This is the last day of PDC09. There is no keynote today and I have nothing schedule for the first session (this is the only time slot for this conference I had nothing planned). I decided this would be a good time to start playing with the new technologies I have been seeing the last couple of days. I have downloaded Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio (November 2009) before I left my hotel room. I was planning to work with it in Windows Virtual PC. Then I realize I have not created one with Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010, this will take me a while to set up; so Azure will have to wait until I get home. I had also downloaded everything for Silverlight 4 development. I have an XP virtual image with Visual Studio 2010 which I started installing on the software on. Once that was completed the Silverlight 4 setup, it was time for the next session.

For the second session of the day I had scheduled “What’s New for Windows Communication Foundation 4”. I decided not to go to that session, but to do some HOL (hands-on-labs) instead. While on way to the HOL’s, I saw a great demonstration at the Live Labs product team’s booth on Pivot. I got information on how to start using this technology; another thing to try when I get home. I then started working on the “Develop Visually Engaging Applications with Bing Maps Silverlight Control” (HOL). This was a great lab it showed me that it is easy to incorporate this technology in a silverlight page. It did have some trouble with the developer code, but it told me how to get one I will do this when I get home. I am planning to do a talk on Silverlight with DotNetNuke (DNN) for the C-DUG, I believe I will incorporate this in to my presentation.

The Next three sessions of the day are for me the most interesting ones of PDC09, since my area of focus currently is developing business applications with Silverlight. These sessions are “Building Amazing Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft .NET RIA Services”, “Developing Testable Silverlight Applications” and “Mastering Microsoft .NET RIA Services” will help me do this. .Net RIA service was introduced at MIX09. At MIX09,  I missed Brad Abrams session but went to Nikhil Kothari session. For me “.NET RIA Services” was highlight of MIX09.

Therefore next session I went to was “Building Amazing Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft .NET RIA Services” presented by Brad Abrams. Since MIX09, I have watch Brad’s presentation many times and follow his blog, These resources has helped the most with the web application I am developing for Prince Williams Special Olympics. He covered some of the new features on what now is called WCF RIA Services and Silverlight4; such as the data binding picker, increase support for converters, “connect-the-dots’ data binding, improved validation support.

Today, I decided to go to a lunch session on “Developing Testable Silverlight Applications”. I arrived late, because I decided to eat lunch first. This was a good talk, will have to see this session again online. They demonstrated using the MVVM pattern and the Silverlight Unit Test Framework which will be very helpful to me with the application I am developing.

My next session of the day was “Mastering Microsoft .NET RIA Services” which was great follow-up to the Brad Abram session. They talk about that while “RIA services” is now for Silverlight, but there are future plans for it to be use with ASP.NET AJAX and ASP.NET Web Forms among other technologies.  This session demonstrated how the “unit of work” gets done in “RIA services”. This session also demonstrated how to do authorization. This was my last session of PDC09,

I decided not to go to “Unleashing the Power of Excel on the Web” session which was on my schedule for the last timeslot at PDC09.  This was a great PDC.