TechDays 2012 Belgium – Sponsoring and partnerships at the technology conference for developers and IT Professionals

In this session, you will have an overview of the work recently delivered by the Patterns and Practices group related to SharePoint 2010. Join MVPs Karine Bosch and Serge Luca to learn about best practices and the role of Team Foundation Server 2010 as a major tool in any SharePoint 2010 project. Unit testing frameworks like Microsoft PEX and Moles in the specific context of SharePoint 2010 will also be illustrated. Although this session focuses on Microsoft SharePoint 2010, this session is also interesting for developers working with SharePoint 2007.

Over the last year we’ve added a number of new and exciting features to the Windows Azure Platform. Join us at this session to learn about new features available to the platform, such as Full IIS, elevated started-up tasks, Virtual Machine Role, database import/export, Access Control, Caching, and much more. If you’re not up-to-date with the Windows Azure Platform, this is the perfect cloud session to kick-off TechDays.

For years we have been striving towards Single-Sign-On (SSO) for our users when they access corporate resources. However, as organizations move applications to the Cloud and have requirements for their users to access applications that reside within partner organizations, secure SSO authentication and authorization presents major challenges. The solution to these challenges is Federated Identity and claims based applications. Come to this two part session and learn how to build Federated Identity solutions for the future. Part 1, introduces the challenges facing administrators and developers and show you how to implement Federation using Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) v2. You will learn how to build SSO solutions allowing your users to access on-premise, Cloud and partner based applications. Part 2, delves deeper and looks at enhanced options for Federation including the user of Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) SP1 and ADFS v2. Both part 1 and part 2 contain extensive demos which will accelerate your understanding of Federation and what it can bring to your organisation. Although we don’t delve into code, developers will gain invaluable knowledge on claims based identity. Federated identity is the Hot Topic for 2011. Make sure you are riding the wave.

In this session we focus on Azure from an IT Pro point of view. We see how tasks of administrators are changing and what new responsibilities they have in ‘the Cloud’. Topics : How to create a hybrid environment with Azure Connect where your application runs in the cloud but needs access to local resources like SQL Server or Exchange. How to integrate cloud applications with your enterprise AD for authentication/authorization. How to monitor health and performance of Azure application roles with SCOM and scale out more instances if needed. What is the value of the Azure VM role and how to remote desktop into the Azure machines. In this session : NO CODE, NO VISUAL STUDIO (promised!) but Hyper-V,SCOM, AD, ipv6 ….

Today's applications are faced with several communication and connectivity obstacles in their daily life. Often secured connections are not allowed through firewalls and NAT devices at all. What to do if you need ubiquitous connectivity? Windows Azure AppFabric's Service Bus can be seen as the Swiss Army Knife of communication. Christian Weyer shows you how to build mighty cross-platform communication patterns like publish/subscribe – all in a secure manner, programmed with WCF or pure REST.

All the talk about the Cloud and the Windows Azure platform. But where does it make sense? In this session, Christian shows you one example of how you can leverage the pros of Windows Azure and SQL Azure in order to expand your web-based data-driven applications from a local installation into the cloud. Whether you want to handle predictable or likely unpredictable bursts or you want to prepare for moving your existing applications into the Cloud: experience a hands-on demonstration powered by IIS, SQL Server, Windows Azure, SQL Azure, Sync Services and PowerShell.

Have you ever been jealous of James Bond and his gadgets? Don’t be: as a .NET developer you have plenty of cool gadgets at hand. If you are interested in how our .NET gadgets can be mixed together, let Kevin and Maarten guide you along the path of building a live event feedback application that leverages Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, Windows Azure, jQuery, OData and RIA Services. This is the perfect session to give you an update on the newest technologies to build Web, Silverlight, Client and Phone applications.

Cloud computing and platforms like Windows Azure promise to be “the next big thing” in IT. This is certainly true as there are a lot of advantages with cloud computing: computing and storage become an on-demand story that you can use at any time, paying only for its effective usage. But this also poses a problem: if a cloud application is designed like one would design a regular application chances are that the cost perspective of that application will not be as expected. This session covers common pitfalls and hints on improving the cost effectiveness of a Windows Azure solution.

If you don’t yet know what claims-based identity is, it’s time to get busy. Signing users in and granting them access is a core function of almost every cloud-based application, and claims-based identity is the best way to take care of that. In this session we will show you how to simplify your user experience by enabling users to sign in with an existing account such as a Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or on-premises Active Directory account, implement access control, and make secure connections between applications. You will learn how the AppFabric Access Control Service, Windows Identity Foundation, and Active Directory Federation Services use a claims-based identity architecture to help you to take advantage of the shift toward the cloud while still fully leveraging your on-premises investments.

In addition to SQL Azure Database, new SQL Azure services will be available in the near future.  In this session you’ll learn about the capabilities of these new services, in what scenarios they can be used and see them in action.  Data movement capabilities are critical for cloud-based applications; with SQL Azure Data Sync you will be able to share data between on-premises SQL Server and SQL Azure databases as well as between multiple SQL Azure databases, allowing you to link on-premises and cloud-based applications and make data available to users around the world.  Reporting and visualization of data stored in SQL Azure will be enabled with SQL Azure Reporting.  See how reports can be authored, deployed and made available to users on the web or embedded in applications.

Windows Azure AppFabric is Microsoft’s next-generation middleware application platform in the cloud, providing access control with federated identity, high-density, multi-tenant component-hosting, caching services, on-premise connectivity, rich publish/subscribe messaging, and integration services. In this session, Clemens Vasters, an Architect on the AppFabric product team at Microsoft will provide an overview of the AppFabric services that are already commercially available and the new services that Microsoft will bring to market until the end of this year.

The consumerization of IT and cloud computing are two profound trends changing the face of corporate IT. These trends present both new challenges and exciting opportunities to those tasked with navigating this transition. Join Clare Henry to learn about how Microsoft can enable IT professionals to maximize these opportunities for their organization with the upcoming release of System Center products. Clare will present Microsoft’s vision to empower you to say yes to the consumerization of IT and yes to providing the right cloud strategy for your organization. Clare will also share with you new demonstrations on the System Center 2012 products showing you how you can actually build and deliver a private cloud in your organization.

For years we have been striving towards Single-Sign-On (SSO) for our users when they access corporate resources. However, as organizations move applications to the Cloud and have requirements for their users to access applications that reside within partner organizations, secure SSO authentication and authorization presents major challenges. The solution to these challenges is Federated Identity and claims based applications. Come to this two part session and learn how to build Federated Identity solutions for the future. Part 1, introduces the challenges facing administrators and developers and show you how to implement Federation using Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) v2. You will learn how to build SSO solutions allowing your users to access on-premise, Cloud and partner based applications. Part 2, delves deeper and looks at enhanced options for Federation including the user of Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) SP1 and ADFS v2. Both part 1 and part 2 contain extensive demos which will accelerate your understanding of Federation and what it can bring to your organisation. Although we don’t delve into code, developers will gain invaluable knowledge on claims based identity. Federated identity is the Hot Topic for 2011. Make sure you are riding the wave.

Dynamic memory is a new feature of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. Join us to learn how Dynamic Memory enables Hyper-V to utilize system resource more efficiently and how this can benefit your environment. Also learn how Dynamic Memory works under the covers and what you should be preparing for with the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. We will also have a look at System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1 which supports this hypervisor functionality.

Come to this session to learn about how to take advantage of the Windows Azure platform for developing and running your subscription based applications. Discover, through concrete examples, how to onboard customers, dynamically provision application instances, handle single sign-on, and offer self-service authorization. Explore the patterns and the tradeoffs you need to consider in order to meet the needs of a wide variety of customers, all the while maintaining control over your resources and the way you run your business.

SharePoint 2010 comes with a nice AJAX enabled web user interface (UI) out-of-the-box. As a SharePoint developer you probably know this UI can be extended using techniques such as Ribbon Extensions, Notifications, Web Parts etc. However building those UI extensions that mimic the out-of-the-box UI and behavior can be challenging: you need to leverage JavaScript and the SharePoint JavaScript API’s. That’s where the jQuery library comes into play! jQuery can dramatically simplify and reduce the amount of JavaScript code that’s necessary to obtain astonishing results. This session will explain the best practices related to integrating jQuery with SharePoint, and build some real-life samples to pimp up your SharePoint sites with minimal efforts.

We kick-off the Windows Azure Deep Dive post-conference with this session focused on Windows Azure SDK 1.3. Developers will be happy to hear that SDK 1.3 adds a slew of new things, such as Azure Connect, Full IIS, elevated startup tasks, how to build your own startup plugin, VM Role, how to enable remote desktop access and some new features for developers.

In this session learn how to address the business need of VDI. We will cover topics such as choosing the right storage model, identifying the appropriate business case for VDI, and deciding what form of desktop virtualization is right for you. Also in this session we will be taking time to answer questions directly to ensure you have the best possible understanding of VDI from Microsoft and Citrix.