I’ll be speaking at the PADNUG meeting next week in Portland at the Microsoft office. Rich asked me to present on jQuery again as I did last year which was surprising to me, but Ok – nothing I like doing better than jQuery presentations – I guess I have material for 10 of these sessions :-}. A lot has changed in the last year and when I gave the last presentation at PADNUG jQuery was just starting to get some attention in the .NET world and most people had heard but not used it yet. By now many more people have been using jQuery for a while so  this talk likely will hit a different tone.

We’ll take a small poll at the beginning to decide exactly what to cover :-} but my goal is to talk more about the server communication aspects and how to use jQuery effectively as a front end tool in applications without repeating functionality and striking the right balance.

The official abstract I gave Rich is a bit more vague:

jQuery is a compact and powerful JavaScript library that greatly simplifies JavaScript and HTML DOM manipulation. jQuery's appeal lies in its compact implementation and flexible and elegant use of selectors to select document elements and manipulate them using jQuery's flexible and intuitive functions in a browser independent way. From AJAX functionality, to easy DOM manipulation, to simplified event handling, to simple effects, this compact library provides many ways to make client scripting much easier and… actually fun. Additionally a vast community of add-in authors have added hundreds of extremely useful, easy to use and free plug-ins that provide many common useful features to common client side tasks. In this session I'll show a quick review of jQuery's core client side features, but the main focus of this session will be on integration of ASP.NET server side functionality for AJAX callbacks. We'll look at various ways to interface with ASP.NET with jQuery via manual implementations in WebForms and MVC applications as well as using ASMX/WCF to handle callbacks. We'll also look at several examples that demonstrate how to effectively manage client side and server side operations in a maintainable way to minimize code and layout duplication by using client side templates and wrapping jQuery functionality via server side components.

If you’re in or around Portland stop on by. The Portland user group is a fun bunch and there’ll be some time for socializing afterwards across the street. If you’ve never come to a user group meeting now’s your chance – it’s a good way to get in touch with other developers in your area and exchange ideas and see what others are doing around you.

Hopefully I’ll see you there.

Busy November: Training in Houston, ASP.NET Connections in Vegas

I’ll also be doing some training for EPS Software/Code Magazine brand in early November in Houston Texas. If you’re interested in going deep with jQuery I’ll be teaching a 3 day Crash Course for using jQuery and Ajax in ASP.NET. Short sessions are fine, but this 3 day course goes deep in various ways that you can use jQuery in your applications from rich client functionality, to server integration, managing the user interface effectively between client and server side code and extending jQuery with third party and your own plug-ins and server control functionality.

The other course is for FoxPro and Web Connection developers thinking about moving to .NET. This 3 day Crash Course to Web Development for FoxPro and Web Connection Developers is an introduction to Web development with ASP.NET geared towards FoxPro developers with FoxPro specific perspective discussing differences and similarities and how they transfer to .NET. This is a no-nonsense class that goes through proper project setups, dealing effectively with data access using business objects and creating Web applications using both Web Forms (similar to the Web COntrol Framework) as well as MVC (similar to Process based Template applications in classic West Wind Web Connection). The focus is on comparing approaches used in the West Wind Web Connection Framework and how those approaches can be applied in the .NET world for building Web applications.

Both classes are in Houston text on November 2nd and November 5th respectively. All of that will be followed up by ASP.NET Connections the following week in Las Vegas where I’m doing 3 sessions (jQuery and ASP.NET, ECommerce with ASP.NET and Low Level ASP.NET: Handlers and Modules and the ASP.NET Pipeline )– I guess I’ll be busy preparing for all of this stuff…

Good thing my back is out and I’m stuck inside with nothing else than my computer, huh? Grr… it’ll be windy tomorrow too, and I surely won’t be able to go…

I hope to see you at one of these events.