This weekend (Saturday, June 5, 2010) I attended the New York City Silverlight Firestarter.  I had the opportunity to attended the MVC firestarter in New York last year in August and subsequently made contract with Steve Bohlen who helped introduce me to the technical community in New York.  I find that with these sorts of events, for me, its hit or miss.  For the most part the content consists of examples that I have seen and features I am already aware of.  Though you do also tend to find nuggets of things you didnt know, and this event was no different.

Perhaps the best thing that came out of this talk was clarification on the MVVM pattern.  I attended a session at CodeMash 2010 on MVVM and was able to grasp the basic idea, but I could never understand what the purpose of the ViewModel was and why a control concept seemed to be missing.  Thanks to the presentation today by Todd Snyder of Infragistics the concept was clarified for me.  I now see the pattern as mostly a client side pattern, not a pattern for the solution as a whole.  In fact the acronym would be more accurate as MVVC (Model View ViewController).

Of course, whenever I hear Silverlight being talked about I am interested to see how people are using and organizing application which leverage RIA services.  I love the concept of RIA services, but I think the technology needs more maturation before it will truly be ready for primetime.  Not to worry, in the mean time we have standard WCF which works pretty darn well.

But the main reason I got to these events is for the people. I just love to meet and talk with people about technology.  In particular, today I was seeking advice on solving a problem I was having with my proof of a new architecture for a application I am developing for the client. After much discussion I think I settle on something. I do have questions on its performance, but the idea is very sound and accomplishes many of the goals I was seeking to achieve.

June 19th is the WCF Firestarter. Very much looking forward to that.