Presentation Layer
ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, and the Future of Web Development
Understanding the future is critical for web developers. Decisions you make today need to be aware of what's coming if you're going to be successful on web. In this session, we'll examine ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight to gain a deep understanding of how these technologies can help us solve the problems of a rich, ajaxified Internet. From the rich client-side library in ASP.NETAJAX that changes the way you write JavaScript to the power of .NET in the browser with Silverlight, understanding how to leverage these technologies is key for future ASP.NET applications. We'll also examine the future of web browsers and seek to understand how they will affect the applications we build.
To AJAX or Not to AJAX
This session shows the power of AJAX in ASP.NET applications and how it could be used the wrong way.
SQL 2008 and PowerShell
SQL Server 2008 introduces support for Microsoft PowerShell. PowerShell is a powerful scripting shell that lets administrators and developers automate server administration and application deployment. It is more powerful than simple T-SQL and provides great features to SQL Server administrator.
This session will cover the basics of the SQL Server providers in PowerShell.
Silverlight 2.0 Made Easy
This session will introduce people to Silverlight 2.0 with coding in C# and VB.NET to build high quality, robust and elegant web sites.
Fun with HTTP Handlers (and Security)
Ever wish you can track what people download from your site? Or even worse, prevent people from downloading files for which they need to first pay. Well once someone figures out the web folder where you store files for download, they may just be able to browse to them. Let's put a stop to this now! While I give away a lot of software, I also make you pay for some of it, and by golly you're not breaking through the techniques for file protection that I'll teach you here.
Control Customization in Silverlight 2
Silverlight 2 provides a rich set of options for customizing your controls. Unlike other technologies, creating user and custom controls is not necessary to get the customized control you want. In this talk I will cover Compositing, Styling, Templating and Custom Controls to help attendees understand when and how to customize their controls.
Science fiction becomes reality with WPF
In this session you will see how the two worlds of science fiction and real-life software embrace each-other to form an astonishing mixture of art, user experience and functionality. We will show you a different perspective of how you can utilize modern technologies to achieve better interaction and presentation in ways you only consider possible in movies.
ASP.NET MVC: Red Pill or Blue Pill?
There is an emerging technology in the ASP.NET world that is going to radically change the way you think of ASP.NET development, and it's called ASP.NET MVC. In this session, we'll introduce ASP.NET MVC and explore this new way to think about web application development. We'll look at how you build a basic ASP.NET MVC application, how ASP.NET MVC enables TDD for the web, and discuss the pros and cons of switching to MVC. Attend this session and you'll know everything you need know to get started with ASP.NET MVC- or know enough to decide to stay with Web Forms. The choice is yours.
Blend 2.5 for Silverlight Developers
In this session, we will dig into how developers can use Blend for their Silverlight 2 applications. This includes tips and tricks for common graphic tasks like shiny buttons, clipping regions and grouping/layers. Common programmer tasks like event handling, data binding and stying is also covered.
WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007 Customization Developer Best Practices
In my teaching of the Ted Pattison course "The Great SharePoint Adventure", my greatest realization was that developers simply don't know how to get started with SharePoint customization with Visual Studio, nor especially what the best practices are, nor how to properly deploy and manage those customizations. So this session then will cover the best practices for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 customization, including:
1. Setting up your very own MOSS 2007 Development Environment
2. Best practices for SharePoint customization using Visual Studio
3. Develop and deploy a custom web part using Visual Studio (using STSDEV)
4. Develop and deploy a custom workflow using Visual Studio (using STSDEV)
5. Development resources
The best practices will cover:
1. Using a "code behind" technique for your ASPX pages and deploying to the GAC
2. Using "The Feature" to package your customization
3. Using Solution Packages (WSP) files to deploy your feature
4. AUTOMATION of Visual Studio Project generation and Solution Package generation using Ted Pattison's new STSDEV utility!
WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007 Web 2.0 – Controls / AJAX / Silverlight
Face it! The out of the box user interface for your Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 sites and your Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 sites is BORING! In this session we’ll look at spicing up your life a bit with many ways to make your SharePoint sites “Web 2.0”. This session includes:
1. New AJAX support provided with Service Pack 1. Learn how to AJAX enable your web.config files. Learn to AJAX enable your web parts and to call web services using AJAX. Integrate controls from the AJAX Control ToolKit.
2. A look at the SharePoint controls provided by third party Telerik.
3. Silverlight integration into SharePoint
And then watch your SharePoint sites come to life!
Managing WCF/WF Services with Windows Server “Dublin”
Now that WCF/WF services have gained some popularity companies are starting to ask the question “How do we manage those services?”. The most common problems with the today’s middle-tier services are related to the deployment of those services to test, staging and production environments, observing the operation of the services deployed, scaling the services that hit the boundaries of their servers, and versioning the services without requiring all clients to get upgraded simultaneously. This talk will show Microsoft’s approach for solving some of these problems. We will start with a single long-running durable Workflow service implemented in .Net 4.0 and we will show how it gets it persistence working. Then we will show how to export it and how to import it in a different environment. After that we will see how to inspect and control instances of that service.
Data Layer
Introducing the Entity Framework
The Entity Framework is the core of Microsoft's evolving data platform and has many layers of abstraction to give developers access to data, client-side views and schemas, as well as mapping of data to objects. This session will give you an understanding of what the Entity Framework is all about. You will learn how to build a basic Entity Data Model and inspect it's most important parts and learn basics of querying with Entity SQL and LINQ to Entities. You will also learn how to easily access it's highest level of abstraction in common databinding scenarios. Lastly the session will tempt you with the potential of building and using highly customized models as well as what lays beneath the surface of the Entity Framework APIs.The Entity Framework is the core of Microsoft's evolving data platform and has many layers of abstraction to give developers access to data, client-side views and schemas, as well as mapping of data to objects. This session will give you an understanding of what the Entity Framework is all about. You will learn how to build a basic Entity Data Model and inspect it's most important parts and learn basics of querying with Entity SQL and LINQ to Entities. You will also learn how to easily access it's highest level of abstraction in common databinding scenarios. Lastly the session will tempt you with the potential of building and using highly customized models as well as what lays beneath the surface of the Entity Framework APIs.
TSQL for 2005 and 2008
Take your queries to the next level! This highly technical, yet entertaining session focuses solely on advanced querying techniques to get the most out of your SQL Server 2005 & 2008 database. See a series of real-world examples to extract data from your databases in ways you've never seen before. 2005 techniques demonstrated include an ultra-fast way to do crosstab queries in SQL Server, XQuery and ranking. 2008 techniques demonstrated include, merge, SPATIAL data type, and Table-valued parameters. Along the way you'll get some insight into how SQL Server works.
SQL Server User-Defined Functions - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
T-SQL user-defined functions (UDFs) were first introduced in SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 added ability to implement UDFs using SQLCLR. While they are indeed a very nice feature from a developer's perspective, they can cause some headache for the DBA. In my consulting practice I often see UDFs being misused and/or causing performance problems. During this session we will analyze the pros and cons of using UDFs as well as their performance impact. You will leave the room with full understanding of how SQL Server handles optimization and execution of UDFs and when you should be careful in implementing them.
SQL Server 2008 Security
Security requirements have grown rapidly over the last few years. There are more and more regulations, both government as well as industry-specific, that require certain standards and procedures to be implemented and force changes to the way data is handled and stored. With the amount of data growing fast and evolving ways in which we access it, it is not an easy job to make sure that data stays secure while being accessible. In this session we will discuss SQL Server features that will help you solve security problems, especially new features in SQL Server 2008, such as Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), SQL Audit and Extensible Key Management (EKM).
Consuming Data with Silverlight 2
In this session, we will explore the different methods for dealing with data in your Silverlight 2 applications including LINQ, ASMX, WCF, REST, Astoria and WebClient calls. The session covers both how to consume data as well as how to expose data to Silverlight 2.
Performance optimizations of TSQL code in SQL Server 2005/2008
In this session we will go through the typical steps that should be done when TSQL statements do not perform as efficient as possible. The new features of SQL Server 2008 related to performance tuning will be covered.
Deep Dive into Entity Framework Object Services
The Entity Framework combined with the Entity Data Model (EDM) bring data access to a new level in Enterprise Applications. Entity Framework Object Services APIs, while providing a lot of automated functionality, are filled with features that give developers much more control over how objects are handled. The most important jobs of the ObjectContext are relationship management and change tracking. This session drills into how the ObjectContext manages relationships and how you can control its behavior. This is especially important in SOA scenarios where you may need to transport ObjectGraphs. We also look closely at change tracking, focusing on the challenges and solutions for dealing with data concurrency when moving objects across tiers in your enterprise applications. Knowing what to expect from these features and how to take control of them will empower you in your use of the Entity Framework and EDMs in your Web sites, SOA applications, and smart clients, as well as other applications that share the EDM.
SQL Reporting Services 2005 and What's New in 2008
SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services delivers enterprise, Web-enabled reporting functionality so you can create reports that draw content from a variety of data sources, publish reports in various formats.SQL-Reporting services is a very power full tool and has come a long way since the first version of it. Although there is room for improvement it is really worth looking at.I will address the following aspects of Reporting services: Report Server, Report Builder, Report Viewer both win32 and web. Besides the named functionality I will also address the whats new in 2008 for Reporting Services.
The Castle Project - Open Source Kick-Ass MVC/ORM/IoC Framework
The Castle Project is one of the open source projects that just might change your mind for the whole open source way of doing things. When we say “Open Source”, usually we refer to a low-quality, bad design, unusable and non-user-friendly products.
The Castle Project is one of “Those Open Source” projects that might just change your mind on the subject. Castle is the wrap-up around:
- Monorail – an ASP.NET MVC Framework, compatible with Mono
- ActiveRecord & ActiveWriter – an ORM implementation, including graphical tools integrated in VS 2005 & 2008 (same as LINQ to SQL, but they have it since VS 2003 and it works on SQL, Oracle, MySQL, Posgre, SqlLight, Db4 and many others). Built on top of NHibernate.
- MicroKernel – one of the most widely used IoC (Inversion of Control) implementations
- WindsorContainer – an Enterprise-class framework for designing and configuring reusable components (services, facilities, components, domain model entities, controllers, etc) in your applications. Built on top of MicroKernel and allowing parameterization of the configuration for your app. Incredible stuff. So you can basically declare the instances of the services in xml and the pass them as parameters to other pre-configured services.
Join me, and see how the Microsoft MVC Framework got its ideas and how a good open source project can be used for building 1st class enterprise applications, way ahead of its time. See how you can combine Monorail with Prototype, Scriptaculous and other well-know JS/Ajax frameworks, keep the unit testing coverage over 85% on the whole project (including UI) and still make it for the pub tonight.
Object-relational Mapping in Modern Architectures
WCF, WPF, Silverlight: Always new Buzzwords appear and come to market with new technologies, which are hard to learn. But how do those technologies integrate and collaborate? Data Access is usually encapsulated in a data access layer. Does this still make sense with the all over presence and acceptance of object-relational mapping (ORM)? Using surprisingly simple tools, you can implement basic and complex applications. This presentation shows that you need to rethink your architecture in order to implement persistent objects in nowadays application requirements. You will learn about the necessary feature set of an object-relational mapping tool and how it simplifies your daily work and how it reduces your data access code by 90%.
Business Data Catalog of Office Sharepoint Server 2007 and SQL Server 2005
Business Data Catalog is a new business integration feature in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to surface business data from back-end server applications without any coding. Business Data Catalog bridges the gap between the portal site and your business applications and enables you to bring in key data from various business applications to Office SharePoint Server 2007 lists, Web Parts, search, user profiles, and custom applications. To achieve this goal, Business Data Catalog provides homogeneous access to the underlying data sources with a metadata model that provides a consistent and simplified client object model. Business Data Catalog is the key infrastructural component around which the other Business Data features of Office SharePoint Server 2007 are built. We will explore how to expose SQL-Server 2005 data in a SP 2007 portal.
Business Layer
Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation
With the .NET 3.0 Framework, developers were given the plumbing to create business process management solutions graphically. In this session, Mark will introduce the basics of working with Workflow Foundation. This is a 100 level talk for developers that are new to WF. We will spend some time talking about the architecture and when best to use a tool like WF for the greatest return. We'll also compare WF to BizTalk and learn that they are completely different worlds.
ASP.NET Providers
Windows Workflow Rules and Policy
Windows Workflow includes a powerful rules engine similar to the one found in BizTalk Server. In this session, Mark will dig into how the rules engine does it's job and how forward chaining works. You'll also see how best to debug WF policy problems and the best way to take control of rule evaluation with code.
WCF the Manual Way... The Right Way
Visual Studio 2008 has plenty of templates to get us started with WCF, but with that comes a lot of extra weight that we simply do not need. In this session, I’ll teach you how to write WCF services in a completely manual fashion, including both the service side and the client side. You’ll see that it’s not hard, not a lot of work, and results in a much cleaner solution. We’ll keep WCF short, sweet, and to the point, just like this abstract.
Building Telerik Trainer in WPF and LINQ
This session is a technical case study on how Falafel built the main Telerik Video Trainer application.
Hierarchical Work Items in Visual Studio "Rosario"
In this session we are going to delve into a brand new functionality coming in next version of Visual Studio Team System – Rosario. Hierarchical work items feature allows you to create different kind of relationships between work items, create parent and child work items, prepare summary data on related work items and make your life managing the project a bit easier as a whole. We will go through some practical usage of this new feature and will see how it integrates with other Microsoft products also.
Building Powerful Office Applications the Easy Way with VSTO
This session focuses on the power and developer productivity of Visual Studio Tools for the Office System (VSTO). VSTO is a .NET Smart Client technology and this session will delve into the tips and tricks, positives and negatives when designing and building smart client applications with VSTO. VSTO allows you to build managed code applications with .NET languages like VB.NET and C# and have the functionality of those applications manifest in the rich user interfaces of Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, Outlook and others from the Office stack. You will learn just how easy it is to build powerful VSTO applications in this session and how to deploy those applications. This session will cover all versions of VSTO (versions 1.0 through 3.0) targeting both Office 2003 and Office 2007. VSTO addresses some of the biggest challenges that Office solution developers are facing today, including separation of data and view elements, server-side and offline scenarios, seamless integration with the Visual Studio tools, deployment and updating. Lastly, this session will delve into the future of VSTO and its potential coverage of document-centric and add-in solutions for the entire Office System stack.
Windows Workflow Scalability
WF is a compelling new tool available to every developer working with the latest version of the .NET Framework. Many processes take time to complete and holding them is memory prevents scaling. The answer to scaling workflows is the ability to persist them. Fortunately, the architects of WF gave us a mechanism to accomplish this task in the form of Peristence Services. In this session, Mark will explain how this works, what comes in the box and how you can write you own persistence service when needed.
Integrating WPF and WCF into Your Office Business Applications
This session will highlight many of the ways that the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and the Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) can be leveraged in applications built with Visual Studio Tools for the Office System (VSTO). Visual Studio® 2008 introduced an array of new features aimed at a wide range of Office solution types. With Visual Studio 2008, you can build solutions that incorporate the native capabilities of the Office client applications (like Outlook) combined with the sophisticated UI capabilities of WPF that's connected to remote data and services via WCF and use the RAD features of LINQ to manipulate that data. These new technologies provide opportunities for building owerful solutions with functionality that was previously difficult or impossible to achieve. Now that Office has evolved into a true development platform, office-based solutions are becoming increasingly sophisticated, less document-focused, and more loosely coupled. This session will show you how easy it is to build robust solutions that leverage the latest technologies. WPF provides developers and designers with a unified programming model for building rich Windows smart client user experiences with Office client applications that incorporate UI, media, and documents. WCF contains a support framework and a design-time toolset for building service-oriented solutions that connect rich Office clients with powerful server-side functionality and remote data access. Visual Studio 2008 provides a simple GUI wizard that lets you consume WCF services without having to worry about service metadata, protocols, or XML configuration.
Fun with Programming
Looking for something fun and inspirational? Let Carl Franklin show you some of the fun you can have with Visual Studio .NET and a few cool ideas, from artificial intelligence to practical joke software.
Architecture and Practices
The Daily Scrum
One of the most popular Agile project management and development methods, Scrum is starting to be adopted at major corporations and on very large projects. After an quick introduction to the basics of Scrum like: the Scrum Master, team, product owner, and burn down, and of course the daily Scrum, Stephen, Remi, and Joel show many real world applications of the methodology drawn from his own experience as a Scrum Master. Negotiating with the business, estimation, and team dynamics are all discussed as well as how to use Scrum in small organizations, large enterprise environments, and consulting environments. The speakers will also discuss using Scrum with virtual teams and even an offshoring environment. The session will finish with a large Q&A on best practices.
Be a Good Host and Fetch me a Service will you?
Unlike Web Services, WCF Services offer us several hosting solutions in order to serve our services (say that 5 times real fast). We are no longer locked into IIS, and in fact it probably is no longer the preferred solution anyway. In this session, I’ll show you how to host WCF services in IIS as well as console apps, Windows Services, WAS, and even straight Windows Forms applications. Oh well, since I’m on a roll, how about WPF as well as even a Workflow Service Host. You might have heard some say that “every class should be a service”, so I think I’ll add, “Every application can be a host”.
Introduction to Test-Driven Development
Test driven development (TDD) is a new way to code. It is an Agile method that consists of short iterations where new test cases covering the new functionality are written first, then the production code necessary to pass the tests is implemented, and finally the software is refactored to accommodate changes. This session will go over what TDD is, how to use it in Visual Studio Team System 2008 and 2005, and how it relates to Agile development methodologies such as XP and Scrum. We will see how TDD and the new MVC framework for ASP .NET makes testing web user interfaces very easy as well as data driven tests.
Pragmatic ASP.NET Tips, Tricks (And Tools), Part 1
Every experienced ASP.NET developer has picked up a few cool tricks or useful tools that they put to use on every new project after they've learned them. This session draws upon the experience of many successful ASP.NET developers and distills this knowledge into a collection of tips and tricks you can start using in your work today. Some of the topics covered in this session include error handling, tracing, caching, base page classes, site layout and architecture, and data access best practices. You'll learn about highly reusable Http Modules and Handlers and a few code routines you may want to add to your personal library. Stick around for part 2 if you’re interested in learning about a wide variety of (usually free) tools available to aid ASP.NET developers.
This session is appropriate for anyone who is working with ASP.NET today, and especially for those who are new to ASP.NET.
Pragmatic ASP.NET (Tips, Tricks) And Tools, Part 2
Every experienced ASP.NET developer has picked up a few cool tricks or useful tools that they put to use on every new project after they've learned them. This session will quickly demonstrate a wide variety of useful (and usually free) tools, libraries, and controls. If you learn about just one new tool that saves you a few hours, your time will have been well spent.
This session is appropriate for anyone who is working with ASP.NET today, and especially for those who are new to ASP.NET.
Designing for testability
Applications that are tightly coupled are not flexible or easy to extend, and worse yet, are not testable. Creating a robust testable application involves a series of design decisions that need to be made up front and that can drastically improve the overall outcome of the project. This session delves into advanced object orientated principles such as separation of concerns, dependency injection, inversion of control and other principles that allow you to create robust and testable applications. Concepts such as unit testing and mocking are also covered.
To buy, to modify or to build from scratch? How can you get your own template for effective project management with Team Foundation Server 2008?
Together with Team Foundation Server (TFS) - 2008 or 2005 Microsoft offers two methodologies: Microsoft Solutions Framework v4.x for CMMI Process Improvement (MSF CMMI) and Microsoft Solutions Framework v4.x for Agile Software Development (MSF Agile). Out of the box you will get two very interesting Process Guidance and two templates for TFS. The problem is that the connection between the Process Guidance and the methodology template is slight - for a rich process (i.e. MSF CMMI) you will get a simple template.
But … The templates provided by Microsoft are fully customized to match the organization development process and to integrate them with other systems already existing in the organization environment. You can build your own template from scratch using tools provided by Microsoft too. In the end you can buy a template provided by the third part company (i.e. Object Consulting). What can you modify? Which tools can you use? And the most important questions – whether to buy, to modify or to build from scratch your own template for effective project management with Team Foundation Server 2008.
Effective risk management without and with Team Foundation Server 2008.
Do you usually finish your project on time with budget and specification? If yes - this session is not for you. If not and if this is a problem for you - you are welcome to join us. Maybe you will decide to follow the presenter’s way in the future …
Risk management helps to identify the potential problems before they occur, so the risk-handling activities can be planned and invoked as needed across the life of the project to mitigate adverse impacts on achieving project's objectives.
During this session you will get the answers to many important questions (i.e. How to indentify risks in your project? How to validate them? What is top10 risks list? How to prepare and drive an effective mitigation plan? How to build a good contingency plan?) and you will get familiar with the best practices - how to identify, validate and manage risks using the Risk Management Discipline from Microsoft Solution Framework and the work item “risk” of Team Foundation Server and its workflow.
So I want to unit test, which framework should I use?
With the rising popularity of unit testing, a whole slew of frameworks exist. It’s not just NUnit anymore. Microsoft provides its built-in version of called MSTest that provides tight integration with Visual Studio. However there are other alternatives such as MbUnit and the recent xUnit which provide substantial improvements and different approaches to similar things. This session will delve into the different frameworks, examine the differences and let you decide which one suits you best. Comparisons are made with examples.
ASP.NET Performance and Scaling
Q&A Panel
How Will Web Development Be Done Next?
This .NET Rocks panel discussion with host Carl Franklin explores where web development is going and how the different technologies coming out of Microsoft are going to impact the future. Panelists Todd Anglin, Miguel Castro and Shawn Wildermuth are sure to attack these products with a variety of viewpoints, expect lots of debate and some great thoughts on how to use these technologies in the future. Bring your questions and engage the panel yourself to get answers to your web development questions.