Open Source .NET Exchange

I’ll be presenting a short session on jQuery at the SkillsMatter Open Source .NET Exchange here in London on January 22nd.

If you’re a .NET developer of any kind, you’ve probably seen or heard people talking about stuff like web UI frameworks, object-relational mapping, fluent APIs, asynchronous messaging, aspect-oriented programming – and you might well be wondering what they are, and why they’re relevant. These events are designed as a sort of “tasting menu” of open source frameworks and techniques – six fifteen-minute sessions that’ll give you some idea of what these technologies can do, why you might want to consider using them, and where you can find more information if you’re interested.

In the jQuery session, I’ll be showing you how jQuery’s CSS-based selector syntax and flexible “chaining” API let you add rich, cross-browser behaviour and effects to your web pages. I’ll demonstrate how to add animation, dynamic content and AJAX callbacks to your web pages,  and hopefully include a few examples from the multitude of freely-available plug-ins and libraries built on top of the jQuery framework. Yes, all that in fifteen minutes. Like I said, jQuery makes things easy.

You can see the full programme at SkillsMatter’s site. I’m really pleased that I’m speaking first, because it means I get to relax and listen to the rest of the speakers afterwards – in particular, Mike Hadlow’s session on the repository pattern. Mike’s code (and help!) were invaluable on one of my projects earlier this year, and in particular his Linq-to-SQL repository – part of the Suteki Shop project - was a great example of how this pattern can make your code cleaner and your life easier.

If any or all of this sounds interesting (or if you just fancy an evening of beer, pizza and geek chat) then please sign up and come along - especially if you’ve not come along to an event like this before.