash development at conferences like FITC and Flashbelt in the past.
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Best and Worst Practices Building a RIA
Description:
In this one of a kind session – Flex expert Michael Labriola and Silverlight expert Josh Holmes join forces and experience to talk about the best and worst practices when building a Rich Internet Application. Why should you go through the hard how and where to keep the state management? What networking stacks make the most sense? When does it make sense to use a Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform?
About The Speakers:
Michael Labriola is a Founding Partner and Senior Consultant at Digital Primates, a Chicago-based Adobe Solution Partner. He has been developing Internet applications since 1995 and has been working with Flex since its 1.0 beta program. Michael is an Adobe Certified Instructor, Community Expert, Flex Developer Champion and international speaker on Flex and AIR topics who has consulted for four of the world’s ten most recognized brands. As a consultant, he mentors software development teams using emerging technologies and architects enterprise applications with high business impact. His free time is spent escaping from technology through wine and food. .
Josh Holmes is a RIA Architect Evangelist with Microsoft focused on building and educating the dev partners with a Rich Internet Application offering in Central Region . Prior to joining Microsoft in October 2006, Josh was a consultant working with a variety of clients ranging from large Fortune 500 firms to smaller sized companies. Josh is a frequent speaker and lead panelist at national and international software development conferences focusing on emerging technologies, software design and development with an emphasis on mobility and RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Community focused, Josh has founded and/or runs many technology organizations from the Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group to the Ann Arbor Computer Society and was on the forming committee for CodeMash. You can contact Josh through his blog at www.joshholmes.com.
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Fast. Smart. Agile. User Experience Driven Agile Development
Description:
This session will cover tips and tricks for leveraging user experience design together with Agile development best practices to break projects into small steps, create realistic time frames, meet deadlines, and deliver new features and releases every few weeks while incorporating constant feedback and improvements. These techniques are based on real world experiences and are applicable at any stage in the development cycle.
About The Speaker:
Matt heads Pathfinder’s User Experience Design team which works with directly with developers to ensure software that is easy to use and meets business objectives. He brings over 15 years of experience in information architecture, usability, and solution design to developing best practices and strategies for client projects. Matt's experience with designing for the web stretches back to 1993, when he left The Onion to begin an online publishing venture. Since then, he has worked as the lead information architect for First Chicago/Bank One’s Internet banking application, and lead brand, marketing and user experience design projects for clients such as Motorola, NYSE, Chicago Sun-Times and Procter & Gamble.
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How RIA Changes In Application Design
Description:
How RIA changes in application design. What are the challenges with trying to go too far with AJAX based solutions. We'll look at a piece of functionality written in Dojo vs. Flex for example and discuss the performance and experience differences as well as the amount of code required to achieve both. We'll look at ways to take this might be to look at how RIAs can change the conception of portal and search and explore different implementation models such as: AJAX, AJAX Framework, Flex, Silverlight, etc.
About The Speaker:
President/Chief Technology Officer at Roundarch, Geoff is responsible for establishing the technology vision that guides the development of our service offerings, delivery methodology and vendor partner relationships. Together with the Chief Experience Officer, Geoff shapes a unified vision of user experience and technology that is the essence of Roundarch. Geoff has led the build-out of Roundarch’s highly successful J2EE frameworks and Rich Internet Application delivery offering. Geoff has 18 years of systems development, operations improvement and consulting experience, with the past 10 years focused on eBusiness/CRM. Prior to joining Roundarch Geoff was one of the founding members of Deloitte Consulting’s CRM and eBusiness practice. Geoff has significant experience designing and managing complex Web solutions with integration to enterprise systems for several industry-leading organizations including American Express, Bear Stearns, JPMorgan Chase, Northern Trust, HP, Agilent, Molex, Waters, Baxter Healthcare and Best Buy. Geoff has an MS in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University and a BS in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University.
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Silverlight and RIA
Description:
In this session Corey will build an application from scratch to finish, jumping in and attempting to get the most out of Silverlight 2. Corey will build an interactive image viewer and slideshow presenter in Silverlight 2 based on an existing flash application.
About The Speaker:
Corey is a professional designer and software developer with extensive experience in multimedia, web & windows based applications. A pioneer in Flash and Silverlight development, he uniquely combines design sensibility with rock-solid Microsoft .NET development skills. Recently, he was instrumental in developing a Silverlight business application (the first of its kind) for a major railroad company. Corey is highly active in the designer/developer space and has served as a presenting speaker at numerous community events including CNUG and MADNUG.
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Better Designer/Developer Collaboration with WPF & XAML
Description:
In this session, Anthony will showcase a recent WPF application and demonstrate how XAML & WPF as a rich platform allows for better designer/developer collaboration
About The Speaker:
Anthony Handley is a Senior Consultant and User Experience Specialist at Magenic and has over 15 years experience in interactive design and creative direction. He has a passion for clean, user-centered design and leads Magenic's UX practice in Chicago.
