Keith Hill -- What is Windows PowerShell and Why .NET Developers Should Care"

Keith Hill is a three time Windows PowerShell MVP. He has a Masters from CU Boulder in Electrical and Computer Engineering and has worked for Hewlett-Packard and now Agilent Technologies for 21 years. During the past 16 years Keith has worked on various commercial software products including VEE, a "visual" data flow programming environment, and T&M Toolkit which is a .NET-based class library and a set of Visual Studio integrated tools for scientists and engineers. Outside of work, Keith enjoys playing guitar and recording music, riding his dirt bike and coordinating the open source project PowerShell Community Extensions on CodePlex. His Windows PowerShell blog can be found at http://KeithHill.spaces.live.com

Dick Grier -- Virtual Earth + VB .NET = Windows Forms Mapping for the Desktop

The MapPoint <http://www.microsoft.com/mappoint/default.mspx> web service is based on SOAP and provides the conventional way that Microsoft assumes that desktop applications will provide mapping to internet-connected Windows Forms applications (desktop and mobile).

While Virtual Earth <http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/> and MapPoint are based on many common underlying technologies, Virtual Earth uses JavaScript to access the underlying web service. Thus, VE relies on an Internet browser as the execution host for the JavaScript code. There may be good reasons to prefer Virtual Earth to MapPoint, both from technological and marketing standpoints. So, how might we use VE, which is designed for a web-based application in a Smart-client (desktop) application?

The answer is straight-forward, though the implementation details make “straight-forward” a somewhat optimistic statement. Watch these details unfold during this talk.