After speaking at the St. Louis Day of .NET last month on building WPF and Silverlight applications using Expression Blend, I had several people come up to me and, very excitedly, tell me how they wish there was more in-depth training available for not only Blend, but for XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language).

Well, your wishes have been granted.

I'm very pleased to announce that we'll be hosting a two day free training event called XamlFest at the St. Louis Microsoft offices from Thursday, January 29th to Friday January 30th. This will be a classroom style event led by fellow Softie John Pelak and, to a lesser degree, myself. We'll be going in depth on the XAML markup language and how it is used in both WPF and Silverlight 2.0 applications. We will also go deep on how to use Expression Blend to visually design application interfaces.

Here's all the information on the event:

Dates
The event will take place on Thursday, January 29, 2009 to Friday, January 30, 2008.

Attendees
This event is targeted toward software developers and designers who want to learn more about XAML, Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight 2 and Expression Blend 2. We can accommodate 40 people for this session and registration will be accepted on a first come/first served basis.

Venue
Microsoft North Central District: St. Louis, Missouri
3 City Place Dr., Suite 1100
St. Louis, MO 63141
Phone: (314) 994-1800
Fax: (314) 991-8762

Registration
To register for XamlFest, send an email with your contact information to xamlfest-stlouis@live.com. Only 40 seats are available, so be sure to register early if you want to attend. Also, we ask that, if you find you can't make it for the session, please let us know so we can let someone else come in your place.

Please register early, because we anticipate the seats filling up fast. I look forward to seeing at XamlFest at the end of this month.