Big booth out. Big house in.

Normally for a big conference event like TechEd, we, as a company, go hell-for-leather. Of course, in order to provide this experience, we spend quite a bit of money.

This year, though, we paused with our metaphoric pen on the dotted line. You see, TechEd 2010 is taking place in New Orleans.

I'm sure like me you were horrified at the extreme flooding of New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. We at DevExpress can only wonder at the horrors of losing our homes and belongings due to this awful disaster. We've just never experienced such events. In thinking about it, we came to the realization that we cannot in all conscience spend what we normally do on a booth for three days and just leave. We didn't feel it was right.

So we've decided to put the money we'd normally spend towards building a house.

TechEd North America 2010 will be hosted by the noble city of New Orleans. This year, DevExpress have decided to shift the focus from our elaborate demonstrations and go all out in another direction – an important charitable direction.

In 2005 a huge natural disaster caused the worst civil engineering disaster in American history. Just five years on, in June 2010, you will find the DevExpress team standing alongside Habitat for Humanity, as they invest in the future of a city almost devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The team will be raising funds for charitable causes in New Orleans and helping to build a home for a deserving local family.

Keep your eyes on the DevExpress blogs, Twitter and Facebook as we do our bit to help rebuild The Big Easy.

TechEd 2010 New Orleans

Mehul recently showed us that in DXperience v2010 vol 1 the Bing Maps service had been integrated into the ASP.NET Pivot Grid.

DevExpress customer, Richard Beezley, had been working on an XAF application to store statistics from field equipment, and he wanted to plot the location data he held in for each piece of equipment on a map.

Not a problem for our intrepid data dude, Gary Short. Using some sample data he found lying around on the internet, he’s created a new XAF sample application to plot location data to Bing Maps.

Plotting Location Data in Bing Maps with XAF

New additions to the Silverlight control suite continue to emerge, but another great new extension that should not be overlooked is the WPF Pivot Grid.

Many of you have been long-time users of the XtraPivotGrid, and the good news is that its WPF counterpart is gaining parity. Azret takes us through some of the highlights that we can expect with DXPivotGrid for WPF in the upcoming release.

Check out all of the latest news items for the v2010 vol 1 release in the DevExpress Blogs. And don’t forget to leave your feedback.

WPF Pivot Grid Control Silverlight Drag and Drop Silverlight Outlook and Explorer Style NavBar Control Silverlight Report Viewer and the XtraReports End User Report Designer ASP.NET Combo Box Performance Improvements Expanded Support for Microsoft Office

On Monday, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform, Scott Guthrie, will be joined by Scott Hanselman, Jeffrey Palermo and our very own Mark Miller for a developer event of epic proportions.

Tickets for this event in Arizona are very limited. If you want to participate check out Rachel’s blog for further details on how to get involved.

AZ.net Scott Guthrie Day of .NET