SkillsMatter Progressive.NET Tutorials 2011

Some of you may have heard about - or attended - SkillsMatter's Progressive.NET Tutorials over the last couple of years. This is a three-day program of in-depth workshops covering the latest languages, frameworks and techniques in .NET development. The great thing about the workshop format is that it provides enough time to actually get some hands-on experience; instead of the rapid-fire 45-minute lectures you'll find at most conferences, you can actually try things out, ask questions, work through examples, and really get to grips with the techniques or frameworks you're exploring.

This year, Ian Cooper - whom you may know from the London .NET User Group - has put together a great programme of speakers and topics, and I'm really excited to say that, for the first time, I'll be there as a speaker instead of an attendee.

My workshop is called "Front-End Tips for Back-End Devs". I'll be looking at how many of the techniques we take for granted in back-end development - including DRY, abstractions, packaging and dependency management -  can be applied to your page layouts, stylesheets and scripts. We'll cover semantic markup, we'll take a whirlwind tour of all the wonderful new tags introduced by HTML5, we'll look at CSS sprites and media queries, and we'll see how you can keep your web UI as clean, elegant and maintainable as the rest of your codebase.

There's also Damjan Vujnovic talking about TDD in JavaScript; I went along to one of Damjan's talks earlier this year and was really impressed, so I'm looking forward to the opportunity to go over his ideas in a little more depth. Jon Skeet will be talking about async/await programming on C# 5 (no word yet on whether Tony the Pony will be there). There's workshops on continuous deployment, on web development in F# using the WebSharper framework, on packaging and dependency management, on REST, on Nancy, on SimpleData - in fact, if you've heard the .NET community buzzing about anything in the last year or so, chances are there's a workshop here that will show you what they're all so excited about.

It's at the SkillsMatter eXchange in London, from 5-7th September 2011. The cost is £425 (yes, it's not free, but you do get three days of top-notch content without giving up your evenings or weekends) - and you can use the promo code PROGNET50 to get £50 off.

Sign up online here. To keep up with event news, follow the hashtag #prognet on Twitter, and it'd be great to see you there.