This year’s NT Konferenca is starting next week! Organized by local Microsoft, it will be held (for the 15th year in a row!) in beautiful Portoroz (Slovenia), that’s now become a traditional venue for this event. Over 130 sessions, labs and seminars will be delivered by over 130 speakers in only four days – that’s a lot of content.

I’ll be speaking (and discusing things) on the following conference sessions:

Tuesday, 25th

10:15 – 11:30 Silverlight and MEF
11:45 – 12:30 ASP.NET, WebForms, Silverlight – What to choose? [BoF session, co-hosting with @dusanzu]

Wednesday, 26th

10:15 – 11:30 Silverlight and WCF RIA Services
11:45 – 12:30 Tips & Tricks: Expression Blend For Developers [Tips & Tricks session, co-presenting with @krofdrakula]
13:30 – 14:15 What’s new in Silverlight 4?
16:30 – 17:30 MVP Panel [A panel discussion with all Slovenian MVPs]

See any theme/pattern here? ;)

You can follow me and my whereabouts next week through twitter [@andrejt], with the official conference hashtag being #ntk10.

See you next week…

Windows 7 launch day was fun. I gave a talk on Expression tools (and related) – here’s the PowerPoint slide deck for those who asked for it:

I used Expression Blend 3 to build a photo viewer application, which I’ll blog about later; key points here were designer-developer workflow + using sample data and behaviors.

I blogged about the Microsoft ICE last year and I used that exact sample I’ve used in that blog post, but with one difference: did you know that by installing ICE on your desktop will, you can stitch panoramic (or large composite) photos right from your Windows Live Photo Gallery? It’s as easy as selecting the photos and click on the Extras menu item:

Yet another option for stitching a bunch of photos together will give you the Deep Zoom Composer(free and not listed as an Expression tool, but sure looks and feels like it), which has similar features and much more compositing power (different zoom levels, layers, etc.)

And for closing I briefly showcased Expression Encoder 3 and IIS Smooth Streaming.

Yup, fun.

This blog has been tagged.

Microsoft Tag Reader is available for a range of mobile devices, including iPhone. This is the second (I think) Microsoft app available in the iTunes Store - a way for Microsoft to introduce and promote their latest technologies to the Apple crowd.

I snapped a few tags I could find online. The results were at 100%, showing that the technology is quite stable and reliable... Just wondering how long until these “visual URLs” appear in the real life…

With HTC out of the picture and iPhone on hold, there's a new mobile making a great entrance - Sony Ericsson just announced XPERIA™ X1! Windows Mobile (! a new direction for SE !), QUERTY keyboard + finger touch navigation on 800x480 display, 3.2MP camera and lots of connectivity options are just a few features, which make this phone jump way up high in the candidate list. The only question is - again - availability... "Available in “selected markets” from the second half of 2008"? Huh!

What do you get when you mix apple and coke? Music on the Coke side of life, of course...

Psst! The secret to getting one of these babies is some luck and plenty of thirst. Or vice-versa...