Web 09 and Expression for Arts Sake

So it's been a busy few weeks, last week I was at Web 09 a great conference here in Auckland. I was able to spend a day at a one day workshop with Tim Heur and Arturo Toledo going over some of the new features in Silverlight 3. Some excellent talks from a wide range of companies and parts of our industry. Iparticularly enjoyed the discussion of designer / developer workflow by Dan Rubin and Steve Smith. It was also good to see some of the developer tools coming out from Adobe (particularly Adobe Catalyst) and how they fare against the upcoming Blend 3, they're pretty much feature for feature.

After Web 09 I headed down to Wellington for "Expression for Arts Sake" a new event run by Nigel Parker from Microsoft. Each invited company sends a designer and developer, the first two days were spent with sessions and exercises using Silverlight and Blend run by Tim, Arturo and Nigel. After that we spent a few days doing our own projects with the fantastic opportunity to have these guys teach us and help us fix any problems we encounter with some new tools. Some of my posts over the next few weeks will be around what I encountered during this week.

All in all a good couple of weeks but I'm pretty exhausted. I'd like to thank all the guys involved in these events, I've learnt more in the last few weeks than a very long time.