With the new version of ASP.NET, developers can easily leverage the Model-View-Controller pattern in ASP.NET applications. Pulling logic away from the UI and the views has been difficult for a long time. The Model-View-Presenter pattern helps a little bit, but the fact that the view has to delegate to the presenter makes the UI pattern difficult to work with. This session is a detailed overview of the ASP.NET MVC Framework.  It is meant for developers already building systems with ASP.NET 3.5 SP1.

While most enterprise applications are object-oriented, the data upon which they depend is not. Often, binding these two platforms together can result in significant amounts of lost productivity and a less than optimal solution.

Come see how you can resolve this recurring theme by leveraging the ADO.NET Entity Framework as your Data Access Layer.

In this session, we'll…

·         Explore the Entity Framework and its related components

·         Design an Entity Data Model using the designer tools

·         Walk through a variety of examples of how to interact with the model

·         Demonstrate advanced mapping scenarios

·         Compare Entity Framework to LINQ-to-SQL

·         Show how to implement Entity Framework in a multi-tiered application

You'll walk-away with a clear understanding of how the Entity Framework can greatly simplify your DAL and enable you to program against a conceptual model of your data, versus the actual data store itself.

You can visualize the solution in your mind.  All the key algorithms are scribbled on scratch paper on your desk, the architecture is diagrammed neatly on your whiteboard, and you’ve listed all the possible corner cases.  Nothing can slow you down!  Watch Sam Gazitt, product manager at Microsoft, as he demonstrates the ways that Visual Studio 2010 can help you avoid development pitfalls and bring your ideas to life.

F# is the new kid on the block, and many are wondering why they should care. F# offers a lot of really elegant solutions to some tasks many avoid simply because of the pain involved. What many don't realize is that F# was the basis for a lot of time-saving tools now available in C#, such as LINQ. That's not to say everyone should switch all their projects from VB.NET and C# to F#. Find out how you can start leveraging F# in your current projects by using the right language for the right job.

In the keynote, you heard Sam talk about how Visual Studio 2010 can help you customize your development environment, build new types of applications with your current skills, work well with designers and testers, and quickly get ramped up on a new project.  Now come watch Sam prove it all in this demo-packed session!          

As you build applications with a framework, you often find yourself running into the same problems. Fortunately, the ASP.NET Mvc framework is very extensible. We will discuss some common web development problems and how we can understand and extend the framework to solve our development hurdles.

The ASP.NET MVC framework greatly improved the web testability story in .NET, allowing for testing of the various components of MVC including controllers, filters, binders and more.  But testing these components in isolation still doesn't prove that your site works as a whole.  Action methods tested by themselves don't prove that the view shown has the correct information on it, or that links work as expected.  For these types of tests, an end-to-end, browser-based test is needed.  But just as it is difficult to test APIs not designed for testability, views not designed for testability can lead to brittle, difficult to understand tests.  In this session, we'll look at the popular UI testing frameworks, and pros and cons of each.  We'll also look at design for UI testability in our MVC application, and how we can greatly ease our testing burden with design techniques in our views.  Finally, we'll look at UI test design as a whole, and examine how we can develop a complete UI testing strategy that eliminates the difficulty in testing the last mile.

In this presentation we'll talk about the technical advances Microsoft is making in the user experience arena. We'll also get a sneak preview of some of the things that are ahead. Topics we'll cover include:

·         Intro to SketchFlow
·         Multi-touch in WPF with .Net 4 and in Silverlight 3
·         Perspective 3D in Silverlight 3
·         Windows 7, .Net 4 and Surface Roadmap
·         Inertia Processor, Manipulation Processor and Scatter View
·         XNA Game Platform and Creators Club
·         Intro to Front Runner

Mike Moles and Mike Azocar show cool new features in 2010. What's new and why it's better than 2008

Come learn the new features of C# 4.0 and VS 2010 that can make you more productive in getting your job done. C# 4.0 introduces new features such as Dynamic Types, Optional Parameters, better COM-Interop, and Co-Variance/Contra-Variance support. This presentation will explain each of these features and how they can make your programming tasks easier. You'll also learn about new features of VS 2010 that support the C# code-focused development paradigm.

Building high-performance applications that are easy to use and visually appealing is a challenge. Discover how Windows 7 helps developers create engaging, user-friendly applications by providing familiar tools and rich development features. In this session, we explore the new Taskbar, Jump Lists, Thumbnails, and file management with libraries, as well as many other enhancements to the new operating system.

soon

You've been learning about the core concepts of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) for quite some time now: Abstraction, Encapsulation, Inheritance, and Polymorphism. When you thought you knew it all, all of a sudden the cool kids are talking about all these principles such as "Single Responsibility Principle", "Open/Closed Principle", "Dependency Inversion Principle", as well as Inversion of Control containers, etc. This session presents those concepts so the attendees can understand what they are and start using right away.

You’ve started down an agile adoption path; teams are working from prioritized product backlogs, iteration goals are being set and achieved, and working software is created every day.  Now what?  As more organizations adopt Agile practices, understanding how long it takes to develop these skills across an organization and how to lead the process of skills adoption becomes important. Using the Seven Stages of Expertise model developed by Meilir Page-Jones, this hands-on discussion uses lightweight tools to leverage a framework that will help you understand where you are, where you want to get to, and the leadership required to keep your teams progressing along the path.

Many companies have started to adopt agile practices, but few are seeing all the benefits that they hoped to gain. Mistakes commonly made by those adopting a more agile process often leave technical leaders wondering if the Agile software movement is a fraud, or if they're just doing it wrong. This session will address questions and problems frequently encountered by those making the transition to Agility, and offer concrete ways to overcome those roadblocks and start reaping all the benefits that a truly agile organization can gain.

More than ever, businesses face increasing uncertainty and rapid change that put increased pressure on technology organizations to deliver. Traditional project management methods that apply proven but inflexible plan driven practices are ill-equipped to address this uncertainty and as a result projects often fail to meet their anticipated business objectives.  Agile practices are becoming well established to address these issues in software development efforts and beyond. By focusing on business value, transparent collaboration and continuous improvement, agility provides alternative approaches and toolsets than can meet the challenge.  This presentation will provide an introductory look at how agility can be applied to deliver improved business results in ever evolving business environments, and the expectations placed on both agile teams and agile leadership.

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Overview of NHibernate - highlight the background & history of NHibernate and it's key features
Mapping objects to your database - create persistent classes and related mappings
Build our database - Forward engineering your database from your mappings
Overview of Collections support - learn how NHibernate supports one-to-many (parent to children) and many-to-one (child to parent) relationships. Also explain how lazy loading works.
Querying - using HQL & Criteria expressions to query your database
Persistence - persisting your objects and managing transactions

One of the barriers to wider adoption of TDD is that it is best taught from within a team, and the technical challenges of writing tests frequently thwart those looking to teach themselves. This is exacerbated by the fact that most tutorials focus on toy examples rather than real-world problems. This session will be a live demonstration of Test Driven Development in Java, aimed at those new to TDD and looking to learn. We will explore some of the hard problems that frequently discourage new TDDers, and demonstrate some techniques for overcoming them in a live coding session. We will use JUnit, Java, and Eclipse to employ tools that most new TDDers are familiar with.

Soon after getting used to writing "unit" tests, developers tend to realize that those tests weren't really testing "units"; they were testing way more than that. In order to write real unit tests, it's necessary to use test doubles such as mocks and stubs. This session covers how to create and use those, and how to use Rhino Mocks to simplify things further. As we learn about those things, we'll also learn about the importance of thinking through how we write our code, putting thought into the dependencies that a class may have, and how things should be split up.

Join Matt Hinze to talk about inversion of control, object-oriented
principles, software architecture and how to develop quality software
very quickly.  In this intermediate to advanced level talk, Matt will
present the basics of IOC and dive deep into some interesting usage
scenarios…

This session offers an overview of Exchange Server 2010, the cornerstone of Microsoft's unified communications solution, and demonstrates how this latest release helps our customers achieve new levels of reliability and performance, by delivering features that help simplify their administration, protect their communications, and delight their users.  The session will highlight key innovations and enhancements made in Exchange 2010 across three product investment areas: "Flexible and Reliable", "Anywhere Access", and "Protection and Compliance". We will also touch on high-level options around migration from previous releases of Exchange, and illustrate the significant "Software + Services" opportunities delivered with Exchange Online.

Windows 7 will help introduce touch computing on a massive scale to millions of people over the next several years. The Microsoft Surface group was asked by Windows to assist in showing off what touch computing could do, and to present new ways to think about designing applications for those unique interactions. Come here the story and process of how a few members of the Microsoft Surface team developed three of the applications for the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7. The story will also offer and discuss numerous pain points and road blocks encountered along the way, and the learning developed as a result to take advantage of these new technologies and experiences.

This session will explore the Windows 7 client platform capabilities which provides enhanced security and control, secure anywhere access, and seamless desktop management. We will discuss networking features such as Direct Access, Branch Cache, and Search Federation. We will also explore management improvements, deployment, virtualization, data protection enhancements, and core security improvements.

n this session we will look at the updates and changes since Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. Key topics areas include web, virtualization, scalability and availability improvements, remote desktop services, PowerShell new features and cmdlets. We will also examine Power Management, Group Policy,  and Active Directory improvements for identity and access management.

When deploying SharePoint as a business-critical collaboration platform and digital-asset repository, implementing a comprehensive backup and recovery strategy is absolutely essential. Though SharePoint and SQL Server natively provide some data protection capabilities, these prove inadequate for most competitive organizations. In this session we will discuss the key components of any successful SharePoint backup and recovery plan. After analyzing SharePoint's native data and platform protection capabilities, we will identify best practices, available free tools, and other best-of-breed solutions for ensuring a fully protected SharePoint platform.  Finally, we will discuss SharePoint archiving, and review how intelligent archiving procedures, when coupled with a successful data protection plan, can improve platform performance and reliability, and lower storage and management costs.

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You’ve probably heard of Ruby on Rails, and now there is the Groovy equivalent: Grails.

If you know Java or Groovy (or even if you don’t), creating a website with  Grails is a snap.

In this talk we will cover the basics to get you up and running:

Domain Classes

Controller Classes

Views

Deploying your application to a production environment

Some of the tricks you should know that will make your life easier
and much more

NetBeans is more than an IDE - it is a full fledged platform for
developing Java desktop applications. The NetBeans IDE uses libraries
provided by the NetBeans platform that make displaying windows,
handling events, and plugging in new modules much easier. Using these
libraries can speed the development of interactive desktop
applications. Interactive Network Technologies Inc. (INT) is a Houston
based software company that provides graphical toolkits primarly for
the oil and gas industry. It has migrated its geophysical data viewer,
INTViewer, to the NetBeans platform. Customers can easily add modules
to INTViewer as well as add custom features. We will take a look at
developing applications with the NetBeans platform, using INTViewer as
a case study.

In this session you will learn how requirements modeling from Systems Engineering has been mixed with Java UML and how this can greatly ease the creation and tracking of requirements. Finally project requirements are no longer a big document that you use to prop your door open or keep handy in the winter for kindling. Requirements become living entities connected throughout your design and code.  Developers can see and show what they have done and not done. It is also simple to do at lower cost and risk analysis without paying for costly tools. This is not tool specific, just a set of techniques that can be implemented with any modern UML tool.

Coherence provides replicated and distributed (partitioned) data
management and caching services on top of a reliable, highly scalable
peer-to-peer clustering protocol. Coherence has no single points of
failure; it automatically and transparently fails over and
redistributes its clustered data management services when a server
becomes inoperative or is disconnected from the network. When a new
server is added, or when a failed server is restarted, it
automatically joins the cluster and Coherence fails back services to
it, transparently redistributing the cluster load. Coherence includes
network-level fault tolerance features and transparent soft re-start
capability to enable servers to self-heal.

This presentation will include demonstrations of the different
partitioning types, use of coherence event listeners, and integration
of Coherence as a second level caching mechanism for Hibernate.

Ever since its birth 14 years ago, the Java platform and  JDK have been  constantly changing to accommodate the emerging needs of the developers and  deployers.

 This session will try to give attendees good exposure to  the latest technologies on Java SE and Java EE platforms. They include new  plug-in architecture and Java deployment toolkit introduced  in Java SE 6 update 10.  For the JDK 7, the topics of  Project Jigsaw, whose goal is to provide simple, low-level module system for the JDK, and the dynamic language support will be  discussed.For the Java EE 6, the features of profiles, pruning, extensibility, and  the ease of development will be discussed.

The Groovy language is well suited for top-level server-side code. Operations like moving data between Maps, XML, and Beans are trivial constructs in the language. This presentation will show how easy it is to create an implementation of a Google Web Toolkit web service in Groovy. The final demo will show how an administrator or developer can modify the behavior of a running server by editing a script or invoking a text console.

JavaFX technology has been around more than 2 years now and  developers are  starting to leverage its easy to use yet powerful features  in building  exciting  RIA applications.  In this session, the advanced  features of JavaFX  technology  such as various deployment options, Java and JavaScript integration,  accessing  RESTful web services, how to mix JavaFX and Java, WidgetFX  framework, JFXtras,  building enterprise apps using JavaFX, and newly introduced  UI controls,  skinning, layouts, and charts, etc. are going to be covered  and  demonstrated.
The Java Store, which is a JavaFX-powered storefront that  provides an easy  and  secure means of discovering and acquiring compelling Java  and JavaFX applications is also going to be discussed.

 The demo's of this session will be available in the website  below in the  form of hands-on lab 1 week of before the event.  Attendees  are welcome to bring  their laptops and try along the demo's right on the spot.
 (It is strongly  encouraged you pre-install the required  software before  coming to the  session.)

     http://www.javapassion.com/courses/houstontechfest2009

* A quick intro of Portal world, primarily when one should consider using Portal servers.
* A brief summary of JSR-168 aka the first portlet spec and its limitations.
* The new spec JSR-286 and what the first spec did not cover and some of its other new features.
* A demo of JSR-286 implementation using the latest and the greatest JBoss Portal version.

Why  it is important for developers and Project Managers to take notice (High Level  - 20+ years of development history and how ALM/TFS helps solve historical industry problems

Fluent NHibernate, HTML Helper & Input Builders, and Automapper (and others) use extension methods, fluent interfaces, and expressions to make a more approachable, readable, and flexible coding framework. These tools aren't restricted to the elite third party frameworks. You too can use these techniques to evolve your code.

We will explain what each technique is, show popular examples, explain how to use the technique, and apply the technique to everyday code.

"To manage, one must lead." Deming

To go from good to great in the IT project world is to go from IT project management to optimization. The powerful evidence of "Super Projects," those projects whose outcomes far outperform their stakeholder expectations, demonstrate that there is something additional and nontechnical occurring in this category. The evidence points us to Deming's famous call for as much project leadership as project management. Through real life case examples we will examine the category of measureable "Greatness" or "Superperformance," its servant leadership link, and the urgent requirement for a new mindset about IT projects and their optimization in dynamical, complex adaptive environments.

Engage yourself in LINQ and change the way you work with data. Query and transform data from in-memory collections, XML sources and relational data with a unified set of tools and language extensions, while writing code that is cleaner, concise and free of fragile, hand-crafted query strings.
In this session, we'll…
·         How LINQ shifts from an imperative to a declarative style of programming, providing a single, unified approach to querying data

·         Examples of querying data from multiple data domains: In-memory, database, ADO.NET constructs and XML documents

·         Fundamentals of anonymous types, inferred relationships and deferred and immediate loading

·         A detailed at look at LINQ to Entities and the Microsoft Entity Framework

·         How to implement LINQ in a multi-tiered application

You'll walk-away with a clear understanding of how LINQ can help you write code that is cleaner, shorter and free of fragile, hand-crafted query strings.

Generics let you tailor a method, class, structure, or interface to the precise data type it acts upon. In this session we will discuss what capabilities Generics provide to you the developer and how to use them in collections, and with delegates. We will also talk about creating your own generic classes and methods.

Scala is a relatively new programming language for the Java Virtual Machine that interoperates nicely with Java libraries. Scala is staticly typed so the resulting applications are fast and reliable. Scala is more powerful than Java while offering a simpler conceptual model. Many of Scala's features come from the functional programming paradigm. This talk will cover some of the features that make Scala so attractive. This will not be a comprehensive coverage of Scala, rather the coverage will be selective. This talk will not assume any Scala knowledge.

Advanced Rails

This is a follow up to the Intro to Rails session. In this session, we'll cover Rails conventions and "current best practices". We'll take a look at popular gems and plugins, common ActiveRecord methods, Rails' built-in Ajax support, and many other aspects of Rails all while building a real app from scratch. Finally, we'll cover how to deploy a Rails application into the wild.


After this session, you should have a good understanding of how a Rails application works, some popular tools used in the Rails community, and deployment options for Rails apps.

In this presentation Mohammad Azam will introduce IronRuby. IronRuby is a Microsoft implementation of the Ruby language. Currently, IronRuby is in PRE-ALPHA release and complies to 80% of the Ruby language specification. Mohammad Azam will demonstrate how to get started with IronRuby and interact with this beautiful language. Don't tell my wife that I love Ruby.. IronRuby i.e.

While Rails has been around for a while and is no longer the "new kid on the block", many in the enterprise space have yet to be fully introduced to the full Rails stack. This is geared towards those who have heard the hype, but have not yet delved into the details of what makes Rails such a productive development stack. This session is also geared towards those who have some programming background, but may not be familiar with common web development conventions, such as MVC, ORMs, CRUD actions, the response/request lifecycle, etc.


After this session, you should have a general understanding of how a general purpose web development framework such as Rails facilitates a productive development environment and the pros/cons of using Rails.

Python is a language that runs well on the Java Virtual Machine,
the Common Language Infrastructure (.Net and Mono), and native C
environments (including embedded systems). This presentation will demo
Python running as a first class citizen in Java and C environments. It will
finish with a demo integrating Python in Java, Java classes, Python in C,
and C code.

Web Parts play a key role in just about every SharePoint implementation; from surfacing list or library content to extending SharePoint's reach across the enterprise. If you've implemented SharePoint, chances are you have a highly customized, custom developed or third party web part.  But how do we determine when to use out-of-the-box web parts or develop our own? And if we choose to develop our own how can we make sure we follow best practices? During this session, Catapult Systems will cover several aspects of Web Part development and customizations, including; when to choose one approach over the other, best practices, and lessons learned.

SharePoint is a great platform on which to build and deliver solutions. The question, however, quickly becomes what to build, how to build it, and most importantly, how to ensure that what I build is successful. In this presentation, we discuss the SharePoint "Solution Quadrant," which addresses the many types of solutions you can build on SharePoint. We explore how to build your solution, keeping in mind the concepts of modularity and reusability. And finally, we address end user adoption challenges and how to overcome these by providing the information people need right to their fingertips. In short, how to get the most value out of your SharePoint investment!

Most users are turned off by the out-of-the-box look and feel of a SharePoint portal, while IT may believe branding to be too daunting of a task to undertake. There is a common misconception that, while it’s possible for a website to look stunning, a SharePoint site has to be rigid and bland. The users are frequently left with a less than appealing portal and thus a less than ideal central place for them to work. To the user, SharePoint is a great collaboration tool, search tool, content management system, et cetera, but it feels so blah. Using the skill sets common to developers, we can create an appealing portal that drives traffic, delivers information to the users, and establishes a central workplace.

In this session, Errin O’Connor will discuss how you can examine your organization’s current SharePoint state as well as items you should start to consider around SharePoint 2010’s release.

Errin will discuss how organizations should examine their current SharePoint roadmap \ situation and provide guidance in helping to plan for the future.  Errin is under a Microsoft NDA for

SharePoint 2010, but will still be able cover the publicly available items that can be shared around SharePoint 2010 and will give insight into how organizations can avoid the SP2003 to SP2007 upgrade pitfalls when planning for future upgrades from SP2007 to SP2010.

If you do any kind of development with SharePoint, you’ll inevitably encounter the WSS/SharePoint object model.  This session will give an introduction to the object model as well as cover various tips and tricks when working with the objects.

Topics we’ll cover include:

•       What is the WSS object model?
•       Why have an object model?
•       How does the object model work?
•       Object hierarchies
•       Important things to know when coding
•       What to know about the object model cache
•       Performance issues when working with list objects

In this session we create a composite application in WPF, built following the Composite Application Guidance for WPF (codename Prism). The sample application is simple, but most of it is written during the session, covering both the main components of Prism, as well as the Model-View-ViewModel pattern and dependency injection.

Cloud-based computing infrastructures deliver broad-based functionality to end users in far-flung locales but too often the destination device remains a PC. Developments in virtual desktop technology are creating a new generation of ultra low-cost endpoints such as network monitors, set-top boxes, next-generation netbooks, and kiosks. These devices can deliver a full multimedia experience over the cloud, and enable subscription-based and application-specific computing services. This session will examine how new-generation virtualization technologies have evolved and how companies are utilizing it to create new kinds of computing and services.

How do you validate your input with WPF? I am asked this question a lot. With this presentation we will go over a small (but popular) gambit of methods to validate input & binding with WPF.

We will be going over the validation rules built into WPF, how to use IDataErrorInfo, how to leverage Enterprise Library Validation Block, and how we can make our own validation markup extension.

Silverlight and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are here and they're popular. Really popular. All the buzz these days is about how you can build a dynamic application for the web that targets a RIA plug-in. Does that mean standards-based development's days are number? Of course not! There are still many compelling reasons to build new websites using standards-based approaches like ASP.NET. In this session, you'll learn why you may want to pick a standards-based approach to web development over a RIA plug-in. You'll also learn how you can use a RIA, like Silverlight, to enhance ASP.NET websites and overcome the limits of HTML and JavaScript, such as enabling multi-file uploading, data visualization, and rich, animated UI. By combining the best of standards-based websites with rich islands of RIA functionality, you can build a modern web experience that offers the best of both the RIA and standards worlds!

Believe it or not, the next version of Silverlight is here and it rocks! Silverlight 3.0 is finally making it easy to build complex line of business (LOB) applications on Microsoft's next generation RIA platform. From simplified data binding to increased access to system resources to H.264 support, Silverlight 3.0 is a major step forward and it delivers many of the tools LOB developers need to efficiently build data-driven applications. In this session, we'll look at many of the new features in the Silverlight 3.0 beta and discover how they can be used to build business applications. Attend this session to jump start your Silverlight 3.0 understanding and prepare for the official release later this.

Many developers use enterprise service bus (ESB) tools such as BizTalk or, for those looking at a lighter-weight approach, NServiceBus. What many fail to realize is that we have another option, one that has been tried and tested for many years and that we all use daily: HTTP. Find out how HTTP can deliver a much more maintainable, simpler solution to your ESB problems.

MonoTouch using C#

What does the emergence of having "processors everywhere" do for your development opportunities and risks?  Why is "The Web" becoming something more than "The World Wide Web" for a larger number of people every day?  In this session we'll talk about how innovations in display technologies, wireless communications, sensors, and power supplies are changing the game for (and on) developers.

There has never been a standard for storing and processing hierarchical data. Over the years, multiple approaches have emerged. Oracle provides the START WITH...CONNECT BY PRIOR syntax. Joe Celko even wrote an entire book on the subject. With SQL Server 2008, the new hierarchyid data type offers an easily understand and implemented approach to storing hierarchical data. It can be implemented with either breadth-first or depth-first indexing for navigating the hierarchy, which makes it a flexible and viable solution for handling hierarchical data while delivering good performance. To illustrate the usefulness of the hierarchyid data type, this session will tackle a problem of great financial and business significance to the manufacturing industry: Bill Of Materials (BOM). All of the various forms of the Bill of Materials (engineering, manufacturing, sales, service) are comprised of hierarchical data. Individual parts are assembled into units called subassemblies. Subassemblies and individual parts are assembled into finished goods. The BOM problem is explained in detail so that the application developer thoroughly understands the requirements. Next, the audience is shown how to take the requirements and transform them into a logical hierarchical model. Finally, the audience is shown how to take the logical design and use SQL Server's hierarchyid to implement the physical design. Implementing a BOM solution with SQL Server 2008 provides the developer with the skills to solve similar problems such as modeling an organizational structure, a set of tasks in a project, or web site navigation graphs.

New and Improved in Expression Web
Super Preview-for debugging cross browser display issues.
Using Snapshot mode during development.
Site Management improvements, using staging servers, secure FTP
Designer-Developer workflow tips

Sell your IT project by helping the organization identify their most critical processes and most challenging gaps. Plan sprints with short-term ROI in mind.  Assist managers in developing and implementing an action plan to ensure high priority design and readiness issues are resolved early, generating a quick payback.  Separate organizational issues from technical problems and direct efforts appropriately.  Even with complex organizational or work process issues involving integration of departments, sites and external partners, long project cycles can no longer be justified.  Learn to move beyond habitual project and change management methodologies to whole systems design processes and rapid deployments.

While all the focus these days is on RIA platforms like Silverlight, there are still tons of new features coming in ASP.NET 4.0 that are going to make it easier than ever to build high-performance standards-based websites that give RIAs a run for their money. In this session, you'll learn about the new client-side features coming to ASP.NET 4.0, such as client-side templates, client-side controls, and even a client-side data context, that make it possible to build an application that completely cuts-out unnecessary page PostBacks. Using the techniques presented in this session will enable you to build highly optimized web applications that maximize the power of Ajax and deliver unprecedented interactiveness in the browser- no plug-in required!

Most everyone has heard of cloud computing initiatives offered by Amazon, Google, IBM, Sun, and others. Come to this session and learn about Microsoft's Windows in the cloud initiative: Azure. The Windows® Azure™ Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. Learn how to get started with Azure, using resources provided by Microsoft to develop applications for the cloud. We will introduce you to the core pieces of the Azure Services Platform and show you how to use your Visual Studio and .NET skills to develop applications for deployment in Microsoft's cloud.

Why sketching  generates better concepts and ideas compared to creating wireframes.

-         Learn how to describe the ‘feeling’ of interaction and gestural interfaces with sketches.

WF 3.5
 Brief introduction to WF 3.5
 What it is
 What problems it solves
 Brief WF architecture overview
   Hello World
  Walk through of creating an asynchronous, persistable Hello World application
 Gotcha’s and techniques
  A review of frequent gotcha’s I’ve seen on the WF forum and in my projects
 Techniques that we’ve used in our implementation and a brief tour of how we architected our system

        WF 4.0
  3000 foot overview of the changes to the system

Learn how to leverage DotNetNuke's content
 management framework while developing powerful web applications.  Developers will learn how to apply existing .NET skills within DotNetNuke and how to use its content management, security, and skinning frameworks.

This presentation overviews many products in the Microsoft business intelligence stack including SharePoint, SQL Reporting & Integration services. Standing on these technologies and the Adventure Works database, we'll build a faceted/dimensional search capability using only out of the box capabilities. Faceted search has found a home in the product listing arena (see BestBuy.com website), but is an under-utilized player in the business intelligence arena. This highly intuitive real-time reporting UI has much of the bang of a data cube or pivot table in a streamlined, executive friend approach. This Microsoft Architecture review will demonstration where and how the pieces fall into place to build a useful capability.

As much as we learn and as hard as we try still many of our software projects fail. Hundreds or thousands of factors combine within a team or an organization to cause failure or inefficiency, but a large percentage of projects I've seen fail failed because of unproductive teams. Maybe they produced endless discussions or documentations instead of software, maybe they produced thousands of bugs instead the essential features, maybe they produced accusations and blame instead of working together toward a common goal, or maybe they didn't produce much of anything because they weren't motivated or didn't know what they were supposed to build. Productivity in a software team is the team's ability to produce quality, working software, but the concept is ubiquitous throughout all industries.

This session will address how everyone from the CEO to an entry-level developer can impact the productivity of their organization and the success of their software projects. We'll look at how techniques from agile and scrum can help improve productivity of teams as well as how individuals, teams, and organizations can each learn productivity lessons from GTD and other non-software disciplines.

Learn how Microsoft Dynamics xRM can be leveraged as a rapid solution development platform for streamlining business processes and applications.  With an intuitive interface for both developers and end users and a robust security and extensibility model, Dynamics xRM can deliver successful, integrated solutions more quickly and easily.

ASP.NET developers have always had two options for building controls for applications: user controls and server controls. Although server controls have their benefits, developers tend to gravitate toward user controls because of the designer support for building out the UI. SharePoint Web part developers are restricted to the server control realm which offers no UI designer support and often requires a great deal of code to define the UI directly in the control itself. Even simple UI changes require sifting through Web part code to determine where to make the change, and then the Web part needs to be recompiled and redeployed before the change takes effect. This session illustrates the use of templated Web parts, an architectural technique that separates Web part logic into the server control and the UI into one or more user controls. Developers are then free to use the designer tools in Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer to build out the UI for Web parts, and can make UI changes without the need to recompile or redeploy their Web parts. Templated Web parts also allows for other user experience possibilities like displaying alternate Uis based on user input, profile settings, security, or Web part configuration properties, and promotes code reuse because project-specific UI elements are maintained separately from the core Web part logic. As an added bonus, the it also contains built-in support for AJAX.NET components.