Session Abstracts
The 2008 Launch Day and TechDays 2008 offer a wealth of information for Developers, IT Professionals and IT Architects.Listed below are the abstracts of all sessions delivered over the three days.
Anatomy of S+S – Part I: Practical considerations for building S+S Applications
Speaker: Eugenio Pace
Many of us have seen or used "software delivered as a service", but we have seldom analyzed these applications. In this session we will see the internal components of a typical S+S solution. We will present specific details of their implementation, common technical challenges and proven design patterns to address these challenges using the Microsoft Platform. A sample implementation will be shown, demonstrating these core design patterns and their application to all layers of a software solution: UI, business logic & persistence. Considerations for integration with “cloud” services (such as Microsoft Silverlight Streaming) will also be covered.
Anatomy of S+S – Part II: Considerations for Running & Consuming S+S Applications
Speaker: Eugenio Pace
Service delivery is a broad discipline that amalgamates knowledge and best practices from technical areas, such as networking, security, instrumentations and monitoring, operating systems, business processes, and system automation. Many ISVs are re-implementing operational components by necessity, not because those infrastructure additions provide significant value to differentiating the core features of the applications. Moreover, building these components add to the time and cost of delivering the application. Therefore, for the software vendors, most of such redundant work and expenditure can be eliminated if the software vendors can obtain the same operational functions from third parties that specialize in S+S hosting. This session explores the relationship between ISV and Hosters, and opportunities for both in the road ahead, as well as considerations of consuming S+S applications from an enterprise perspective.
Anatomy of S+S – Part III
Speaker: Eugenio Pace
The emergence of specialized on-line services gives developers an opportunity to offload functional responsibility to such services and concentrate resources on the value added aspects of their own offerings. These services are like “on-line libraries” that can be leveraged by an application. Microsoft is planning to offer a wide variety of such services. Some of them are already available, like Silverlight Streaming Services, but there will be others coming. In this session we will explore examples of usage of some of these on-line services and the implications to the application architecture.
Application Lifecycle Management and Visual Studio Team System
Speaker: Steven Wilssens
Do you want to know about the “Why?” of Application Lifecycle Management, as well as what it means to adopt “value-up” software development practices? During this session you will learn the benefits of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), and how Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) provides the necessary tooling to support an ALM approach. You will see how Microsoft adopts these practices within the development of its own products.
Building RIAs for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007
Speaker: Patrick Tisseghem
In this session you’ll learn how to leverage Web 2.0 technologies to deliver a rich and interactive end-user experience for SharePoint sites and content. Topics that will be covered are: building ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 enabled Web Parts; creating and consuming SharePoint Web Services that are AJAX-enabled; Web Parts hosting Silverlight 1.0 and 2.0 applications; techniques to have the Silverlight applications communicated back and forth with SharePoint content such as items in lists and libraries, user profile information and search results; samples of how publishing portals can be enriched with Silverlight navigation controls and enhanced page layouts; demos on how to build Vista Gadgets that display SharePoint content using traditional UI techniques as well as using Silverlight.
Developing More Intelligent Applications using Data Mining
Speaker: Rafal Lukawiecki
Imagine an application that adjusts its behaviour as it learns about the needs and characteristics of its users: for instance, a user interface that knows what the user is most likely to do, or select next. Or, perhaps, a web store that can predict a shipment delivery failure even before the order has been placed, and warns the user. How about software that knows it is being abused and is on the brink of being hopelessly attacked by a criminal. In these three cases, and many others, traditional approach would require you to think of all the circumstances in advance, and to encode them as some form of logic. Naturally, that is impossible task ever to complete. Data Mining offers to us a glimpse of a world to come: your application will self-trace its past behaviour in order to discover these patterns for you. Your code, in turn, will use the ever-evolving data mining model to perform predictions based on which the application would react. While the world of academia has been thinking of similar approaches, notably in the Artificial Intelligence research, it has only recently become an everyday possibility to harness the power of Data Mining to similar extent. Come to this session if you would like to see where the future is headed. This session will introduce the key concepts of data mining and its algorithms for the benefit of those not yet familiar with the field, but the bulk of the presentation will concentrate on the as yet unexplored world of building more intelligent applications.
Dude, where's my business logic?
Speaker: Chad Hower
Over the years we have moved from desktop, to client server, to 3-tier, to n-tier, to service orientation. In the process though many things have changed, but many habits have remained. This session discusses what we are doing wrong, and solutions.
Interop – the new battle ground?
Speaker: Stephen McGibbon
Interoperability between software platforms from different vendors has always been a matter of importance. Increasing government regulation and policy decisions have elevated interoperability to a strategic matter affecting the entire ICT industry. We want to demonstrate you how interoperability fits within the Microsoft platform strategy. Based on this framework we then illustrate through practical examples and case studies how Microsoft achieves interoperability between our platform and those of the competition (40 mins). The core ingredients of Microsoft’s approach are:
Microsoft Forefront
Speaker: Michael Anderberg
Many have asked over the years - why isn't Microsoft in the anti-malware business themselves, why do they leave this business to partners? Well with the introduction of Forefront and its various member products, we do. Come to this session and get an understanding of how Microsoft Forefront’s products easily integrate with each other, with your organization’s IT infrastructure, and they can be supplemented through interoperable third-party solutions, enabling end-to-end, defense-in-depth security solutions. The result for you? Simplified management, reporting, analysis, and deployment enable you to more efficiently protect your organization’s information resources and secure access to applications and servers
Network Access Protection (NAP) Architecture and Design
Speaker: Kevin Rhodes
This session will review the functionality and architecture of Network Access Protection (NAP), look at the pro’s and con’s of enforcement mechanisms and then discuss deployment design and execution. It will talk about the experiences from the Microsoft deployment of NAP and how those lessons learned can be applied in deployment planning.
New Enterprise Search Technologies: Microsoft Search Server 2008, Federated Search and Faceted Search
Speaker: Patrick Tisseghem
The Microsoft search space has been extended with a number of important products and technologies. The goals of this session is to give you an overview of the latest features. Following topics will be covered: search administration with the Microsoft Search Server 2008, Federated Location Definition files and how to use them to create new federated search locations, customization of the Microsoft Search 2008 Search Center, customizations in the XSL that is used to transform the search results into the HTML representation displayed in the browser, faceted search, refinement of the search results and the delivery of options to have users execute a search within the search. This session is also an opportunity for Patrick Tisseghem to highlight the topics that are covered in his latest MS Press book “Inside the Index and Search Engine” out in the shops around April 2008.
Office Open XML Formats
Speaker: Chad Hower
Office 2007 now stores its documents in XML. This makes manipulation and creation of documents easy to do, even without Office installed. The Office Open XML format is also an ECMA standard and has backwards compatibility with older versions of Office as well as some capabilities on Linux and Macintosh, as well as Java. Surprised? Learn about these features and more in this session.
SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services – New Architecture, Visualisation and Tablix
Speaker: Steffen Krause
Reporting Services 2008 has much to offer. See the new architecture, which no longer needs Internet Information Server (IIS) and provides new features like better memory management and enhanced rendering. Learn about the new, completely flexible Tablix layout which enables you to combine fixed and dynamic columns and multiple parallel groupings in one report. And finally, take a look at the new chart and gauge controls and how you can create great looking visual reports.
The .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) Framework
Speaker: Alex Turner
Modern applications operate on data in several different forms: Relational tables, XML documents, and in-memory objects. Each of these domains can have profound differences in semantics, data types and capabilities, and much of the complexity in today's applications is the result of these mismatches. Alex Turner, C# Compiler Program Manager, explains how Visual Studio 2008 aims to unify the programming models through LINQ capabilities in Microsoft Visual C# and Visual Basic, a strongly typed data access framework and an innovative Application Programming Interface (API) for manipulating and querying XML.
Visual Studio 2008: Building applications with Office 2007
Speaker: Jay Schmelzer
This session provides an overview of the tools and technologies that enable developers to leverage the new Visual Studio 2008 and Office platform tools and technologies to build new and exciting Office Business Applications. You’ll learn a number of key technologies in this session, including the creation of Office smart clients, development of custom SharePoint workflow, and extension of Outlook to integrate key business data into one of our most popular productivity tools.
VSTS Application Lifecycle management
Speaker: Yves Goeleven
Application lifecycle management regards the process of delivering software as a continuously repeating cycle of inter-related steps and each of these steps needs to be carefully monitored and controlled. As the complexity and sophistication of this task has grown it has been matched by increasing numbers of tools with little or no integration. Today Visual Studio Team System provides us a comprehensive environment that allows for frictionless integration of all the roles participating in the application lifecycle.
What's new for developers in SQL Server 2008?
Speaker: Dandy Weyn
As a developer you want to understand the new features in SQL Server 2008.
In this session you will learn how to work with the new data/time datatypes as well as implementing new T-SQL Features such as the MERGE statement.
You will learn how to enable a database for change data capture and track changes in data throughout an ETL data process.
You will also see on how to implement geospatial data and work with FILESTREAM objects.
This session is focusing on database developer SQL Server side topics.
Applied Service Oriented Architecture
Speaker: Steven Wilssens
During this session we will have a look at what the most recent buzzword in the IT industry means for one of the product teams at Microsoft. Although it is still in beta, Popfly was recently chosen as one of the 25 most innovative products by PC World. See how SOA, short for Service Oriented Architecture, works for a product that was build using a variety of Microsoft services, what the team has learned from this experience, and how this approach can work for you.
ASP.NET MVC Framework
Speaker: Matt Gibbs
A benefit of the MVC architectural pattern is that it promotes a clean separation between the models, views and controllers within an application. ASP.NET now includes support for developing web applications using an MVC based architecture. The ASP.NET MVC Framework is designed to support building applications that exhibit the following traits: Testability – Red/Green test driven development - Maintainability –clear separation of concerns - Extensibility – interfaces allowing custom implementation at all levels - Web Standards and clean URLs – with routing and giving developers tight control over the resulting HTML. Join us for a dive into the new MVC Framework and learn how to leverage this new alterative in your own applications.
Domain Specific Development with Visual Studio Domain Specific Language (DSL) Tools
Speaker: Jelle Druyts
As one of the pillars of the Software Factories initiative, Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) provide a way to describe your business domain in a language closer to the actual problem than using traditional programming code.
The Visual Studio Domain Specific Language Tools allow developers to create their own graphical designers and code generation tools – much like the ones you can find in Visual Studio today, such as the Class Designer.
In this session, you will learn how to develop your own DSLs inside Visual Studio and see an example of a real-world DSL that simplifies your life as a developer: the Configuration Section Designer.
IIS7 End-to-End Extensibility for Developers
Speaker: Fabio Yeon
In IIS7 the server exposes a brand new, powerful extensibility model for building server features that can be used to extend its functionality, or replace any of the default features. With the Integrated Pipeline architecture, managed modules become virtually as powerful as native modules. In this talk we will illustrate extending the server with an end to end scenario, building a managed module to extend the runtime, extending the new configuration system with custom properties as well as the IIS user interface to expose them to the users.
Roles, Roles, Roles.. A Guide to Role Based Access Control
Speaker: Daniel Meyer
Roles are a fundamental concept in Enterprise IDA requirements today. Understanding the concepts of groups, application roles, enterprise roles and policy driven access rights is difficult, since there is no crisp definition and a lot of overlap. Given the long list of different technologies modelling access rights/roles/groups, from AD, ADLDS, AzMan, ADFS, ILM to IAG and Sharepoint, it is hard to keep an overview on what to use where. This session will give an overview of the different models on how to manage access rights in enterprises today and map these to Microsoft technologies like .Net, AD/ADLDS, ILM, Sharepoint and AzMan. It will also cover an overview on Partner solutions delivering added value in this area and case studies on the different scenarios.
The Past, Present, and the Future of Security in IT
Speaker: Rafal Lukawiecki
Why is security such a challenge for Information Technology? We seem to be constantly “solving” security problems, yet we are still surprised each time a new vulnerability has been discovered. This lighter, non-technical session aims to give you a broader perspective onto the problem of security in IT. We will briefly review the history of the most important attacks and flaws and the defences they spawned. While reviewing the issues of today we hope to show you a certain pattern of omissions which, if addressed, could greatly help us secure IT. The session will suggest that the key answers to questions of securing technology do not lie in its sphere, but require a broader and more pragmatic approach. Necessarily, we will stress that it is people and processes that matter far more to security than technology itself.
Windows Server 2008 Licensing, we can’t make it fun, but we can make it easy.
Speaker: Patrick Viaene
Speaker: Erik de Bondt
How do I know if I already have a license for it? What does a license allow me to install? Does virtualization change the licensing-rules?
From a license perspective, WS2008 is just another MS product that requires the correct license for usage. But what are the possible acquisition-paths? If I had WS2003 with Software Assurance, can I really install it ‘for free’? Do I need more licenses if I have mutliple VHD-files with WS2008 as host OS? Can I rent WS2008? Like it or not, at some point, smart IT Pro’s must ask the right questions for correct but economical usage of WS2008. Discover the PUR – Product Use Rights – a document that holds all answers to a too simple question: ‘If I have a license for MS product, what am I allowed to do with it?’ A large part of the session will focus on ‘Licensing in a Virtual Word’. Together with Technical & Solution Advisor Erik De Bondt, we will address all virtualisation offerings and their correct license usage.
WPF Futures
Speaker: Bart De Smet
Learn about the great new features in Windows Presentation Foundation 3.5 and beyond. See examples that include Add-ins, data binding support for LINQ and ADO.NET, interactive 3D, streamlined application deployment, high-performance animation, and much more. During this session we’ll explore what’s coming next in WPF 3.5 SP1: performance improvements, writeable bitmap, XAML enhancements, refinements to the data binding model and a more streamlined deployment story.
