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 introduction to the basics of Scrum like: project planning and estimation, the Scrum Master, team, product owner and burn down, and of course the daily Scrum, Stephen (a certified Scrum Master) shows 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. Stephen will also discuss using Scrum with virtual teams and even an off-shoring environment. The session will finish with a large Q&A on best practices.

Windows 7 Beta hit the web early January 2009. During the period following the beta release millions of downloads mark the major interest by the community in this new Windows release. This demo filled session shows you what is new in Windows 7 starting with some of the neatest features but also addresses how you as a developer can take advantage to deliver richer experiences to your users. This includes tools for incorporating touch, ribbon/shell UI improvements, effective search, the latest in sensors, web services and more.

This talk presents 3 innovative tools from Microsoft Research in collaboration with Visual Studio DevLabs related to software reliability and testing: Code Contracts, Pex and CHESS. We will show coding demos for each tool (they are available for commercial evaluation through the DevLabs. Code Contracts provide a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions, under the form of pre-conditions, post-conditions, and object invariants, for .NET programs. The contracts are used to improve testing via runtime checking, enable static contract verification, and documentation generation. Pex is an automated white box testing tool for .NET. Pex systematically tries to cover every reachable branch in a program by monitoring execution traces, and using a constraint solver to produce new test cases with different behavior. The result of the analysis is a test suite which can be persisted as unit tests in source code. CHESS is a tool for finding and reproducing Heisenbugs in .NET and Win32 concurrent programs. CHESS repeatedly runs a concurrent test ensuring that every run takes a different interleaving. If an interleaving results in an error, CHESS can reproduce the interleaving for improved debugging.

Cloud computing is one of the central topics of a lot of current high-level discussions in the IT space. In this session, Ingo Rammer will show you the cloud-based features of Windows Azure which allow you to extend your on-premise applications and services to the cloud. You will learn about cloud-based hosting, deployment, about the different roles of projects and how you can leverage Azure's storage services for blob, structured data and queue storage. In addition, you will learn how you can run parts of the cloud-hosting infrastructure (the so-called "Dev Fabric") on your development PC for debugging purposes. This session is heavily code-based and will give you a very clear, developer-centric overview of this new and exciting platform.

Do you practice unit testing but always forget corner cases? Do you own a large (untested) legacy codebase? You might be interested by Pex, an automated white box testing tool for .NET. Pex is available for commercial evaluation through Devlabs. Pex systematically tries to cover every reachable branch in a program by monitoring execution traces, and using a constraint solver to produce new test cases with different behavior. Pex can be applied to any existing .NET assembly without any pre-existing test suite. Pex will try to find counterexamples for all assertion statements in the code. Pex can be guided by hand-written parameterized unit tests, which are API usage scenarios with assertions. The result of the analysis is a test suite which can be persisted as unit tests in source code. The generated unit tests integrate with Visual Studio Team Test as well as other test frameworks. By construction, Pex produces small unit test suites with high code and assertion coverage, and reported failures always come with a test case that reproduces the issue. In this session, we will show coding demos on how to apply Pex on any given piece of code to generate a regression suite and how to write parameterized unit tests that guide the Pex exploration.

While Silverlight offers us a lot of controls to build business applications, you might feel the urge to change them even more to suffice the needs of your application. A round button perhaps? Or a non-rectangular textbox? It’s all possible with the Silverlight skinning framework. In this session, you’ll see how to overhaul the look of your controls as well as create your own from scratch.

With the release of Silverlight in 2008, Microsoft put in place the last piece of the client application puzzle and completed the .NET continuum: From very thin clients (running HTML code created by ASP.NET) to "richer thin clients" (using AJAX) to rich interactive applications (RIAs with Silverlight) to very rich clients running on the Windows desktop (Windows Presentation Foundation). In this session with few slides and much code, Laurent demonstrates how to implement and configure a single Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service. Then, a continuum of client applications consuming this service is created. For Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation, Laurent also shows how to reuse as much code as possible, and how to optimize the development. Finally, services located on external servers will be consumed too and the problem of cross domain communication will be inspected.

Does Windows Presentation Foundation’s learning curve intimidate you? Did you hear about Silverlight but didn’t have the occasion to try it yourself? Are you afraid that, though it is using well known .NET languages and libraries, it has specificities that are difficult to understand? Discovering these two platforms on your own can seem like a frightening step. In this very interactive session, Laurent will code Silverlight and WPF in front of you, and will let the audience’s questions guide him in this journey through rich user experience. Simple tools like KaXaml and SilverlightPad will be used, as well as the powerful development environments Visual Studio and Expression Blend. Depending on the audience’s desires, this session can take you into Expression Design, Designer-Developer workflows, the Model-View-ViewModel pattern, web services communication, Animations and Transforms, Multimedia integration, and many other topics. Samples will be made in both WPF and Silverlight in a fun way that should allow everyone to overcome their inhibitions and to get started without pain!

About creating business processes in Workflow Foundation and integration with other applications using WCF. The Workflow first approach vs. the Contract first approach. The use of the wsHttpContextBinding. Big demo of a real life scenario based where a public webapplication start a process, internal applications are communicating with the process and at the end thirdparty services are called.

In this session, we'll discuss the future direction of Visual Basic both in the near and long term. Come see the exciting new language features in VB 2010, including additional LINQ functionality, syntax simplifications and dynamic language runtime support. We'll also discuss trends in the industry that are likely to influence the direction of the language going forward. Next, we'll show what to look forward to in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE which has been rewritten in WPF. Join us as we explore new IDE features that are designed to make you more productive in a number of areas in the development lifecycle, including better navigation, tools for understanding code and a focus on consume-first development.

For some applications, time to market is simply critical. If your application is heavily-data driven and backed by a well-designed database schema, you could help yourself a lot be looking at the dynamic duo of ASP.NET Dynamic Data and the ADO.NET Entity Framework. Together, these two technologies allow you to build data driven websites ... quicker than anytime before. In this session, Ingo Rammer will show you how to combine the flexibility of ASP.NET with these new features for quickly building data-driven web sites. (And yes, it even allows you to simply embed a few RAD pages in your big, existing ASP.NET application).

Silverlight 2 is one of the most exciting new technologies on the web. It adds new controls, rich networking APIs and DRM support. But the really exciting part of Silverlight 2 is the ability to use .NET languages to program for the web. We’ll take an overall look at how CoreCLR compares to the desktop CLR including:

• Development of a small, efficient, low-impact CLR. What changed in CoreCLR and why? What did we learn?
• Silverlight’s new Security Transparency model: what you can’t see really can’t hurt you.
• Changes to the Base Class Library: trimming and retargeting the world’s most popular programming library without changing a thing.
• Isolated Storage: Like cookies on steroids, but tastier!
• Cross platform support: the same CoreCLR works on both the Mac and the PC. How’d we do it?
• Why’d we do it? And what’s Moonlight, anyway?
• So just how does all this work? The big picture can be just as fun as the details.

If you come to this talk you’ll learn that you don’t have to learn anything new. But you’ll know how to use your existing skills to target a new customer base. Find out about the real power of Silverlight from the people who built the CLR engine inside of it.

Learn about the new features of the CLR that will make your life easier, including easier debugging, better compatibility, and more new base class library types than you can count with a Big Integer. The next major version of the Common Language Runtime (CLR) engine sports a ton of innovation, including:

• Support for running two versions of the CLR in the same process – so that COM addins written for different versions of the CLR can work together, each using the version of the CLR they were written for. You’ll see better compatibility.
• Code contracts -- make it easier to find bugs earlier in your development cycle. (Break one of these contracts, and we won’t send our lawyers after you, but tools we developed with Microsoft Research will complain vociferously.)
• Improvements to our GC – better scalability for multiple processors, and notifications that can help you reroute traffic before a major GC happens.
• A new debugging architecture that enables mini-dump debugging in Visual Studio and more.
• Cross platform support: the same CoreCLR works on both the Mac and the PC. How’d we do it? Why’d we do it? And what’s Moonlight, anyway?
• A new security model for libraries based on the simpler Silverlight 2 security model. The world is now a safer place for partially trusted code.
• Enhanced base class libraries including BigInteger, tuples, trees, enhanced localization support, and much more.

Well discuss each of these areas, describe how they’ll make your life better, and answer your questions. Don’t be left behind; find out from the people who build the engine what’s new and exciting in the next major version.

The code that takes care of authentication is traditionally one of the nastiest spot of every distributed application. The current situation derives from multiple causes, from tightly coupling with specific technologies to trusting non-experts to write security code. Microsoft has been among the thought leaders who proposed a strategic solution to the problem, the Identity MetaSystem and its claim based identities, achieving vast consensus across the industry. Come to this session to learn how you can finally put that vision in practice thanks to the new "Geneva" products line.

Applications today are expected to expose their data and consume data-centric services via REST. In this session we discuss ADO .NET Data Services and see how we can REST enable your application. Then you will learn how to leverage existing skills related to LINQ and data access to customize the behavior, control-flow, security model and experience of your data service. Then switching gears we will focus on consuming of REST services from any platform (including Ruby on Rails) using Visual Studio and LINQ to REST. We will then see how to enable data-binding to traditional ASP.NET controls as well as Silverlight. We will conclude with developing offline applications with the ability to sync back to the online data service.

Based on his book " Managing Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System" Joel Semeniuk will provide a deeper look into the challenges and exiting opportunities of managing projects using Team System. This session will explore some best practices and tools that you must have when managing virtually any size team.

Lean Software Development, inspired by Lean Product Development, is asking us to look at how we approach software and focus our efforts on eliminating waste. In this session we will explore the 7 key principles of Lean Software Development as well as map these principles to agile development and management tools and techniques that you can use today. In this session we will also show you how tools found in Visual Studio Team System can support your lean processes.

How to make your data available everywhere, online or offline? Microsoft Live Mesh with the Live Framework solves this problem by providing a framework that syncs your data across all your applications, devices, your friends and on the web. In this session you will learn about the benefits of this approach and see how to program against the Live Services from any device, platform, runtime, or programming language.

Did you know .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 from last Summer added quite some interesting features to ASP.NET? Join this session to get an update and take a walk through the 4.0 landscape from ASP.NET and learn how you can get involved in shaping ASP.NET future. This talk focuses on the next release of ASP.NET including web forms and MVC. Do you love web forms? See how you can taking control of your control IDs, learn about better ViewState managment in GridView and ListView, and get more control over the CSS markup of ASP.NET server controls. See how Dynamic Data makes building you data-driven apps easy. If you're considering MVC, we look at the feature set and understand how to create applications with this technology.

This talk focuses on building real world applications with ASP.NET MVC. We walk through building a database driven application that illustrates how you can submit and validate form data. We move beyond the basics and you learn how to take full advantage of many of the advanced features of ASP.NET MVC such as Model Binders, Action Filters, and AJAX support.

In this session we will look at the new features in ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 and how they can help you build Web 2.0 websites in ASP.NET. We will especially talk about the following new features: * Client-side template rendering * Declarative instantiation of behaviors and controls * DataView control * Markup extensions * Bindings

In this session we’ll head for the next step and learn how to optimize applications that use Windows Presentation Foundation. Learn about performance design, techniques, and tools, and pick up tips on how to investigate performance issues in Windows Presentation Foundation applications. Topics that are covered in this sessions include efficient resource usage in Windows Presentation Foundation or tools and methods used by performance developers.

Join this session to know more about the design of the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint, how SharePoint Server 2007 is used out of the box, and which components have been developed and how: rating, commenting and rating, native Zune support, Silverlight 2.0 for playback and robust upload, streaming, grid view, mobile views etc... Scaling, performance and deployment will also be discussed. We'll also share lessons learned from the current Academy Mobile implementation within Microsoft.

Applications communicating over the Internet or being provided in the cloud need certain infrastructure functionalities. Authentication, authorization, powerful communication options and support for workflows seem to be a common need. Microsoft's .NET Services - as part of the overall Azure Services platform - offer exactly all this with their Access Control Service, Service Bus and Workflow Service. In this session Christian Weyer sheds a light on how these services fit into the Azure picture, how they work and fit together in a practical manner, based on first experiences in customer projects.

Lynn's demo-filled presentation will give .NET developers an overview of the numerous new capabilities in SQL Server 2008: from support for Spatial Data types to a mechanism to store SQL BLOB data using the NTFS file system, and several things in between. There are also improvements in the area of SQL CLR and XML, Reporting Services, etc. This presentation will take a technical dive into the new things you will find in SQL Server 2008. Lynn's sessions are always highly interactive, educational and a lot of fun.

This talk presents 3 innovative tools from Microsoft Research in collaboration with Visual Studio DevLabs related to software reliability and testing: Code Contracts, Pex and CHESS. We will show coding demos for each tool (they are available for commercial evaluation through the DevLabs. Code Contracts provide a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions, under the form of pre-conditions, post-conditions, and object invariants, for .NET programs. The contracts are used to improve testing via runtime checking, enable static contract verification, and documentation generation. Pex is an automated white box testing tool for .NET. Pex systematically tries to cover every reachable branch in a program by monitoring execution traces, and using a constraint solver to produce new test cases with different behavior. The result of the analysis is a test suite which can be persisted as unit tests in source code. CHESS is a tool for finding and reproducing Heisenbugs in .NET and Win32 concurrent programs. CHESS repeatedly runs a concurrent test ensuring that every run takes a different interleaving. If an interleaving results in an error, CHESS can reproduce the interleaving for improved debugging.

This session will focus on best practices for SharePoint development based on lessons learnt. You will learn how to approach SharePoint development to build solutions in an effective way. This is not only about knowing the right tools and techniques to speed up the SharePoint development process but also about how to avoid mistake and making the correct design decisions.

One of the most important assets of LINQ is its tremendous extensibility. In this session we pinpoint those extensibility points on two sides: fan-in and fan-out. Starting on the fan-out side we explore the wide