I have to say that I had an absolute blast presenting at the NH .Net User Group last night. It was a good crowd that seemed genuinely interested in the topic and threw up some good questions. I only angered the “demo gods” once, but was able to dig out and keep to my plan for what I wanted to cover in the presentation. With the 2 hour format, I was actually able to cover more ground than I had elsewhere, stating with a bit of “Hello World” and running all the way through authentication and the HTML Bridge.

I have posted the latest version of the presentation slides, code, and “script.” As usual, the script is an interactive PDF version of the mind-map that I use, and it includes hyperlinks to the references for the pertinent topics covered in the presentation. To use it, start at 1:00 and work through the topics in a clockwise rotation. The content is available here.

My one glitch occurred during the Authentication segment – to date the most fragile piece of the whole event. I got aggressive and uncommented too much out of the web.config too early. The result was that I had set things up for Forms Authentication, with Anonymous access disabled. When I went to add the web service reference from the Silverlight Client project, the tool failed to obtain information about the service (because it was trying to request information from the server anonymously.) Once I commented out the anonymous restriction and recompiled, things were working fine.

Now it is time to set things up for Silverlight 3 – I hope to do something at the upcoming Connecticut Code Camp on June 13, which is likely to be my next presentation opportunity.

Many thanks to the audience and especially to Pat Tormey who runs the NH group.

At the Boston Code Camp last week I got to talking with Pat Tormey who runs the NH .Net User Group and he asked if I could bring my Silverlight talk to their April meeting. After he sat through the presentation he was still interested, so it looks like I’ll be holding off on changing the presentation content to Silverlight 3 for a couple more weeks.

I’m really looking forward to this talk. My introduction to the User Group Communities came through the NH .Net User group, back before my daughter was born and when it was meeting in Tyngsboro, MA. I saw some great presentations there, and I think I owe Sam Gentile an apology or two as I asked him about any potential impact to video playback that could be caused by the unpredictable timing of the .Net framework’s GC collections. I got to see some really good speakers talk about a wide range of topics dating back to the beginnings of .Net. It is a great opportunity to try to give something back to this group.

I’ll be presenting on Wednesday, April 15^th at 6:30 PM at the Eaton Richmond Center at Daniel Webster College in Nashua (directions.) There’s usually a gathering at Shorty’s off of Exit 6 (next to the Home Depot) in Nashua following these events.