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.
An Overview of Visual Studio 2008
Speaker: Peter Himschoot
Explore all the new Visual Studio 2008 features, from language enhancements; improved designers; Web and smart-client development tools; to Visual Studio Team System, a suite of software lifecycle management tools poised to transform how you deliver software for Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and the Web.
Building Applications for Windows Vista and Office 2007 with Visual Studio 2008
Speaker: Jay Schmelzer
The 2007 Microsoft Office system has evolved into a business application platform that developers can use to build and deploy Office Business Applications (OBAs). This session demonstrates how developers can use Visual Studio 2008 to build OBAs, customize Microsoft Office applications, and utilize the Microsoft Office platform. This session also new features and improvements introduced in Visual Studio 2008 for smart client development.
Secondly, we demonstrate how you can leverage both Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Forms in a single application to build the right experience for your customer. Finally, we show feedback-driven improvements to existing features in Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, and ClickOnce.
Next Generation Web Applications with Visual Studio 2008
Speaker: Gill Cleeren
Visual Studio 2008 enables developers and IT operators to dramatically reduce the amount of time, effort and code required to develop and deploy real-world Web applications. ASP.NET 3.5, Visual Studio 2008 and IIS 7 each provide much improved administration and management support, on top of dramatically improved performance. Also covered is support for ASP.NET AJAX, JavaScript enhancements, rich support for CSS standards and rapid development of data-bound Web pages.
Pervasive Business Intelligence with SQL Server 2008
Speaker: Frederik Vandeputte
Attend this session to learn how the new enhancements in SQL Server 2008 provide a comprehensive and scalable Business Intelligence platform that enables you to integrate and manage your growing data volumes, comprehensive analysis and enterprise reporting, and deliver insights through Microsoft Office System. This session provides an overview of the new data warehousing, reporting, analysis and integration features in SQL Server 2008.
10 Things to Love in .NET 3.5
Speaker: Roy Osherove
In this talk we'll explore 10 things every developer should know about and find valueble in the .NET 3.5 framework and extensions. From LINQ and Lambdas to WF and WCF, this talk will be a quick overview of each of the major cool stuff in .NET 3.5.
Advanced Debugging with Visual Studio
Speaker: Ingo Rammer
Basically every .NET developer knows the Visual Studio debugger, but only few know its little secrets. In this session, Ingo shows you what you can achieve with this tool beyond the setting of simple breakpoints. You will learn how advanced breakpoints, debugger macros and visualizers, interactive breakpoints, tracepoints and interactive object instantiation at development time can support your hunt for bugs in your applications.
Ajax Patterns
Speaker: Nikhil Kothari
This session takes a deep look at the Ajax paradigm by discussing useful development patterns, common problems and associated solutions. Patterns covered range from development approaches such as unobtrusive script attachment, to fundamentals such as search optimization to user interface and usability patterns such as intuitive navigation and visual notifications. While the demonstrations are illustrated through basic scenarios, like any pattern, the concepts can be applied to your own applications. In the course of demonstrating the patterns, this talk will also cover various aspects of ASP.NET AJAX including the latest features.
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 Applications with Silverlight 2
Speaker: Nikhil Kothari
Learn how to use Silverlight for building your rich internet applications using the power of managed code, .NET and XAML UI on the client. This session will demonstrates using the Silverlight presentation framework including controls, the application model, the networking stack and other new capabilities that Silverlight brings to browsers for the next-generation of cross-browser and cross-platform applications.
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.
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.
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 Basic: Tips and Tricks for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
Speaker: Jay Schmelzer
In this session, we combine some tips for existing Visual Studio features, and tricks for leveraging new Visual Studio 2008 features. We look at a variety of existing features including operator overloading, refactoring, creating your own snippets, some tips for using frameworks classes (and generics), and leveraging application settings. Then we look at new features including some LINQ Do’s and Don’ts, My Extensibility, and taking control of unit testing in Visual Studio. All of these tips are aimed at giving you a more productive, fun programming experience.
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.
Visual Studio 2008: RAD for Today’s Line of Business Application Developer
Speaker: Jay Schmelzer
In this demo intensive session we’ll take a look at improved support in Visual Studio 2008 for building distributed business applications. We will focus on Visual Studio’s support for building and consuming WCF services, sharing business validation rules between client and server, implementing local caching of read-only data on the client, sharing common application services like authentication and authorization between Windows and Web client applications and much more. Next we will turn our attention to web and see how Visual Studio 2008 allows us to easily incorporate rich experiences into our existing ASP.NET web sites using ASP.NET AJAX, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit and take advantage of improved HTML designer, CSS editor and JavaScript intellisense and debugging. Visual Studio 2005 raised the productivity bar for business application developers. Visual Studio 2008 builds on that foundation bringing unmatched productivity gains to distributed business application developers.
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.
WCF and WF: Integrating two key technologies of .NET 3.5
Speaker: Ingo Rammer
Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation are two cornerstones of .NET 3.5. In this session, you will learn about different ways to combine them to workflow-enable your WCF applications.
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.
.NET 3.5: WinForms and WPF
Speaker: Chad Hower
With two options for building forms, which is better to use? For the near future the answer often is both. In this session we will cover the strengths and weaknesses of each, and how to use them effectively together.
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.
Building internet web sites using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Speaker: Joris Poelmans
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides the necessary framework components to build Internet web sites using master pages, page layouts and WCM specific functionality. In this session we will take an in-depth look at how to use these components and which are the best practices for developing an internet web site while leveraging the MOSS platform. This session will conclude with a look at the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint as well as at the migration story for MCMS customers.
Creating Custom LINQ Providers – LINQ to Anything
Speaker: Bart De Smet
LINQ is all about unifying data access in a natural language integrated way. But there’s more than just LINQ to Objects, LINQ to SQL and LINQ to XML. In this session, we put ourselves on the other side of the curtain and explore the wonderful world of LINQ providers. You’ll learn how to create a fully functional LINQ query provider allowing users to target your favorite query language using familiar LINQ syntax in C# 3.0 and VB 9.0: LINQ to AD, LINQ to SharePoint, LINQ to Outlook, you name it! This is your chance to get to know the inner workings of LINQ.
Deep Reflection
Speaker: Roy Osherove
In this 400 level session Roy digs deep into the heart of some of the new features in Reflection 2.0 such as runtime code generation using DynamicMethod (Lightweight Code Generation - LCG), parsing IL at runtime, generics in reflection, debugging runtime generated code, understanding Reflection.Emit, ReflectionOnly Context's for security and using Code gen to improve performance. Put your thinking cap on.
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.
LINQ Under the Covers: An In-Depth Look at LINQ
Speaker: Alex Turner
Want to know what really happens when you execute your favorite LINQ queries? Join us as we peek behind the curtain in Reflector to see how the C# compiler translates LINQ query expressions into standard query operators, while digging into the iterators that make LINQ to Objects tick. Learn exactly when query evaluation is deferred, and see how lambda expressions and closures work together to enable LINQ's elegant syntax. Then we'll explore how nearly identical LINQ to Objects and LINQ to SQL queries will result in radically different translations as we dig into the details of IQueryable and expression trees. Finally, we follow our IQueryable objects across the language barrier to investigate the unique features VB brings to LINQ, including XML literals. It is suggested that you attend the session "The .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) Framework" before attending this session.
Running externalized Business Rules in any .NET application (including Sharepoint) with the Workflow Foundation Rules Engine
Speaker: Serge Luca
As an important subsystem of the .Net Framework 3.0 and 3.5, Windows Workflow Foundation provides 2 engines: a Workflow Engine and a Rules Engine. The Rules Engine is a very interesting way to isolate the Business Rules from the other parts of the application which will be therefore much easier to maintain; the Rules Engine also manages interaction between rules thanks to its forward chaining feature; another benefit is that a business analyst or a power user can modify the business rules without having to recompile the application.
In this session, we will have an overview of the Rules Engine , you will see how to store business rules in a repository , how to use rules without workflow , how to organize the code and how to use the Rules engine in any application. We will take the case of Microsoft Windows Sharepoint Services 3 or MOSS 2007 web parts.
The ABC of building services with WCF
Speaker: Peter Himschoot
In today’s highly connected world being able to communicate is very important, especially for your applications. But how? Web Services? Remoting? Enterprise Services? WCF is Microsoft’s unified framework for building communication into your application, ready for the future. In this session we will look at building services with WCF, getting our hands dirty through building a service live, in front of your eyes. After this session you should have a clear understanding of the development life-cycle for WCF, the advantages of using WCF and how to proceed with it yourself.
The TR1 Libraries and building “modern” user interfaces with MFC
Speaker: Ronald Laeremans
The TR1 Libraries and building “modern” user interfaces with MFC
This session will demonstrate the new features added to MFC in Visual Studio 2008 and our plans to evolve the MFC library for Visual C++ 10 and beyond. We will also take an in depth look at the TR1 extensions to the C++ Standard Library which can make your code significantly more robust and expressive. We’ll cover the major libraries in TR1: shared_ptr, regex and the functional libraries, explaining when to use them, how to use them, and how not to use them.
Unit testing in .NET 3.5
Speaker: Roy Osherove
In this talk we'll explore the exciting and problematic world of testing code that uses .NET 3.5 technologies, especially LINQ, Anonymous Types, Extension Methods, Dynamic Initializers and other language features. It's possible, but the answers aren't always what you thought they will be.
We’ve been hacked! Web security for developers
Speaker: Dave Webster
This is a demo driven session showing the actual hack of a web site. You will learn how to write your web sites securely, and what your IT department will need from you. We will cover Cross Site Scripting (XSS)/SQL injection hacks as well as subtle hybrids.
WPF and Expression Blend. What is in it for developers.
Speaker: Dave Webster
Now that we have had some time to get used to XAML and WPF and seen the shiny new UIs we can build, it’s time to get serious about architecture and understand the power of databinding and opportunities for Data Visualization. In this talk we will discuss advanced topics in databinding, how to access the Graphics Model to show data, and the use of MVC architecture patterns. We will stretch Expression Blend version 2.0 to its limits.
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.
