INETA NorAm is pleased to announce the election of the following individuals to the Board of Directors starting April 3rd.

• Rob Zelt, President
• Mike Vincent, Vice President
• Scott Spradlin, Secretary
• Morgan Baker, Treasurer
• Steve Andrews, Director
• Lori McKinney, Director
• Randy Walker, Director
• Shawn Weisfeld, Director
• Chris Williams, Director

We look forward to having this great group of people working on behalf of the developer community. We would also like to thank all of the other individuals that were nominated, and hope that they will join us in helping grow our community.

Please direct any questions to noram.secretary@ineta.org.

Coders For Charities is a 3-day charity event that pairs charities and local software developers. Charities often do not have the funds to implement a new website or intranet or database solution. Software developers often do not volunteer for charities because their skills do not apply. This event is the perfect marriage of these two needs; software developers volunteering their time to help charities better serve their community though the latest technology!

For more information, contact Doug Butscher ( doug@coders4charities.org) or visit http://coders4charities.org.

The Microsoft MVP Program has recently launched The Microsoft MVP Award Program Blog, showcasing some of the amazing and inspiring contributions of Microsoft's Most Valuable Professionals!

With a fresh new post each day, learn how MVPs are helping technical community watchers like you to find information and share knowledge with a global audience. Take a look at the blog, be inspired and tap into the rich knowledge and connections of our awesome community! The blog is currently in English but we do feature non-English content.

Want to get involved?

Support us by linking back to our blog from your own site! If you enjoyed the blog, you might also want to take a look at our Twitter site and Official Facebook Fan Page.

We hope you enjoy reading the blog and find it a valuable and enriching experience. If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact the blog moderator.

The MSDN team recently launched a series of free "YouTube" style videos on the Azure Services Platform and they want YOUR feedback. These short screencasts are designed to help customers "see" the Azure Platform in action without a token or access to the CTP. Topics range from " How Do I: Get Started With Azure?" to "How Do I: Use the Microsoft Live Framework Resource Browser?", and most topics include code downloads. So what do you think? Are there other topics you would like to see from Microsoft? Do you think they miss the mark? Let us know why. We want to hear from you. Join the forums.

Azure Services Platform Video Landing Page (Keep checking back or subscribe to RSS since we'll be posting a total of 50 videos over the next 6 weeks)

The Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) Threat Modeling Tool allows developers to identify and mitigate potential security issues early, offering a methodology that any software architect or developer can use easily and effectively. In the article Getting Started with the SDL Threat Modeling Tool, Adam Shostack invites you to follow Deb (a developer), Paul (a program manager), and Tim (a tester) through the process of developing their first threat model, and he discusses each screen of the tool.

To download the SDL Threat Modeling Tool, click here.

New! Watch SDL War Story Videos

Hear stories from the people at Microsoft who encountered challenges and successes in implementing the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), the industry-leading assurance process, at Microsoft. Steve Lipner tells about security struggles that began with Code Red and led to the Microsoft Security Push. Mike Howard tells the story of the Security Push, the massive security training effort and the other challenges Microsoft overcame to make the SDL part of its development culture.

Click here to watch the videos.

If you are a .NET Developer today you probably have heard of Microsoft Silverlight. You may have noticed a .xaml file in your project, saw it was all xml and wondered why anyone would code an app in xml. After all I am a VB/C# programmer not a designer right?

All that xml is a language called XAML which stands for eXtensible Application Markup Language. Its true power lies in its ability to serialize out your objectives into a format that is universally readable. In fact since .NET 3.0 was released XAML has been used across all of Microsoft's presentation technologies.Windows programming via Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Rich Internet applications via Silverlight, and even the new Microsoft Surface table (whose API is based on WPF) all use XAML as the glue. Thanks to the great technologies already introduced in early Framework versions like Partial Classes, you can code a .NET application entirely in XML. But wouldn't working with XML be time consuming and take longer than what I can do today in code?

The answer is no, and in fact, it can be a lot quicker thanks to new tools like Expression Blend. These tools have been created around XAML and can both read and write out to it. They also offer rich design time visualization and the ability to "draw" your interface instead of coding it. In the past working with XAML meant editing the xml manually in tools like XAMLPad. This experience hasn't changed much even in Visual Studio 2008 and you will find yourself still editing the xml manually when it comes to things like Silverlight. When shifting to XAML technologies like WPF there are certain concepts you will need to get your head around. Databinding, logical/visual trees, dependency properties, routed events, resource dictionaries and templates all add a barrier of difficulty if only thought of abstractly. Tools like Expression Blend allow you to see these things visually on your screen and then go back in and dip into the XAML. It is a great way to learn and has made things "real" for a lot of the developers I talk to.

Expression Blend

Blend is where you create your User Interface (UI). This is your "WinForms Designer" for a modern day XAML application. It supports the creation and real design time editing of both WPF and Silverlight. Blend adds visual editing tools to some of those XAML features that we only had intellisense to aid us in before. Here are just a few of them:

• Databinding - Blend has a resource palette that visually allows you to bind to things like .NET Classes, XML and other Elements within your tree.
• Template Editing - Blend has a visual template editor for creating and modifying your controls (control templates) as well as how your databound data (data templates) should look.
• Animations (Storyboarding) - The biggest comment I get from developers here is that it reminds them of the old Office macro recorder. Animations in XAML are time based and not frames based. This concept is pretty natural to developers because we are used to working with things like timers in our code. Blend will actually allow you to draw what your UI elements look like at different points in time and then generate the key frames for you. The results can be pretty impressive.
• Visual State Manager (VSM) - Once you get your head around animations you will realize that every control you make can animate in numerous ways based on what the user is doing on screen. The VSM allows you to manage the "states" of all of these controls, what they will look like when a user "mouses over" for example and how long those animations will last. Most of the out of box controls in Silverlight 2 for example all have predefined states that you can go in and edit in Blend and change however you like
• XAML Resources - Blend allows you to visually add things like Resource Dictionaries and apply those resources to any elements you see on screen.

For more information on Expression Blend check out these links:

Expression Blend 2 - http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Overview.aspx?key=blend
Expression Community - http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx
Expression Studio "How Do I?" Videos - http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/cc136535.aspx

David Isbitski
Senior Developer Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation
http://blogs.msdn.com/davedev | http://twitter.com/thedavedev

Ramp Up is a free, online, community-based program that can help you save time in learning Microsoft technology. The easy-to-access content, provided by subject-matter gurus, is specifically tailored for the Ramp Up program and offered in a variety of forms, including articles, virtual labs, "codecasts" and "slidecasts."

Find out the details at http://www.MyRampUp.com

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  In a debugging session, it is possible to view and explore the values of elements. It is also possible to modify those values in an effort to determine how a new value affects the outcome. In this video, Todd Miranda demonstrates how to use watch and immediate windows to test various scenarios while debugging.
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd442479.aspx
  
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  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd442440.aspx