Expression Blend is a fabulous tool for creating Silverlight components and applications. It boasts the most powerful Silverlight graphics editor among the available Microsoft tools and it handles the trickiest UI design with ease. But many developers are still hesitant to use Blend, perhaps due to its unfamiliar IDE metaphors or possibly because they aren't aware of the potent tools hidden within. This session takes a grand tour of Blend and shows you which tools are indispensible to crafting great UI. Among these tools are the new Sketchflow prototyping tool and the enhanced Assets panel. In addition you'll see how Expression Blend 4 adds new configurable behaviors and learn about the enhance support for data-binding and the MVVM pattern. This talk is loaded with tidbits that will speed up your UI creation and a few secrets that will drastically reduce the amount of XAML you’ll need to write.

Learn how to avoid the pitfalls of amateur video. Get great looking videos without breaking the bank. Learn about the latest affordable gear, the basics of lighting, shooting, non-linear editing with Sony Vegas (a WPF app!), video file formats, codecs, transcoding, free utilities, and all of the tricks you need to know to end up with great video. 

Join Scott Stanfield as he discusses the user interface technologies of today and tomorrow with Richard Campbell. Scott’s company Vertigo has created some of the most original Silverlight applications in the world. The keynote digs into the strengths and weaknesses of Silverlight, especially in light of Flash and HTML5. Looking to the future, Scott examines how emerging platforms like Windows Phone 7 and HTML5 will stretch developer’s skills to new user experiences, and how best to prepare for them.

2007... Silverlight 1.0 is released. 2010… Silverlight 4 is almost upon us. Did you lose track of all the new features that are in the platform right now? And how does Silverlight 4 compare to WPF 4?
In this session, we will take you on a tour through the most exciting features that Silverlight 4 has to offer, varying from Trusted application to full data binding support, from rich text-editing to webcam support etc. While we’re at it, we’ll look at how WPF 4 can help you achieve the same effects. After this session, you’ll have a better understanding on the position of Silverlight 4 and WPF 4 and their newest features.

This session will demonstrate how multi-touch enabled applications can be used in multiple vertical industries to improve the communication, education, collaboration, and experience overall across the software continuum. The user experience demonstrations will highlight the use of these Microsoft technologies:
• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) can be used to visualize data. WPF is the next-generation presentation sub-system for Windows. It provides .NET developers and designers with a unified programming model for building rich Windows smart client user experiences that incorporate UI, media, and documents.
• Windows 7 Touch - Windows 7 offers more choice in how users interact with their PCs, such as through MultiTouch gestures. With WPF support for Windows 7 MultiTouch .NET programmers have a revolutionary new way to build interactive user experiences.
• Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. And with its 3.0 version it is multi-touch capable.
• Microsoft Surface is a multi-touch product from Microsoft which is developed as a software and hardware combination technology that allows a user, or multiple users, to manipulate digital content by the use of natural motions, hand gestures, or physical objects by the use of natural motions, hand gestures, or physical objects.

Silverlight allows for building great RIAs. In this session, we'll explore some cool things I bet you didn't know about Silverlight. We'll look at some Silverlight 4 tips, including debugging of services, hit testing when performing drag and drop and creating a great install experience, translations in Silverlight using MVVM etc. After this session, you'll have learned 10 new things in Silverlight, what a great value!

For more than 30 years developers have been building enterprise software for small computers like the PC. Arguments are frequently made that the tools, plumbing and platforms makes building software easier than we ever dreamed. And many of today’s software architects will argue that building software is more difficult than ever because of the complexities of integration and the myriad of choices in solution architecture.
Now, a reinvigorated focus on user experience with rich client and rich internet application (RIA) developer technologies have created even greater opportunities for the creation of awesome applications. When you couple that with the advent of multi touch capable hardware at consumer prices and the high level .NET APIs to leverage multi-touch capabilities, we have the start of the new age of software focused on the Natural User Experience (NUI). NUI applications manifest in “new” platforms and developer technologies such as Windows 7, Surface, WPF, The Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight and all can leverage innovative capabilities like Multi-touch, Cloud and Parallel computing.
This demo focused keynote will take an amusing look at the past and take an impressive look at some of the best software being built today and into the immediate future.

Good user experience (UX) is not limited to an appealing user interface. It is about making an application that is easy for your users to learn and interact with. This session will explore the process of creating a good user experience from prototyping your design and user workflow through implementation. Learn the secrets to creating intuitive forms, consistent user interaction, and polished and responsive user interfaces.

Learn how to encode, publish, download and display video and audio files and streams using Silverlight 4.0. Use the Expression Encoder to create videos for Silverlight complete with markers and other features. Learn how to access the webcam in Silverlight 4. Great demos.

It's become apparent in the last decade that, done right, animating parts of your UI can have a powerful influence on the user experience. For example, subtle changes in the appearance of a UI element when the user selects the item is a good example of the trend. Another example is the way that information screens slide in from the edges of the window, which elegantly signals the change to another region of the application. We are fortunate to have a robust animation engine available in Silverlight and this session show you how to use it in interesting ways. You'll start the session by examining animations, storyboards and keyframes. Once you are comfortable with these key topics you'll learn the Expression Blend animation tools and then start exploring concepts like frame based animation, creating custom animation types and physics simulations.

The industry predicts all new computers on all major platforms will have multi-touch capability in the short term. Silverlight 3.0 introduced Multi-Touch capability in its API. Unfortunately, the API is rudimentary at best. Implementing multi-touch in a Silverlight application is typically very difficult.
This session will update you on the types of multi-touch capable devices available right now and those coming in the immediate future.
This session was designed to help you build Silverlight Multi-Touch capable applications the easy way with the Firebrick ScatterView control for Silverlight. With a free developer version of the control available you’ll be on your way to building great multi-touch applications in Silverlight with relative ease.
In this session you’ll learn how to build a fully functional Silverlight ScatterView application (both mouse and multi-touch capable) in Visual Studio and/or Blend 3 the easy way. This Scatterview application can be the basis of your Kiosk / Interactive Digital Signage applications and real applications will be demoed in the session.
The Silverlight ScatterView control has all the heavy lifting already done for you: Thousands of lines of Trigonometry and Calculus. All you have to do is learn how to implement and leverage the control in your applications. In the process you’ll learn a ton about the functionality of Microsoft Expression Blend 3 too and let Blend do most of the code writing for you.

Writing Apps for a phone was never so easy. If you've been tempted to write for the iPhone or the Android phone, you don't have to. With Silverlight you can build applications for the Windows Phone 7 Series as easy as you can build a web widget. This talk will focus on getting started building an application for the phone!