For all of you in the Ohio area, I’ll be speaking at the Day of .NET on April 19th. My topic will be “User Interface Design for Programmers.” I will explain the basics of usability, information architecture, user experience, etc. It will be focused on explaining the concepts to people who aren’t and don’t think like designers. I’ll make the materials publicly available after the talk.
As an aside, MS is doing good stuff listening to standards developers. They are no longer “evil” in the sight of standards developers. From their concession on IE8, improved CSS support in IE7/8, and they are also building compliance into ASP.NET. Standards developers have less of a reason to avoid MS development technologies.