Oh Canada - The Canadian Mini-Speaking Tour

Hey everyone!  This past week/weekend I was in Canada to speak at two user groups and a code camp (could be a sitcom title) on some Silverlight related topics.  It was very exciting to be heading to the country where the Winter Olympics were happening.  Above and beyond that, according to my community manager (a Canadian) I was going to get to experience the rich culture that Canada has to offer and get a lifetime of experiences in my short time there. 

So what did I show up to?

Canada is cold!!!  Late February in Saskatchewan is not the balmy beach weather you would expect, but rather the frozen tundra and more ice than I've seen this entire winter in the Boston metro area.

All joking aside though, I had a great time in my three city tour and I wanted to thank a few people for their hard work in pulling these events off:

• Jennifer Pearcey from the Saskatoon .Net User Group set up a great meeting around their local college, however (and I don't blame you Canadians for this or anything) thanks to the US beating Canada in hockey, there was an epic Canada vs. Russia match at the same time as my talk.  For those of you who chose national pride over .Net goodness, slides and code samples are below. :)
• Gary Pronych from the Regina .Net User Group also set up a meeting at the local college (I sense a theme here), at which I had a lot of fun and got to tackle some good questions concerning the current state of Silverlight, WCF RIA Services, MEF, and other surrounding technologies.
• D'Arcy Lussier from the Winnipeg Code Camp and his crew arranged an awesome code camp- for most tracks (besides the one I was speaking at) it was a really tough choice on where to go!  It was also nice getting to connect with some local (and not so local) speakers there as well, all part of the very active community they have north of the border.

I had a lot of fun with the "Do's and Don'ts of Rich Client Development" and "Silverlight, Prism, and MVVM - The RIA Trifecta" talks that I presented and look forward to the next time I get to be up in the area.

You can find the slides and source code for both talks right here.