Microsoft has a great history for providing developers with great tools for creating applications. But great code doesn't guarantee that a software project is successful. Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio Team System extend the Microsoft toolset across the whole software project team, automating methodolgies, best practices, great tools and collaboration across architect, developer, tester and business team members. Hear how the Visual Studio product strategy will make your team's development projects predictable and successful both in the latest release and as we move toward Longhorn.

Windows Server and the Windows Server System are one of the strategic platforms in most IT organisations but they continue to evolve to provide wider and wider infrastructure support. This keynote will discuss the drivers behind this evolution, the strategy for Windows Server and Windows Server system going forward and the Dynamic Systems Initiative as a key element of this strategy.

This session will provide an introduction to the in depth sessions covered in the next two days in the Security track. We will aim to provide practical advice for real world problems, relating to technology you are using today and should be considering for the future. We will also provide you with an update on Microsoft’s drive for Trustworthy Computing and how this important initiative has been progressing and driving change.

This session will provide the groundwork for the rest of the day - we'll be drilling down into key .NET Framework enhancements for the 2.0 release that reduce the load on the developer and help to make life simpler! We'll be looking at some very diverse areas including the new Generics capability, other language updates, and new debug tools, and we'll be focusing particular attention on new Framework features that will make it easier to develop secure applications.

Learn about services to enable automated management of users and computers, simplify administrative tasks and unify management of all Group Policy related tasks. You will walk away from this session understanding the concepts behind Group Policy. Do you want to stop your users playing solitaire or changing screen-savers, redirect user folders, apply disk quotas or distribute software packages? These are just some of the ways Group Policy can help you take tighter control of your environment.

This session explains the conceptual approach to designing and implementing a secure computing environment. The session will cover important security concepts and discuss the need for establishing a process for security within an organisation, and showing the importance of these business processes and procedures for Technical people. You will learn how to identify system criticalities, understand and assess system vulnerabilities and apply best practices to improve the security of your infrastructure.

It's over three years now since Visual Studio .NET was first released - it's very heavily used inside Microsoft, and across the entire spectrum of commercial, academic, and scientific development. So there's been no shortage of feedback as to ways to make it even more productive! Visual Studio 2005 incorporates many new features born from that feedback, features designed to accelerate code delivery, and to reduce the amount of code required to meet developers' most frequent needs. This session will explore the exciting new tools in the integrated development environment, for both VB and C# development.

Learn how to deploy and upgrade to Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 and how management packs for MOM 2005 can be used. Operational and customisation options are covered together with an overview of the functionality. Understand why effective monitoring of Active Directory and Exchange is essential and how management has been vastly improved in MOM 2005. The session will answer any questions you may have about monitoring the Microsoft stack, best practices for operating MOM 2005 and using the Management Packs.

This session will aim to provide you with the tools to address the perennial challenge of patch management that is being driven by the marked upturn in malicious attacks. You will learn how to apply security best practices and use available tools and technologies to implement a patch management process and strategy within your organisation. We will discuss the patch management lifecycle and demonstrate how tools such as Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer and Software Update Services can be used to quickly and effectively respond to published security bulletins and establish patch compliance across your infrastructure.

With a keen focus on productivity, ASP.NET 2.0 greatly extends the reach of the web developer, and offers new tools to address many common requirements. Have you ever needed to personalise a site, to keep a common look-and-feel across all the pages, or to provide different data based on someone's role? This session will look into jaw-dropping new tools to accelerate these kinds of development, to help improve your users' experience, and to improve site management and security.

The ability to integrate and interoperate with different systems is a key feature of the Windows platform. This session looks at the key integration and interoperation questions, proposes architecture for integration and discusses how integration can be achieved at each of these architectural levels. The Microsoft strategy for integration using Service Oriented Architectures and Web services will be discussed and then integration with the major platform systems types (Mainframe, AS400, Unix and Novell) will be covered. The Microsoft products which support these integration types will be examined and integration strategies using these products explained.

In this session we will discuss the concept of securing servers and explain the importance of server security to your organisation, whether that be a small or medium sized business or in the enterprise. We will analyse prescriptive host-hardening for secure servers used in legacy, enterprise client, and high-security environments and also discuss configuring the domain infrastructure through Active Directory and applying security templates to establish security baselines. Building on this knowledge, you will learn hardening best practices for domain controllers and member servers operating in various roles.

Modern PC's deliver enormous computational and graphical power, and users have every right to expect highly interactive and responsive applications that function effectively on- or off-line. .NET took huge steps forward in eliminating the challenges that used to surround deploying and managing client-side code, so it's no surprise that we're seeing a burgeoning interest in so-called “smart client” front-ends. The 2005 version of Windows Forms provides new tools to create fast, graphical, interfaces very rapidly, with a particular focus on integrating data into the overall solution easily and efficiently. When it comes to deployment, the new “ClickOnce” utilities really do allow you to publish a self-updating application with one button click! This session will illustrate the building and deployment of professional-looking smart clients.

Learn how Exchange uses and integrates with the Active Directory to provide a complete directory and messaging solution. You will get details on where information is stored in the Active Directory, including how the Schema is extended by Exchange, the merger of the location where user and mailbox information is stored, Exchange Naming contexts and the Exchange Server configuration. Topics covered include the Active Directory Connector, the Recipient Update Service (RUS), the Exchange Management MMC Snap in, and the Active Directory Cleanup Wizard. There will be a discussion on the permissions needed to run Exchange and access Active Directory. And a demonstration covering how to access the Active Directory schema.

In this session you will learn the requirements for securing client computers in environments where Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0 servers are present. You will also learn how to implement best practices for clients in extreme high-security environments. The session will discuss the use of Group Policy and Administrative Templates to secure Windows 2000 and Windows XP installations and provide guidance on software restriction policies, anti-virus strategies, and distributed firewall technologies. This session also covers configuring Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer to help achieve a secure client environment.

Visual Studio is widely recognised as an excellent development environment, but building good code isn't the whole story - the software lifecycle covers many disciplines beyond development. Unit and stress testing, project management, configuration management, issue and requirements tracking - and how can we be sure the application we developed will meet our security, operational and manageability standards? And how can we be sure what was developed fits with the original design architecture? Visual Studio Team System is a substantial suite that addresses all these “big picture” issues, providing superb communication and flow between all the phases and disciplines implicit in large-scale development. Many of the tools built into Team System were originally developed for in-house use in Microsoft, where projects involving thousands of people are the norm and builds are continuously integrated, yet project managers have an at-a-glance view of key metrics around how much code is changing, whether quality thresholds are being met, and which requirements are still outstanding. If you thought Visual Studio was just about code, prepare to be very surprised!

Virtual machine technology allows multiple operating systems to run concurrently on a single machine. Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 is a complete end-to-end virtual machine solution that enables businesses to achieve increased operational efficiency in software testing and development, server consolidation scenarios and legacy line of business application re-hosting. This session will provide a technology overview including implementation scenarios, architecture, virtual networking, rapid deployment, management and VSMT. VSMT is the Virtual Server Migration Toolkit, which together with Automated Deployment Services (ADS) provides the capability to migrate existing physical machines into virtual machines. Demonstrations in this session will include the Virtual Server administrative interface and VSMT to perform server migration.

This session will build on existing knowledge of server and client security and show how to apply best practices to implement perimeter and network defences. We will discuss how you can increase protection your wireless network through the use of encryption and password authentication protocols and also segment the network using IPSec. We will also cover the increasingly important use of hardware and software firewalls for network and application filtering – showing how ISA server can allow you to look at the payload instead of just the header.

After a full day of great content we would like to offer you the chance to round off the sessions and end the day in a relaxed and social environment at which you can speak with a multitude of local and national User Groups, other delegates, main session speakers as well as other Microsoft staff in attendance. This will be a great opportunity for you to share, and seek, opinions on the content of the day, ask that burning technical question or even join a user group. Please feel free to join us from 1700 - 1830 where drinks and snacks will be provided.

12:50-14:00

Deployment - Introducing the new "ClickOnce" tools

15:50-17:00

Deployment - Introducing the new "ClickOnce" tools