Adopting the Rich Standard: HTML5 in ASP.NET
The web is getting richer. Plug-ins, like Silverlight, are a big part of the richer web, but standards like HTML5 and CSS3 have evolved to enable equally rich, standards-based web applications. Learn how to leverage HTML5 in ASP.NET applications, which HTML5 features are available and ready for use today, and how IE9 is adding power to HTML5 applications in this demo-heavy session. Jump-start your HTML5 development and leave with the tools needed to adopt the rich standard immediately.
HTML5 and CSS3 Techniques You Can Use Today
As more browsers deliver rich support for the next generation of standards-based web development, new techniques are enabling web developers to design with unprecedented levels of control. In this session, you’ll learn practical HTML5 and CSS3 techniques that you can use in any web project today. Learn how to easily add drop shadows to HTML objects, how to quickly create rounded corners, how to use custom fonts, and even how to animate with CSS. All techniques will be demonstrated with special attention to cross-browser support and tips for supporting older browsers.
Anti-Corruption Layers
The code we write is constantly evolving. That is the nature of the beast that we call software development. Nothing stands still. This is also true about the external dependencies that you attach to in your code. You might take a dependency on something as complex as a third party integration API or as innocuous as the default textbox provided in Visual Studio. Either way, you're beholden to two things: the whimsical changes of the owner of that dependency, and the possibility you may need to transition to something slightly different.
How can you effectively deal with the constantly high probability of change? This session will look at techniques, indicators and decision making that can help to protect your application from the constantly blowing winds of change.
Refactoring to Logical Layers
You’ve taken the blue pill and now you’re looking at your project and wondering where you should start creating logical layer. Not only where do you start but also how can you do this massive refactoring without causing a significant and negative impact on our current development efforts. This session will look at some tried and tested practices that allowed for massive refactoring, that created seams and logical layers. We’ll discuss the trials, the pitfalls and the successes that can be found during the experience.
Leveraging Client Capabilities with jQuery in Visual Studio and ASP.NET
Microsoft has embraced the popular jQuery open source JavaScript library, which is already used by many major web sites. jQuery provides a very productive environment for client side programming in JavaScript. It takes advantage of existing knowledge of CSS selector syntax to offer a powerful and efficient alternative to the DOM. The use of operation chaining and implicit iteration leads to a very compact and productive syntax. The library is very lean at a mere 15K, yet provides a strong base and a great extensibility model which has led to a large number of plug-in extensions to simplify web development. The session will review how to use the library for very useful features such as watermarks, avoiding browser inconsistencies, and making AJAX calls to the server. Several plug ins will be demonstrated which provide stunning client experiences with as little as 1 line of code! We will also study how to extend the library with our own custom utility functions and plug ins. Learn how jQuery and the Microsoft AJAX Library JavaScript libraries greatly simplify client side development, and which to use for particular scenarios.
Things Every ASP.NET Developer Should Know
There are many things you need to know to be a good ASP.NET developer. Do you understand the basics of HTTP? Do you know what a request and response look like "on the wire"? Do you take advantage of HTTP compression and expiration to reduce bandwidth and requests to your web site? Benefit from many years of experience with web development and discover features, tools, and techniques that you may have never used before. Utilize response filters and adapters to modify the output of your pages. There will be a wide variety of useful tips that can be taken and used today on your ASP.NET web sites.
BI for Developers with Analysis Services, PowerPivot...and .NET too. - Part I and II
After several years of analysts telling us that Business Intelligence is hot, it's now becoming truly important and ubiquitous. However, most developers still don't have a good understanding of how BI and multidimensional (OLAP) databases work; in fact, developers see BI as difficult and very separate from what they do. But BI really isn't hard, and there are several APIs .NET developers can use to integrate BI into their applications.
In this double session, Andrew Brust, noted MS BI expert, will show you the basics of SQL Server Analysis Services, including how to build OLAP cubes, and the concepts underlying them. Once the cube is built, Andrew will cover the MDX query language and various APIs, like ADO MD.NET, for querying and manipulating your cubes from .NET applications.
The session will finish up with a look at Excel's role in BI, including creation of Excel add-ins with BI functionality (using Visual Studio Tools for Office), and how PowerPivot works and ties into the Analysis Services material covered at the beginning of the session.
.NET Rocks Live at DevReach!
Join Carl and Richard from .NET Rocks as they talk to Scott Stanfield, Shawn Wildermuth and Stephen Forte about the future of UX in the Microsoft development world. Scott, Shawn and Stephen have all worked in different areas of data visualization and user experiences, so you can be sure there will be some strong opinions about what the future holds. Bring your questions and be part of what is sure to be an amazing .NET Rocks Live episode at DevReach!
Web Load Testing with Visual Studio 2010
Is the first time you’ve really tested your ASP.NET application under load when you put it into production? Don’t do it! This session digs into how you can test your ASP.NET application using Visual Studio 2010. This session will demonstrate load testing in real time, showing how Visual Studio 2010 can lead you to the weak points in your web application and dig into the details of the types of problems you’re having. You’ll see some of the new features added to load testing in Visual Studio 2010, as well as the key ideas for how to be successful with load testing.
Dynamic State Storage Using the ASP.NET Provider Model: A Problem-Solution Session
It’s not every day you get two things for the price of one. That’s exactly what you’ll get here. In my opinion, there’s no better way to teach a technique or a pattern than by developing something that’s practical and that solves a real need or problem. For many years now we’ve developing web applications with Microsoft’s web-development platforms, starting with classic ASP and now of course with the latest iteration of ASP.NET. For just as many years, we’ve had to decide when to use each state storage bucket depending on our exact situation and necessity. I’m referring to buckets such as Session, Application, Cookies, and Cache; each with their own special characteristics and each with their own ups and downs. What if I told you there was a way to leverage the same code and swap out what kind of state storage bucket you want at any point in time? The ASP.NET Provider model helps us do this and in a very elegant fashion. This is the same model that Microsoft uses for ASP.NET services such as membership, roles, and personalization. In fact, many developers have leveraged this model to write their own membership or role providers but not everyone knows you can use this model for any feature you want to write for which you need the ability to “swap” out implementation details. I’ll show you how to write a provider-based feature and help you solve your state-storage decision dilemma at the same time.
What's New In WCF 4.0
Incredibly, .NET in on its 6th iteration and WCF, though it seems like only yesterday it was announced is on its 3rd. With .NET 4.0 came some very cool, while non-breaking, features that you're going to want to know about. This session will give you a heads up on several new and powerful features introduced in WCF 4.0. Among these are "Configuration-less Hosting", "Discovery", "Routing", and some additions to the REST extensions.
With the introduction of ASP.NET MVC, many developers have jumped the Web Forms ship. Most of them believing that ASP.NET MVC is the next step to building better sites and that Web Forms are either bad or a dying technology. While I believe that ASP.NET MVC is really very cool and useful, I'm still and will continue to be an ASP.NET Web Forms guys, and believe me this technology is not going anywhere. And while I really do like MVC and the job that team has done with this new framework, I don't think for a second that it is a replacement nor superior to Web Forms, merely different; yet I do hear rhetoric stating that if you haven't embraced MVC as the platform of choice, you're not a good developer. I believe that many of the people that are of the mind-set of Web Forms being inferior believe that because Web Forms is a significantly more "open" architecture than MVC. There are many mistakes in design and development that they allow you to make that ASP.NET MVC does not. But if used properly and with some thought behind your design, ASP.NET Web Forms is still and will continue to be a first rate web application development platform, as proven by the continuous new features that the Web Forms team continues to dish out with every new release of Visual Studio. In this session, I'll go over some of the areas of ASP.NET Web Forms that many look at as shortcomings and show you how to tighten them up so that you can continue to develop great Web Forms sites that rank up there with the best of MVC apps.
Asynchronous pages and handlers can be used in ASP.NET to improve the performance of the application, especially the throughput, but wrongly used can lead to unexpected behavior, including a degraded performance. One of the key technologies that are part of the Visual Studio 2010 is Parallel Extensions. So come to this interactive session to see how you can benefit from those new technologies and how they can help you to mitigate some of the problems.
Designing Applications in the era of Many-core Computing
If you’ve seen the Pattern for Parallel Programming session last year and enjoy it, you would love this session. If you haven’t seen the session you will love it too. We will go through some of the patterns in the Parallel Programming space, and look at how to apply them in practice in a very entertaining way.
A TPL Lap Around, or How TPL will help you do your job
With great power comes great responsibility. And today’s hardware is offering us more and more computation power, so we, as developers, have to assume responsibility for our code, if we want competitive applications. With .NET 4.0 Microsoft introduced new technologies like TPL, and PLINQ, which helps us make our applications future proofed. So come to this demo intensive session to see how those technologies can help you and your application.
Automated Testing in the Agile Environment
As more product teams move to Agile development methodologies, the need for automated testing almost becomes essential to generate the velocity needed to ship fully tested products in short iterations. In this session we will look at the differences between traditional project testing and agile testing as well as how to get the automation effort started for both new and existing agile projects.
Let’s talk Scrum with the Scrum guys (Stephen Forte and Joel Semeniuk)
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 a quick introduction to the basics of Scrum like: the Scrum Master, team, product owner, and burn down, and of course the daily Scrum, Stephen, Remi, and Joel the session will feature a large Q&A on best practices.
Building RESTful Applications with the Open Data Protocol
Applications today are expected to expose their data and consume data-centric services via REST. In this session we discuss what REST is and have an overview of WCF Data Services and see how we can REST enable your data using the Open Data Protocol (OData). Then you will learn how to leverage existing skills related to Visual Studio, LINQ and data access to customize the behavior, control-flow, security model and experience of your data service. We will then see how to enable data-binding to traditional ASP.NET controls as well as Silverlight and Excel PowerPivot. We’ll then turn to consuming SharePoint and other OData based applications in .NET as well as from a non-Microsoft client. This is a very demo intensive session. You will learn:
- What REST and OData are
- How to use Astoria to build apps-and why
- Client side technology for data access (LINQ, etc)
Introduction to WCF RIA Services for Silverlight 4 Developers
WCF RIA Services, released alongside Silverlight 4, represents a new take on multi-tier application development. In this demo-only (no slides) talk, we'll introduce RIA Services and then walk through how you can use it to build your own applications using Silverlight 4 and ASP.NET.
Learn how to encode, publish, download and display images, videos, and audio files and streams using Silverlight 4.0. Use the Expression Encoder to create videos for Silverlight complete with markers and other features. Learn how to access the webcam in Silverlight 4. Great demos.
Test Driving ASP.NET MVC
There are many benefits to the ASP.NET MVC framework, and one of the biggest is the testability. In this session you will learn to test your routes, controllers, and models BDD style with MSpec and MbUnit, and use WatiN to certify the user interface.
Mocks, Stubs, and Dependency Injection, Oh My!
So you aren't writing any code without having tests in place…well, except for those tricky things like web services, database calls, and that section of code that no one wants to touch since it's a pile of spaghetti. In this session we will work through refactoring that spaghetti using dependency injection, and learn how to use Mocks and Stubs to isolate the system under test and write cleaner, more effective tests.
Deep dive into Load Testing features in Visual Studio 2010
Do you still struggle how to use the Load Testing features in Visual Studio 2010? They seem very useful however getting it to work correctly is always a big challenge. In this session will go through various configurations for user pacing, think times, caching, new and return users. A practical demonstration between different test mix models will be shown. At the end of this talk you will have the knowledge to get load tests started right away.
Authoring custom WCF services in SharePoint
We live in a different world today! Gone are the times when you built your webparts around postbacks! Welcome silverlight, jquery, bing maps, google maps, and many others! And there are many enhancements in SharePoint 2010 that let you build such applications, the question is which is right for you? In this session Sahil compares WCF REST Services in SharePoint, The client object model, and custom WCF services, and then dives deep into the WCF aspects of SharePoint. All code, very few slides!
If there is a topic that has more misinformation than anything else, it has to be the scalability and performance aspects of SharePoint. Did you know, SharePoint 2010 has some real world, under the covers improvement that help it perform and scale better? This session involves taking a deep look under the covers into the specific improvements Microsoft has made between SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 that truly qualifies SharePoint 2010 as an enterprise scalable product. This doesn't mean the product doesn't have limits - but this session is a lot more than just limits written on a powerpoint slide. This presentation is a true under the scenes look at specific improvements!
Visual Studio LightSwitch – Beyond the Basics
LightSwitch is a new product in the Visual Studio family aimed at developers who want to easily create business applications for the desktop or the cloud. In this session we’ll go beyond the basics of creating simple screens over data and demonstrate how to create screens with more advanced capabilities. You’ll see how to extend LightSwitch applications with your own Silverlight custom controls and RIA services. We’ll also talk about the architecture and additional extensibility points that are available to professional developers looking to enhance the LightSwitch developer experience.
Building Office Productivity Solutions with Visual Studio 2010
The Visual Studio and Office teams have made significant investments in improving the developer experience for building and deploying Office and SharePoint applications. In this demo-heavy session, we will walk through an end-to-end business application built on Office and SharePoint and discuss architecture options to consider when building these systems. You'll learn how to use Visual Studio and its enhanced set of RAD tools that allows users to consume external line-of-business data within the familiar Office UI. See how new language enhancements will make developers more productive whether they write their code in VB or C#. Finally, you’ll learn how Visual Studio 2010 makes it possible to provide a more seamless end-user deployment experience for Office solutions.
Back to the Feature! Solution Deployment in SharePoint 2010
We know the excellent SharePoint developer tools support provided by SharePoint 2010, especially around the ease of packing and deploying your Customizations. In this Session, we go behind the scenes of the deployment model to build a solid understanding of the inner workings of solutions and features in 2010. We'll demonstrate that the Features and Solutions no longer have to be mapped "one to one" - through the use of the visual designer tool, developers have granular control over solution structure and activation dependencies. We will compare and contrast the deployment of a web part as both a Site Collection scoped feature as well as a Sandboxed solution - so that you clearly understand the benefits and limitations that the new Sandboxing capabilities bring to 2010. You will see the new versioning and Upgrade Solution capabilities in action.
Workflow in SharePoint 2010
There is something for everyone in this session whether you are a developer, designer, or business analyst! In this session we will look at workflow in SharePoint 2010, with a specific focus on new features and capabilities. For those of you completely new to SharePoint and/or 2010, there will be a brief tour and a look at the capabilities of the Document Library (metadata, check in, versioning, etc.). We will finish by applying an “out of the box” approval workflow template to the library, and set the groundwork for important workflow terminology. Then we will create our own new workflow using Visio, transition the workflows into SharePoint Designer (with the new ability to create site level workflow templates) and finally move over to workflow development in Visual Studio 2010 using its templates and tools. Time permitting we will look at how you can upgrade your custom workflows from 2007 to 2010.
Easing into Windows Phone 7 Development
If you are .NET developer you’ve probably seen the mobile phone templates in Visual Studio. Perhaps you’ve even created a few trials apps over the years to learn about the Microsoft’s mobile application platform. Mobile development, at least on the Microsoft Mobile platform, has always felt like a distant cousin to ‘real’ application development. Starting this year Microsoft is making a crucial break with the past and is getting serious about competing in the IPhone dominated market. Windows Phone 7 is new start. It’s flashy, fun, and sports the new Metro interface. It’s easy to create applications for this lively new device in Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend 4 and it leverages the popular Silverlight and XNA programming platforms. This session provide a broad overview of the Windows Phone 7 platform and programming environment.
Silverlight/WPF Data-binding Essentials Part I and II
Using data is a must in most business applications. Silverlight and WPF have a fantastic binding engine built into their API and it is used by hundreds of companies to build powerful LOB applications. Microsoft presents a flexible binding model to the UI developer. This talk covers a huge topic list including XAML binding, data-converters, data formatting, binding events, data validation and exception handling, list binding, XML binding. You’ll also see how data-templates allow you to completely revamp your data presentation.
High Performance Functions
The use of functions is something that, we are taught in our first programming lesson, are good development practice, to encapsulate common code and ensure code reuse. In this session we will look at the different ways you can write functions in SQL Server and importantly look at the performance and pitfalls of each option. Unfortunately, the use of functions in SQL Server can seriously damage you performance. In this session we will look at why functions are used and how you can get round the limitations of the current implementation of functions and still maintain performance. This session is essential for anyone using functions in batch type scenarios such as reports, ETL and batch processing. After this session you will see how you can increase your query performance 100 fold by employing some simple practices.
When a Query Goes Wrong
Walking is not the best means of getting from London to Paris. However it is a good choice when getting to Big Ben from Buckingham Palace. Imagine the scenario where you can only choose one means of travel and use that for all journeys. This is what you get with a Query Plan in SQL Server resulting in some queries being very quick but some taking a very long time or not even completing. In this session we will look at the situations where Query Plans go wrong, looking at data distributions, statistics, potential areas for poor estimations, parameter sniffing and query plan reuse. With each one we will look at the solutions to ensure you don’t get bad plans, including query options, query hints, parameter choices and plan guides After the session you will be able to understand when and where query plans can go wrong and importantly how you can ensure you avoid having bad plans whilst maintaining good practice with plan reuse.
Customizing Team Foundation Server to Your Needs
Team Foundation Server provides a platform for your teams to collaborate during software construction, however, what happens when you need to change Team Foundation Server to best match your continually evolving practices? In this session, you will learn how to customize and extend Team Foundation Server to best match your ongoing process improvement initiatives.
Pragmatic .NET Tips, Tricks, and Tools
Every experienced .NET developer has picked up a few cool tricks or useful tools that they put to use on every new project after they've learned them. This session draws upon the experience of many successful .NET developers and distills this knowledge into a collection of tips and tricks you can start using in your work today. Some of the topics covered in this session include error handling, tracing, caching, base page classes, architecture, and data access best practices. You'll learn about highly reusable Http Modules and Handlers and a few code routines you may want to add to your personal library. Steve will also describe his favorite must-have free developer tools.
Worst Practices and Anti-Patterns of Software Development
Everyone likes to talk about "best practices," but what about worst practices? Mistakes are how we learn, and of course it's much less expensive to learn from OTHERS' mistakes than to repeat them ourselves. In this session, Steve will share a number of experiences, both his own and others', as well as describe a number of practices and patterns that, when used inappropriately, he considers to be "worst practices" and "anti-patterns."
A Whirlwind Tour of Software Development Fundamentals
There are certain principles of object oriented software development that have been shown, over the years, to improve the “-ilities” of applications. OO software of course is supposed to provide better maintainability, flexibility, etc. but these benefits are only realized in properly designed systems. Too often, tight coupling and rigid designs result in expensive to maintain systems. In this session, we will discuss six fundamental principles of software development, including the almost famous SOLID principles. All examples will use C# and Visual Studio 2010.
The Future of UX Technology
Join Scott Stanfield as he discusses the user interface technologies of today and tomorrow with Richard Campbell. Scott’s company Vertigo has created some of the most original Silverlight applications in the world. The keynote digs into the strengths and weaknesses of Silverlight, especially in light of Flash and HTML5. Looking to the future, Scott examines how emerging platforms like Windows Phone 7 and HTML5 will stretch developer’s skills to new user experiences, and how best to prepare for them.
Relational Databases or Storage Tables in the Cloud?
When you put data in a computing cloud, the requirements of consistency, availability and partitioning can conflict. This means when building highly available and scalable applications, you may have to give up classic ACID database transactions and relational database features such as foreign keys, joins, and stored procedures. How do you then handle data versioning, and latency? The Microsoft cloud platform gives you two data technologies: Azure Storage Tables, and SQL Azure. When do you use one or the other? This talk will talk about how to architect, design, and implement data storage in this new world. You will learn:
- The basics of Azure tables
- The basics of SQL Azure
- How to use Azure blobs, tables, and relational databases when appropriate
- How to use transactions in cloud computing
- How to partition data in cloud computing
How to Partition and Layer a Software Application
How do you make your software adaptable to changing technologies? Everyone answers: use layering. But exactly how do you develop software layers, create application interfaces that allow you to change the underlying technology? This is especially crucial as we begin to think about cloud computing and realize that parts of applications may migrate to the cloud, while others stay on desktops and local servers. This session will focus on techniques such as interface based design, proper use of inheritance, inversion of control, factories, single responsibility, facades, and other patterns and techniques to accomplish this. Most of the talk will be spent demonstrating with code how to evolve a tightly coupled application into a properly layered one.
How to Build Composite Application with Prism for Silverlight
The session will cover practices how to build composite applications with Prism and Silverlight that are "built to last" and "built for change". We will go through various patterns set in Prism and end up with fully functional Line-of-Business application that is easily maintained, extensible, testable and works everywhere - both on the desktop and in the browser.
The fun Side of Developing on Windows Phone 7 Series
This session will concentrate on most of the hidden treasures of Phone 7 SDK and gives the developers heads up on where to accomplish tasks that adds value to their mobile application visually and/or architecturally. Topics as simple as associating a Splash Screen for an application to running animations on a secondary thread for performance will be discussed. Demonstration of programming the accelerometer, Isolated Storage, Location and Push Notifications will be covered. Fasten your seat belt, this is going to be a very full and fast pace session!
Bringing it altogether! SL4, WCF, RIA, Blend4, Phone 7, LOB & performance
This session will demonstrate the tactics that need to be considered to play well in a world where Designers and Developers share the Earth! We will build an application in Visual Studio 2010 and Blend 4 for SL4 While displaying data from SQL Server using WCF and RIA, then we are going to tweak the application to make it work in Phone 7 while putting extra consideration on performance for the Phone that might not have been needed in a regular browser.
When and how to use CLR in Microsoft SQL Server
CLR in Microsoft SQL Server is a cool feature allowing user-defined functions, user-defined types, procedures and functions to be created using managed codes. This session will cover in details how we should decide whether to use CRL or not ant what are the potential benefits and problems.
Real World N-tier Solutions with Silverlight, RIA and Entity Framework
In this session I will show you how to structure a real business application, beyond the basic two project solution that the Business Application wizard gives you, with logical tiers on both sides, as well as more advanced strategies for real applications, including working with custom authentication, triggers and middle tier logic to keep track of who is changing or accessing which data.
Building the DevReach Viewer, a Deep Dive into Winphone 7, MVVM and OData
In this advanced session, John will explain how the DevReach viewer application was built, covering a range of common WinPhone development challenges, including: Asynchronous download and parsing of OData feeds, Use of MVVM techniques, Storing settings in Isolated Storage and Page State, Incremental search as you type using CollectionViewSource, Attached Properties and advanced Binding techniques.
Data Access Strategies for Silverlight
Building web based enterprise application has really never been easier. But the ease always brings pain in the mean of performance right? This session will introduce you different data access and caching strategies you can use while building enterprise level application including patterns and real life practices with real life statistics and prove. You will be amazed to see the performance you can get with Silverlight if you pick the right strategy.
Game Programming with Silverlight 4
You always had the dream of programming a game since your childhood? In this session we will start from scratch and finish a brand new arcade game with Silverlight 4. We will emphasize some of the important points and development differences between regular Silverlight applications and games. Finally we build the same game for Windows Phone 7 and that will happen in just 45 minutes. If you want to know how you are welcome!
HTML5 WII-FM : What’s In It For Me?
Find out what HTML5 can bring to your lives as developers and designers. Building offline applications, creating a consistent user experience and providing multimedia features without the need of an additional plug-in are just some of the topic waiting for you. Finally you are welcome to a short discussion of “Why HTML5 instead of others?