Well as mentioned in my previous post last Tuesday I had the chance to speak about Prism and Unity at a DotNetZone event.

I believe the talk went really well, at least the attendees seemed very interested in those two frameworks. Unfortunately time was rather short for covering both topics so I feel I need to apologize for going a bit too fast.

Anyway I’m putting up my slide deck and demo code as promised in case you want to dive into it and have a go your self with Prism.

Don't hesitate to contact me if you need more help in these.

I’m going to be speaking at the next DotNetZone event on a very interesting topic namely IoC (Inversion of Control) and on how using "Prism" and it's friend Unity (an implementation of IoC) from the Patterns and Practices team that can help in building Silverlight applications in a way that lends itself to testability and modularity.

In talking with various colleagues and customers building business applications with Silverlight I find that Prism (and it's friend Unity) is frequently mentioned but not everyone has seen it or use it. So coming next Tuesday 15th of December 19.00 at MIC (Microsoft Innovation Center) we’re going to deep dive into it. I’m planning on starting off with some fairly basic code and gradually build on that making use of dependency injection and modularity.

In Particular we’re going to talk about:

• Inversion of Control with Unity
• Dependency Injection with Unity
• Modularity with Prism
• The Unity Bootstrapper
• Building a modular Silverlight Project
• Shells, Regions, Views
• Commands
• Loosely Coupled Events with Event Aggregation
• Sharing Data via Region Contexts

This is a level400 event so I strongly urge you to come listen but I’m also going to try my best to stream the event on UStream http://www.ustream.tv/channel/35-dotnetzone-event-prism (the code not my face don’t worry ;-)) as well for all of you that won’t be able to make it there.

UPDATE! For those of you that still aren't convinced whether or not to attend, I'm throwing in a little bonus. A lucky winner will get the chance to take home a brand new copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, Microsoft's new operating System, as well as a 120 day trial of Exchange Server 2010. Here they are sitting on my desk waiting for their next owner ;-).

Are you intrigued with Cloud computing, are you considering Microsoft’s Windows Azure but don’t know whether this is going to actually save you money? Then visit Windows Azure ROI / TCO calculator and find out.

After you agree to the terms, you’ll then have to fill in a one page questionnaire. The most important question is about the expected ‘growth profile’ of your application, i.e. steady, predictable or spiked growth, etc.

When you’re done with that you’ll be presented with a detailed cost estimate, which includes estimated costs for Windows Azure, SQL Azure, .NET Services and bandwidth costs.

But that’s not all, by clicking the next tab you’ll be able to get a cost break down of all Windows Azure costs.  This includes platform application migration and setup cost estimates (shown on the left) and more

The tool also includes estimates for Platform IT Administration and Support and then a Windows Azure Platform TCO rollup for your application.

Finally in the last tab you’ll find a detailed ROI comparison including the important ‘cost-savings’ estimated value.

Last week at Microsoft DevDays “Make Web not War” we had a rather passionate conversation on the features Microsoft’s cloud relational database engine (SQL Azure) offers today and how these are going to change the way we program today.

In that direction I’m linking the page that Microsoft has put up in order to listen everyone's wishes on what features are the most important ones.

So if you want to shape the future of SQL Azure, if you are passionate about Windows Azure and the SQL Azure relational database, then visit SQL Azure Feature Votting to vote for features that you believe should be included in it. This is your chance to shape the future of SQL Azure.

Yesterday I received my Google Wave Invitation which includes 8 more invitations to give away. So I have 8 Google Wave invitations and I’m going to give them up to 8 readers that will leave a comment to this blog post. So if you’re interested in testing Google’s new Social Platform leave a comment and try your luck ;-)

The draw will take place next Tuesday.

P.S. You’ll have to include an email to your comment in which I’m going to send the invite in case you win.