Many of today (and tomorrow’s) development projects lend themselves nicely to RIA application patterns. Brad Abrams, Group Program Manager for the UI Framework and Services team at Microsoft, is giving a breakout session at the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference in October which will use the 100% free Silverlight runtime and Visual Studio tools to show delegates how Silverlight offers a compelling RIA development experience that works on Linux, the Mac and Windows as well as all major browsers.

"With HD video, vector based graphics and a rich set of controls including DataGrid," notes Abrams, "Silverlight offers a compelling development experience in nearly any programming language you’d like from C# and VB to JavaScript and Python."

In his session, Abrams adds, delegates will learn how to use Visual Studio to create applications, how to create UI using XAML markup and code, how to retrieve data from a the web, and how to manipulate data with XML and LINQ.

Abrams' team at Microsoft is responsible for delivering the developer platform that spans both clients and web based applications as well as the common services that are available to all applications. Specific technologies owned by this team include ASP.NET, Atlas, and Windows Forms. He was was a founding member of both the Common Language Runtime, and .NET Framework teams.

Abrams has been designing parts of the .NET Framework since 1998 when he started his framework design career building the BCL (Base Class Library) that ship as a core part of the .NET Framework. He was also the lead editor on the Common Language Specification (CLS), the .NET Framework Design Guidelines, the libraries in the ECMA\ISO CLI Standard, and has been deeply involved with the WinFX and Windows Vista efforts from their beginning

He co-authored Programming in the .NET Environment, and was editor on .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference Vol 1 and Vol 2 and the Framework Design Guidelines.

Brad Abrams joins a Speaker Faculty of top industry front-end engineers, UX experts, Web 2.0 pioneers and industry luminaries, including:

• The CTO of Adobe - Kevin Lynch (keynote)
• Microsoft's Silverlight boss - Scott Guthrie (keynote)
• The discoverer of JSON - Douglas Crockford
• The creator of jQuery - John Resig
• Engineering manager of the YUI Team at Yahoo! - Eric Miraglia
• Senior Evangelist, Amazon - Jeff Barr
• Developer Advocate, Google - Chris Schalk
• Architect at eBay - Michael Galpin
• Director, User Interface Engineering at Netflix - BillScott
• VP of Engineering at TripIt.com - Andy Denmark
• Chief dragon-wrangler for Komodo - Shane Caraveo  
• Chairman & CEO of WaveMaker - Chris Keene
•  CSO of Curl - Jnan Dash 
• CTO of Pathfinder Development - Dietrich Kappe
• Sun's AJAX Architect - Greg Murray
• Technology Evangelist for Web Services and Web 2.0 Apps at Sun - Arun Gupta
• Senior Engineer and Designer, Yahoo! - Nate Koechley
• President and senior trainer at Object Training Group - James Harmon
• Lead Developer of the Qcodo Development Framework for PHP - Michael Ho
• VP of Business Development at CommuniGate Systems - Jon Doyle
• Sr. Developer at the creative agency Magnani Caruso Dutton - Mike Girouard
• Lead Developer for the Oracle Fusion Middleware Integration Platform - Rakesh Saha
• UI Architect at Edream Solutions - Sue Googe
• System Operations Manager at EngineYard - Yehuda Katz
• Co-Founder & COO of Concept Solutions - John Krahulec
• Co-Founder & COO of Finicity - Nicholas Thomas
• Principal Consultant, Experience Design at Molecular - Evan Gerber
• Principal Engineer, VeriSign - Karthik Shyamsunder
• Principal Software Developer, Red Hat - Thomas Heute
• Operations Manager of the OpenAjaxAlliance - John Ferraiolo
• Web Theorist, IBM - Andrew Donoho
• Tech Lead of the Spring Faces project  - Jeremy Grelle
• Senior Consultant at SpringSource - Rossen Stoyanchev
• Development Team Lead for the EGL Rich UI - Chris Laffra
• Development Manager, UI Framework and Services, Microsoft - Matt Gibbs
• Managing Partner of Catalyst Resources - Paul Giurata