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

In the newest version of Ingo's classic talk you will learn how to make the most out of your debugging time with Visual Studio 2010. Ingo will show you the most important advanced debugging techniques, including the use of Intellitrace and how to prepare your applications to take advantage of crashdump debugging with Visual Studio 2010 (which is quite likely the number #1 feature to dramatically reduce your bug-hunting time for hard-to-reproduce issues.)

Kanban is becoming an important tool for teams wishing to become agile and continuously improve their processes. In this session we'll discuss why and how to implement a Kanban system for your team. In adddition, we'll demonstrate how to use Team Foundation Server 2010 to model and visualise your existing processes as a Kanban board and how you use this to drive improvement in your project.

Are you building Web APIs for reaching any device, enabling mash-ups, or providing highly connected Web experiences? Then come to this session and learn how to build Web APIs your way with Windows Communication Foundation. We put you in control of patterns (REST, pub/sub, RPC, Hypertext) and formats (XML, JSON, URIs, Atom, OData) and enable you to leverage new technologies to build Web APIs exactly the way you want them.

In this session we will travel to the very depths of our new WCF WEB stack where there treasures which will delight the RESTful eye. We’ll explore our new http channel stack and processor pipeline  and how you can use them to unlock the secrets of REST.

No this is not yet another MEF 101 talk! Since MEF V1 shipped, we’ve seen a ton of folks building extensible solutions and frameworks including a host of OSS solutions. In this talk we will explore these real world solutions and how MEF plays in. The list will include frameworks like MefContrib, RavenDB, Caliburn and the Silverlight Media Framework. As a bonus, will also take a sneak peak at what is to come in MEF v2.

Scaling applications to the current and future multiple-core machines can really be a daunting task --- but it doesn't have to be! In this session, Ingo Rammer shows you the new task-based API and how it simplifies the creation of multi-core supporting applications. You will learn how you can take advantage of the fine-grained parallelism and control which is offered by this new .NET feature. Ingo will also show you how to extend your in-memory LINQ query to run in parallel, and how the new Visual Studio 10 debugging tools will make troubleshooting this kind of applications a lot easier.

Most of the applications today are based on a database backend. While common application development makes it easy to deploy database changes and maintain source code in source control it was always hard getting your database code supported throughout the versions of the application. With Visual Studio Database Projects, you can ease your development, deployment and change management using the integration in Visual Studio and team Foundation server. While giving you the fundamentals of what database development under Visual Studio Database Projects means, we will also jump into the culprits you might face in reality. We will show you how the published Database Guidance on Codeplex can help you preventing common problems and getting around limitations you might face in your daily work.

The Open Data Protocol is an open, RESTful protocol that utilizes existing standards such as HTTP, AtomPub, XML, and JSON. A service using OData is resource-oriented by its nature, contrasting it with the operation-based, RPC-styled services typified by SOAP. There is a movement toward RESTful services, but care must be taken to identify whether a service should be designed resource or operation oriented. Participants will also learn the advantages of the OData protocol and other RESTful technologies.

Scrum and XP have found a strong following in the development community. But most non-development groups (such as Web Administrators, Production Support, Security, Testing, and Users/Stake Holders) inside the enterprise are far from agile, nor are they trying to move to be more agile. This session starts with a refresher on Scrum, and then uses real experiences from large enterprise development projects to show how to effectively work with those teams. Instead of trying to "convert" them, we discuss strategies to adapt to their needs while remaining agile in the development realm.

LightSwitch is a new part of the Visual Studio family and makes it possible to more easily create create professional-quality business applications for the desktop, the web, and the cloud. The big question of course: Is LightSwitch something for you? In this session, you’ll get the answer! We'll show how you can build professional LOB applications quickly using LightSwitch. We will cover why you should look at LightSwitch, binding to data, and building out the user interface. LightSwitch is however more than just some predefined screens: developers will love it for its extensibility, which we’ll cover deeply. Note: LightSwitch is currently still in Beta.

This session starts our Deep Dive post-conference into Application Lifecycle Management. In this demo-rich session we will take a tour of many of the new capabilities of Visual Studio 2010 for application lifecycle management. This includes a look at the new build automation, project management, branching and merging, and related capabilities of Team Foundation Server 2010. We will also look at the new design and modeling tools and software testing capabilities of Visual Studio 2010.

Lately, we’ve seen many industry trends shaping the evolution of programming languages in various directions. The many-core revolution has forced us to think hard about ways to leverage the massively parallel architectures available to the masses. Cloud, web, and mobile programming have put additional emphasis on the need for asynchrony in our applications. Dynamic languages are going through a rebirth, driven by a desire to shy away from schematized data, and accelerated by the renaissance of JavaScript. Oh, and we can’t count out native languages either, with C++0x’s final draft lurking around the corner. In this session, we’ll discuss modern trends in programming languages, correlating those to everyday developer tasks. Come and learn why functional programming matters, how F# fits in the language landscape, why dynamic and native languages deserve a second chance, how frameworks like TPL and Rx help with asynchronous programming, and – last but not least – what the future of C# and Visual Basic has to bring. Don’t miss out on sharpening your knowledge about your single most important developer tool: the language you use to express your coding dreams.

Asynchronous programming is no longer an option, it’s become a must on various platforms, including Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, and various data-centric frameworks. Unfortunately, dealing with asynchrony is way too hard in today's world of development tools and frameworks. The huge amount of manual and error-prone plumbing leads to incomprehensible and hard to maintain code. As we reach out to services in the cloud, the desire for asynchronous computation is ever increasing, requiring a fresh look on the problems imposed by reactive programming. In this session, we explore various methodologies to address asynchronous programming, and explain how they relate and differ. First, we’ll explore existing patterns and libraries – such as the TPL – to sketch some of the pain-points. Armed with this knowledge, we’ll approach the problem from different angles, including a language-centric view with F#’s asynchronous workflows and the upcoming async and await features in C# and Visual Basic. Next, we’ll move beyond sequential composition of asynchronous computations, and introduce the Reactive Extensions (Rx) that enable you to express rich queries – even using LINQ syntax – over asynchronous push-based “reactive” event streams.

At PDC a few years back, we introduced the LINQ project to solve the impedance mismatch between various data models by means of integrated query syntax in mainstream programming languages. Today, we’re seeing a rich ecosystem around LINQ providers that allow developers to reach out to many more data models. However, there’s a lot of opportunity left to democratize even more data models. Based on the theory of monads, we’ll explore the incredibly powerful nature of query comprehensions to do things like constraint solving using Z3 and Solver Foundation, build reactive queries with the Reactive Extensions, carry out various forms of query optimization, split execution of queries across tiers, etc. In addition, we revisit the art of writing query providers, introducing some novel approaches to ensure better compile-time checking. After this talk, you’ll truly understand the (underestimated) power that LINQ has brought us.

Coded UI tests allow developers to create fully-automated, functional UI tests which can be used to quickly alert a team about regressions. These are easy to create, but can become tricky to build in a robust manner which can sustain changes to your application over time. In this demo-rich session we will examine patterns and practices you can employ for building great coded UI tests.

Building web applications on the Microsoft stack continues to evolve. There are lots of great tools to leverage but it can be difficult to keep up with all the options. In this fast, technical and intense keynote, you’ll learn from Scott Hanselman himself how the pieces fit together. We’ll look at ASP.NET MVC 3, MvcScaffolding, Entity Framework Code First (Magic Unicorn Edition!), SQL Compact 4, jQuery and more. Can Microsoft products fit together like LEGO? You’ll leave this session with a clear understanding of the technology options available on the Microsoft Web Stack. What’s changed since PDC? What direction are we doing? Let’s see what you can build TODAY on the Microsoft Web Platform.

Most companies don't have dedicated test environments that are clean, easy to reset and similar to the production environment. This makes it very hard to test software applications. Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 allows you to define, configure and create complete test environments as needed. It can coordinate both physical and virtual environments, and comes with an incredibly powerful suite of effective tools that make managing environments simple and cost effective. In this session, you will be able to see the Lab Management workflow in action: we will define a test environment, identify a suite of (automated) tests for an application, set up a new automated build, deploy the application automatically in the test environment and run the (automated) tests. In the end we will take a look at the collected information through the different data collectors (Intellitrace, System Information, ...). This session is geared towards developers, testers, architects, IT personnel and managers who want to see an in-depth, scenario-based demo of Visual Studio Lab Management 2010.

Join Scott Hanselman as he digs deep into the new open source NuGet package management system. How does NuGet fit into the .NET ecosystem? Learn how to create your own packages that are public and open source or internal ones for the enterprise. By the way, NuGet is an open source project hosted on Mercurial. Microsoft is starting to get serious about open source. We’ll talk about how and why.

The sheer number of features in Visual Studio can be overwhelming to the novice. Even seasoned .NET developers constantly discover new techniques from their colleagues. This session covers features of Visual Studio make you more productive as a developer. It covers items of interest from novice to advanced developers. Why waste your time typing? Code like a Ninja!