April 2010: An Evening of Windows Azure and Visual Studio 2010

Synopsis:
Join your friendly neighborhood Microsoft Developer Evangelists, Chris and Jim, for an open evening delving into Windows Azure and what's new in Visual Studio 2010, customized by you! They have plenty of content and demos at the ready, but they're happy to drive toward specific areas that you'd like. From an overview of Windows Azure to demos of what's new in Visual Studio 2010, it's going to be an information-packed meeting!

Speaker:

Chris (http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen) is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft, covering the Northeastern US. A technologist with over 16 years of experience, he joined Microsoft after holding senior architect and developer positions at companies including Monster.com, VistaPrint, Staples, and IDX Systems, as well as consulting with others. He is coauthor of "Essential Windows Communication Foundation" and "Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System" and holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Management Information Systems, both from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

March 2010: Crash Course: The SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform

Synopsis:
SharePoint is one of Microsoft's fastest growing businesses and makes significant leaps in the capabilities it provides from the 2007 release. SharePoint 2010 has many new developer oriented features. Developers can build collaboration applications on the platform features of SharePoint 2010, the new tools for SharePoint 2010 make developers more productive and new hosting options for SharePoint solutions provide more flexibility in deployment. This talk is a lap around SharePoint 2010 for developers providing a brief look and code based demos of the major new features in building user interfaces, building on the data platform and in general programmability using Visual Studio 2010.

Speaker:

Paul Stubbs is a Microsoft Technical Evangelist for SharePoint and Office, where he focuses on information worker development community around SharePoint and Office, Silverlight, and Web 2.0 social networking. He has authored three books on solution development using Microsoft Office, SharePoint and Silverlight, several articles for MSDN Magazine, and has also spoken at Microsoft Tech-Ed, PDC, SharePoint Conference, DevConnections and Tech-Ready conferences. Paul has also worked as a Senior Program Manager with the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) team in Redmond, Washington. Paul is a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) and has received Microsoft Certified Applications Developer (MCAD) and Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) certifications. Paul also frequently participates in the developer community on the Microsoft forums. Visit Paul's blog at blogs.msdn.com/pstubbs for lots of deep SharePoint developer information.

February 2010: Introduction to Application Development With Silverlight 4

Synopsis:

This presentation is targeted at .NET programmers new to Silverlight or who wish a review of the fundamentals of building an application in Silverlight 4. Topics will include

·         Drag and Drop development

·         Xaml and Code

·         Layout and Controls

·         Data, Data-binding, Validation and Async-validation

·         Templates and The Visual State Manager (Time allowing)

Liberty is the author of over two dozen books, and his blog is a required resource for Silverlight programmers. His twenty years of programming experience include stints as a Distinguished Software Engineer at AT&T; Vice President of Human-Computer Interaction at Citibank and Software Architect at PBS/Learning Link. He can be reached at jliberty@microsoft.com

January 2010: PDC 2009 Recap

Synopsis:
A special presentation to launch our 9th year. A number of attendees at the recent Microsoft PDC event will present some of the cool things seen in LA.

Visual Studio 2010
- Jon Wallace

Micrsoft Business Intelligence, BizTalk Roadmap and the relationship of WCF, WF and AppFabric
- Zhe Ma

WPF/A past, present and future of user experience programming on Windows
- Matt Edwards

A sprint through the The Windows Azure Platform
- Mark Sontz



Speakers:

Jon Wallace is a Systems Consultant at Unum working in the Enterprise Architecture area supporting Enterprise Components and Shared web service applications. He has been with Unum since 1998 and is a Microsoft certified MCPD. Jon is a graduate of Bates College and currently lives in Gorham, ME.

Zhe Ma is the Orchestration/BizTalk Technical Domain Architect and Issue Business Domain Architect at Unum. He has been with Unum since 2002. Zhe has a Master's Degree in Computer Information Systems from Bentley College and currently lives in Portland, ME.

Matt Edwards, Unum Technical Domain Architect / Customer Capabilities (2002-). Prior to Unum, held senior technical positions at two startups (2000-2002), SmartEnergy.com and VideoShare, and a global marketing/technology consulting firm, Think New Ideas (1996). Trivial Pursuit categories: History, Science, Geography.

Mark Sontz is a Systems Consultant at Unum in the Risk Capabilities Development area working as a project manager and technical architect. He is on his second stint with Unum (since 2007). Sandwiched in between he was a Java application architect at Fairchild Semiconductor. Mark has a B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon and lives in Portland, ME.

December 2009: Tour the Top 10 Treats in Entity Framework 4

Synopsis:
Have you been waiting with anticipation for the next version of Entity Framework? There's a lot to see in the new EF4. From a much improved designer, to foreign key support, POCO, lazy loading and more. If you have been using EF, you'll want to see what's changed. If you have shunned EF, it's time to take another look. The list is long so we'll look at the 10 things that I find most noteworthy...and hit some more if there's time.

Speaker:

Julie Lerman is a Microsoft MVP, .NET mentor and consultant who lives in the hills of Vermont. You can find Julie presenting on data access and other Microsoft .NET topics at user groups and conferences around the world. Julie blogs at thedatafarm.com/blog and is the author of the highly acclaimed "Programming Entity Framework." She is currently working on the second edition of the book. Follow Julie on twitter at julielermanvt.

October 2009: SharePoint for ASP.NET Developers

Synopsis:
SharePoint has emerged as one of the most common platforms for deploying Web applications, and for a good reason - it provides many higher-level building blocks for constructing Web applications that would take literally years to develop by hand. However, ASP.NET developers coming to SharePoint for the first time are often frustrated by the fact that many development techniques they are accustomed to no longer apply, even though SharePoint is built on top of ASP.NET. This talk will introduce the practicing ASP.NET developer to the SharePoint development environment and answer common questions like:

• Are requests routed?
• How do I customize a page layout?
• Where do I put resource files to make them accessible?
• Should I use Profile?
• How do I incorporate Ajax/jQuery into my pages?

September 2009: Why REST?

Synopsis:
As REST continues to grow in popularity, it's important to stop and ask yourself why REST? REST is by no means a silver bullet but it does offer some advantages over traditional SOAP and WS-* architectures when it fits well into your scenario. There are also times when SOAP makes more sense because it offers features and capabilities that REST cannot provide. In the end, REST and SOAP are different architectural styles, each with their own pros and cons. Come and learn when to choose one over the other and why REST makes sense for many Web services.

Speaker:
Aaron Skonnard is co-founder of Pluralsight, a premier Microsoft .NET training provider. Aaron has authored numerous Pluralsight courses in the areas of Azure (cloud computing), WCF, Web services, XML and BizTalk Server. Over the years, Aaron has written numerous articles, whitepapers, and books and he's a contributing editor with MSDN Magazine where he authored The XML Files and Service Station columns for years. Aaron frequently speaks at industry events including TechEd, PDC, and VSLive! Check out his blog at http://pluralsight.com/aaron/. 

July 2009: Hierarchyid

Synopsis:
Hierarchyid is a datatype that may be used instead of foreign keys to indicate a parent/child relationship between rows in a table. The advantage of using hierachyid is that it will typically speeds up selects against tree based data quite a bit. The disadvantage of it is that typically slows down inserts, updates, and deletes and generally requires a bit more care and feeding to maintain the foreign keys do. It is, however, another tool in you toolbox for dealing with tree like data. We will be looking at how hierachyid works, how to use it, and how to maintain tables that use hierarchyid.

Speaker:
Dan is a member of the technical staff at Pluralsight, where he heads up the SQL Server curriculum. Dan is also an independent consultant, author, and speaker. He likes data; pointy data, rectangular data, even data just lying around on the floor. He is a co-author of the book "A Developers Guide to SQL Server 2005". His articles have been published in MSDN Magazine and SQL Server Magazine and he has spoken at WinDev, Microsoft events, as well as to various developer groups.

June 2009: .NET and Java Integration

Synopsis:
While the sabers continue to rattle over the superiority of either .Net or Java over its competing platform, the fact of the matter is that terrific software systems have been written in both platforms and sometimes we need them to just get along and work with one another. Perhaps you have built a best-of-breed turnkey platform in .Net but now have a major prospective client who is running in a Java environment. Or maybe you have legacy or acquired software written in Java but need to leverage it with a team of .Net developers. How will you get these two systems to communicate with one another and get the job done in a cogent, efficient and performant manner?

This talk will look at the various ways that .Net and Java systems can work together to provide solid business solutions. We'll look at the strengths and weaknesses of each platform as well as some of the problems that you will face when trying to interface one platform with the other.

Speaker:
With over twenty-five years of software development experience, Stuart Jones offers in-depth technical expertise combined with a strong sense of meeting business objectives. As both an entrepreneur and consultant, Dr. Jones has helped countless firms across a wide array of industries achieve their business goals through sound engineering practices and creative software solutions. His software development firm, Berwick Heights Software Inc (www.berwickheights.com), just celebrated its fifteenth year of operation. A partial list of Berwick Height's clients include well known companies such as Chase Bank, Dun&Bradstreet, IDT, SAP and Scholastic as well as a number of start up firms and mid sized companies.

A member of both the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) and the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), Dr. Jones received his M.S. in Computer Science from SUNY-Stony Brook and his B.S in Computer Science from Florida State University. Also a recognized composer of modern chamber music, which often employs computer-generated sounds, he earned his PhD in Music Composition from Columbia University. His music is performed in concert halls and music festivals throughout the United States and Europe.

April 2009: Intro to ASP.NET MVC

Synopsis:
Come hear about the newly released MVC framework for ASP.NET. This framework turns ASP.NET development on its head and gives you a completely different model from the traditional WebForms we are all used to. This talk will walk through the basics of creating MVC applications with the new framework, pointing out both advantages and disadvantages along the way, as well as comparing and contrasting the newer techniques with ASP.NET WebForms development.

Speaker:
Fritz is a co-founder of Pluralsight where he focuses on Web development with ASP.NET.

Fritz is the author of the book 'Essential ASP.NET' published by Addison Wesley, available in both C# and Visual Basic .NET editions, and 'Essential ASP.NET 2.0' released in 2006. He is a columnist for MSDN Magazine, and is a regular speaker at industry conferences including the PDC, TechEd, and VSLive!. Prior to .NET, Fritz's work focused on Windows development with C++ and COM, and has written several courses and many articles on C++, MFC, COM, and ATL. Microsoft recognizes Fritz as an MVP for his contributions to the ASP.NET community.

Fritz lives in Southern Maine with his wife Susan and two children Zoë and Sam.

March 2009: Azure Cloud Services

Synopsis:
This session provides a tour of cloud computing platform capabilities, an overview of its various components, and explains how these fit together to provide best-of-cloud experiences. It covers the journey of a developer from writing a service to launching that service in the cloud. Learn about the cloud services that enable developers to easily create or extend their applications and services. From consumer-targeted applications and social networking web sites to enterprise class applications and services, these services make it easy for you to give your applications and services the most compelling experiences and features.

Speaker:
Michael Stiefel, principal of Reliable Software, Inc. is a consultant on software architecture and development, and the alignment of information technology with business goals. He is currently a member of the OASIS Technical Committee developing a core SOA Reference Model. He is a Visiting Scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Science, Technology and Society Program where his research and teaching focus is the teaching of engineering to high school and undergraduate students. As Adjunct faculty, Stiefel has taught graduate and undergraduate software engineering courses at Northeastern University and Framingham State University. Michael Stiefel's education is from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a Interdisciplinary Ph.D degree in Nuclear Engineering, Political Science, and History of Technology; M.S. in Nuclear Engineering; and B.S. in Electrical Engineering. He is an active member of Independent Computer Consultants Association and the IEEE Consultants Network.

February 2009: Intro to F#

Synopsis:
Learn about Microsoft´s new language, F#, a typed functional programming language for the Microsoft .NET Framework. F# combines functional programming with the runtime support, libraries, tools, and object model of .NET. Understand how F# asynchronous workflows help tame the complexity of parallel and asynchronous I/O programming and how to use F# in conjunction with tools such as Parallel Extensions for .NET.

Speaker:
Chris Bowen is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft, covering the Northeastern US. An architect and developer with over 16 years of experience, he joined Microsoft after holding senior positions at companies including Monster.com, VistaPrint, Staples, and IDX Systems, as well as consulting with others. He is coauthor of "Essential Windows Communication Foundation" and "Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System" and holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Management Information Systems, both from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

December 2008: Intro to XNA

Synopsis:
3 years ago Microsoft released their new platform for graphics and game development targeting the .Net platform. In it's initial release XNA targeted the Windows Platform and the Xbox. Since it?s initial release XNA has grown in popularity and functionality as Microsoft prepares to release its 3rd version of the XNA Framework and the XNA Game Studio. In this talk we will explore the brief history of XNA and delve into its features using a showcase of demos and examples.

Speaker:
Michael is a Principal Consultant for Magenic Technologies working out of the Boston Office. By day specialties include .Net, C#, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. For fun ( and games ) Michael dabbles in graphics and game development using both C++, and C# targeting XNA, DX, and OpenGL. Michael has spoken at several Code Camps and User Groups over the years. He also founded and runs the Boston XNA Developers Group.

November 2008: Double Feature

Synopsis:
Highlights of the 2008 Professional Developers Conference

Speaker:
Unum Architects Zhe Ma, Dermot Bostock and John Wallace will briefly share their observations from the recent LA conference.

November 2008: Double Feature part 2

Synopsis:
Understanding the ADO.NET Entity Framework

Abstraction is frequently used to create difficult-to-appreciate artwork, but when applied to software, abstractions can improve flexibility, independence, and the ability to compose higher-level concepts. ADO.NET Entity Framework, now shipping as part of Visual Studio 2008 & .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1, helps you create models of your data that enable a familiar object-oriented programming experience. Entities map flexibly to data sources while providing a degree of separation from the specifics of your relational schema. LINQ makes an appearance as well, using a familiar syntax to query entities that's also used with LINQ to Objects, SQL, and XML. Once you get the Entity Framework picture, you can model your own data access works of art, or better, art that works.

Speaker:
Chris (http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen) is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft, covering the Northeastern US. A technologist with over 16 years of experience, he joined Microsoft after holding senior architect and developer positions at companies including Monster.com, VistaPrint, Staples, and IDX Systems, as well as consulting with others. He is coauthor of "Essential Windows Communication Foundation" and "Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System" and holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Management Information Systems, both from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

October 2008: Building Controls in Silverlight 2

Synopsis:
The primary mechanism for reuse in Silverlight 2.0 is the user control. This talk will walk through the steps for building effective user controls in the Silverlight 2, including steps for creating user control projects in Visual Studio 2008, editing user control user interfaces with Expression Blend 2.0, exposing properties and events from user controls, as well as control packaging. We will also look at the custom control model, and show how to build your own controls from the ground up, looking in particular at the factors that determine whether you need to build a custom control, or whether a user control would suffice.

Speaker:
Fritz is a co-founder of Pluralsight where he focuses on Web development with ASP.NET.

Fritz is the author of the book 'Essential ASP.NET' published by Addison Wesley, available in both C# and Visual Basic .NET editions, and 'Essential ASP.NET 2.0' released in 2006. He is a columnist for MSDN Magazine, and is a regular speaker at industry conferences including the PDC, TechEd, and VSLive!. Prior to .NET, Fritz's work focused on Windows development with C++ and COM, and has written several courses and many articles on C++, MFC, COM, and ATL. Microsoft recognizes Fritz as an MVP for his contributions to the ASP.NET community.

Fritz lives in Southern Maine with his wife Susan and two children Zoë and Sam.

September 2008: Developing XSLT Applications in VS 2008

Synopsis:
Visual Studio 2008 is a first class XSLT development platform on par with many standalone tools for XSLT development. You can use it to create and debug standalone transform or transforms that are embedded in a .NET application. Did you know you can set a breakpoint on data?

XSLT is usually one of those things you use only when you have too, but with the amount of XML floating around today you just might be making your life harder by avoiding it. VS 2008 lets you develop an XSLT based application just like you would a C# or VB.NET application; write a little bit, try it out, maybe derive an new transform from an old one because you just need to change part of it (did he say "derive"?).

We will dive into the basics of XSLT, writing an XSLT program in modules (just like you do with C# and VB.NET), debugging XSLT, using XSLT standalone, and embedding XSLT into a .NET program.



Speaker:
Dan is an independent consultant, author, speaker, and an instructor and course author for Pluralsight. He likes data; pointy data, rectangular data, even data just lying around on the floor.

He is a co-author of the book 'A Developers Guide to Microsoft SQL Server 2005'. His articles have been published in MSDN Magazine and SQL Server Magazine and he has spoken at WinDev, Microsoft events, and developer groups.

Dan has been active in computer technologies since before they were fashionable. In the distant past he wrote the microcode for one of Digital Equipment Corporation?s computers. In the recent past has taught and written about most of the development topics in Microsoft Windows technologies, from .NET, to XML and Web services, to SQL Server. He does consulting through Danal Technology Inc.

August 2008: Community Launch and Tech Ed 2008 Debrief

Synopsis:
We will have finally have the Community. We'll briefly talk about the 2008 version of products that launched in February, Visual Studio 2008, Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 (soon). We'll also then talk about things seen and heard at Tech Ed 2008. Stuff like F#, Micro Framework, Oslo, etc.

Speaker:
Tim is a technical architect for Unum, he has been there in various software development roles since 1994. He co-founded the MaineBytes .Net user group in 2001 with Paul Stubbs (now with Microsoft) and continues to lead that group. He was honored to be recently nominated for an INETA Community Excellence award.

Related items:

• Micro Framework
• Poply
• Live Mesh
• F#

July 2008: ASP.NET Dynamic Data

Synopsis:
ASP.NET Dynamic Data provides a framework that enables you to quickly build a functional data-driven application, based on a LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework data model. Full CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) operations are supported. The site includes filtering by foreign keys and Boolean fields; foreign keys are automatically converted to their friendly names. Smart validation is automatically available, which provides validation based on database constraints for nullable fields, data type, and field length.

Speaker:
Jim O'Neil is a Microsoft Developer Evangelist for the Northeast District. He recently joined Microsoft after 12 years at Sybase where he was heavily involved in the PowerBuilder development community as a support engineer, pre-sales consultant, and evangelist. He is a co-author of two books on software development with PowerBuilder and has presented at multiple user groups and conferences in the US and Europe.

March 2008: Mashup your office business apps

Synopsis:

Mashups are wildly popular across the Internet today, let me show you how to bring this powerful technique to your business applications. In this scenario I have a Groove workspace with members of my XBOX clan. We use the workspace to collaborate on activities such as discussions, screen shots, events and game night planning. The application pulls data from Groove and mashes it up with XBOX Live data in Excel so I can analyze the activities of my gamer friends. Although the demo has a gaming theme the concepts and techniques that I will show you apply to line of business data as well. You will see how to read data from Groove and SharePoint, call RESTful XBOX Live services, transform complex xml data using Linq to Xml, Data bind xml to Excel and dynamically create complex Excel charts.

Paul Stubbs worked as a program manager with the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) team in Redmond, Washington. In addition to VSTO Paul worked with the Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) team developing a new managed code application programmability development tool for InfoPath 2007 and independent software vendors. Paul is currently working on the Office team developing programmability features for future versions of Microsoft Office. Paul has written for MSDN magazine and has spoken at such events as TechEd, TechReady and the Office Developers Conference. Paul has also co-authored 2 books: Programming Microsoft Office Business Applications  and VSTO for Mere Mortals': A VBA Developer's Guide to Microsoft Office Development Using Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office. Paul participates in the developer community on the Microsoft forums and his blog http://blogs.msdn.com/pstubbs.

January 2008: SQL Server Integration Services

Synopsis:
SQL Server Integration Services is really a Veg-O-Matic on steroids for data. Not only will it slice and dice your data any way you want; you can put a carrot in one end and have an onion come out the other... all without any tears!

SSIS is the replacement for DTS, Data Transformation Services. In general it is faster, easier to use and more flexible.

A typical use for SSIS is to load data from a file into a table in SQL Server, but SSIS in by no means limited to this. It can be used to directly generate simple reports or by Reporting Services. SSIS can consume data from an Excel spreadsheet, massage that data then dump it into SQL Server or vica versa. It can use FTP to aggregate a bunch of remote files into an update to SQL Server. Just about anything to anything is possible.

SSIS uses packages, which are really programs, to process data. We will look at creating SSIS packages and how they can be deployed and executed.

Speaker:
Dan is an independent consultant, author, speaker, and an instructor and course author for Pluralsight. He likes data; pointy data, rectangular data, even data just lying around on the floor.

He is a co-author of the book 'A Developers Guide to Microsoft SQL Server 2005'. His articles have been published in MSDN Magazine and SQL Server Magazine and he has spoken at WinDev, Microsoft events, and developer groups.

Dan has been active in computer technologies since before they were fashionable. In the distant past he wrote the microcode for one of Digital Equipment Corporation?s computers. In the recent past has taught and written about most of the development topics in Microsoft Windows technologies, from .NET, to XML and Web services, to SQL Server. He does consulting through Danal Technology Inc.

December 2007: New features of ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008

Synopsis:
This talk will look at the new features of ASP.NET with the 3.5 release accompanying Visual Studio 2008, as well as several enhancements to the IDE that improve the lives of Web developers. We will cover features and intend uses of new controls including the ListView, DataPager, and LinqDataSource. We will also look at Visual Studio 2008 features like the multi-targeting feature that lets you develop for both 2.0 and 3.5, the improved factoring support for CSS, and improved JavaScript debugging.

Speaker:
Fritz is a co-founder of Pluralsight where he focuses on Web development with ASP.NET.

Fritz is the author of the book 'Essential ASP.NET' published by Addison Wesley, available in both C# and Visual Basic .NET editions, and 'Essential ASP.NET 2.0' released in 2006. He is a columnist for MSDN Magazine, and is a regular speaker at industry conferences including the PDC, TechEd, and VSLive!. Prior to .NET, Fritz's work focused on Windows development with C++ and COM, and has written several courses and many articles on C++, MFC, COM, and ATL. Microsoft recognizes Fritz as an MVP for his contributions to the ASP.NET community.

Fritz lives in Southern Maine with his wife Susan and two children Zoë and Sam.

October 2007: It's all about the tools

Special Event: Trick or Geek
Break out your Master Chief, Harry Potter, Star Trek, Star Wars, Teletubby, Tool man or other popular geek costumes. Russ is bringing some great prizes for the best.

Categories:

1. Tool Shed tool person
2. Rock Star / Movie Star / Developer Star
3. Geek - (this can't be the way you dress everyday)
4. Best Overall

September 2007: Creating Office Business Applications with Visual Studio 2008

The 2007 Microsoft Office system provides a comprehensive set of servers, clients, and tools to make it easier for enterprises, software vendors and developers to build and deploy a new class of business applications called Office Business Applications (OBAs). Visual Studio 2008 ships with Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) V3 giving you a powerful toolset for building rich Office applications that leverage the power of the client, the server and line of business back end systems.

We will also talk about my new role on the Microsoft Office Groove team. So if you want to know about what Groove 2007 has to offer your Enterprise be sure to stop by. And of course we will talk about all the deep inner-working secrets of life at Microsoft.

Speaker:
Paul Stubbs works as a Program Manager with the Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) team in Redmond. Paul is a co-author of the best selling book- VSTO for Mere Mortals. Paul is currently focused on driving the development of a new managed code application programmability development tool. In addition to VSTA Paul works with the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) team developing Office solutions. Paul has worked at Microsoft for 3 years and has spoken at such events as TechEd and TechReady. Paul also participates in the developer community on the Microsoft forums and the VSTA blog http://blogs.msdn.com/vsta.

August 2007: Visual Studio 2008

Visual Studio 2008 brings a host of new features and technologies to the developer's workbench, including IDE improvements, .NET Framework 3.5, LINQ, C# 3.0, and VB 9.  In this session, we'll concentrate on the main enhancements and features of the IDE itself.  There is native support for the .NET 3.x technologies including designers for WPF and WF and tools for WCF.  Web developers have ASP.NET AJAX out of the box, new CSS design tools, and IntelliSense support for JavaScript development, including type inferencing.  Also new is the inclusion of the unit testing framework with the Professional version of the product.  Time permitting, we'll also touch on how Visual Studio 2008 works with the new ADO.NET improvements as well as the powerful functionality of Language Integrated Query (LINQ).

Speaker:
Chris Bowen (http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen) is Microsoft's Developer Evangelist for the Northeast.  A software architect and engineer with over 15 years of experience, Chris joined Microsoft after holding senior positions at companies such as Monster, VistaPrint, Staples, and IDX Systems and consulting on web presence and eCommerce projects with others.  He is coauthor of "Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System" from WROX and the upcoming "Effective Windows Communication Foundation" from Addison-Wesley.  He specializes in application architecture and building highly-scalable transactional web systems and holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Management Information Systems, both from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

May 2007: Silverlight

This talk will introduce the emerging Microsoft Silverlight technology. Silverlight is the Microsoft solution for delivering rich, cross-platform, interactive experiences including animation, graphics, audio, and video for the Web and beyond. Utilizing a subset of XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language)-based Windows Presentation Foundation technology, Silverlight enables the creation of content and applications that run within multiple browsers and operating systems (Windows and Macintosh) using Web standards for programmability. Consistent with Web architecture, the XAML markup is programmable using JavaScript and works well with ASP.NET Ajax.

Speaker:
Fritz Onion is a co-founder of Pluralsight, a premier Microsoft .NET training provider. Fritz is the author of Pluralsight's ASP.NET curriculum, with courses delivered around the world. He is the author of the highly acclaimed book "Essential ASP.NET" and the much anticipated book "Essential ASP.NET 2.0" came out in November 2006 (both Addison Wesley). He is a columnist for MSDN Magazine and is also a regular speaker at industry conferences. You can read Fritz's blog at http://pluralsight.com/fritz/.

April 2007: Windows Presentation Foundation

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is Microsoft's new strategic User Interface technology designed to provide richer, high-fidelity, applications using an optimized developer/designer workflow. Learn how to leverage the new features in WPF such as XAML to create visually stunning interfaces to enhance capabilities and user experience of your applications. The talk will include many walkthroughs and demos to show the mechanics and capabilities of WPF.

Speaker:
Chris Bowen (http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen) is Developer Evangelist for Microsoft's Northeast district. An experienced software architect and engineer, Chris joined Microsoft after holding senior positions at companies such as Monster.com, VistaPrint, Staples, and IDX Systems and consulting on web presence and eCommerce projects with others. He is coauthor of "Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System" by WROX and specializes in application architecture and building highly-scalable transactional web systems. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Management Information Systems, both from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

March 2007: New Day Launch

The release of Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft® Office system ushers in a new age of application platform development. Join us as we explore the new capabilities and features that will let you create applications to help users communicate, collaborate, and present information in more powerful ways than ever before.

Session will cover:

• .NET Framework 3.0 Introduction
• Windows Presentation Foundation
• Windows Communicaton Foundation

December 2006: Building Apps with AJAX

Companies that carved out a competitive edge in the 1990's through innovative software applications face a different challenge in the new millennium: their clients want instant access to these applications via the web. When evaluating a number of equally capable software solutions, clients are increasingly choosing web-based solutions that require no installation on client machines and provide instant access from virtually any location. Re-architecting an existing software solution for the web is a difficult task given the static nature of HTML vs. the dynamic nature of most user interfaces. The AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technique can help overcome the limitations of pure HTML to create feature-rich user interfaces matching those of most client/server-based applications. This presentation looks at the basics of how AJAX works and offers a survey of the different toolkits that provide an AJAX platform for web applications. We will compare and contrast the Microsoft XMLHTTP object, a few of the AJAX frameworks currently available and the newer Atlas framework. The talk also presents some recent web-enabled applications that relied on AJAX for their novel approaches to web user experiences. The emphasis will be on the practical aspects of AJAX so that attendees will be able to use this exciting technique in their own web applications to create powerful web-based user interfaces.

Speaker:

Stuart Jones,
President Berwick Heights Software
www.berwickheights.com

November 2006: Power SMO

Mix SQL Server Management Objects with PowerShell and you have a scriptable, interactive object model for SQL Server… PowerSMO!

PowerSMO doesn’t let you do anything you couldn’t do with T-SQL, but it just makes things a lot easier. It often less typing and you get command line “Intellisense” from PowerShell’s integrated use of reflection. Want to quickly see what the state is of the SQL Server services are on a system?

	
                    PS C:\demos> $mgt = new-object (s_ManagedComputer) "PARESEC5"
                    PS C:\demos> $mgt.Services | format-table -Property name, 
                    ServiceState -AutoSize

                    Name           ServiceState
                    ----           ------------
                    MSFTESQL            Stopped
                    MSSQLSERVER         Running
                    SQLBrowser          Stopped
                    SQLSERVERAGENT      Stopped
                    

PowerSMO makes it easy to lookup the things you just can’t always remember… Need to know the properties and commands are available for any database object?

                    PS C:\demos> $scratch = $server.databases["Scratch"]
                    PS C:\demos> $scratch | get-member  

                       TypeName: Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Database

                    Name                             MemberType Definition
                    ----                             ---------- ----------
                    Alter                            Method     System.Void Alter(), Syste...
                    ChangeMirroringState             Method     System.Void ChangeMirrorin...
                    CheckAllocations                 Method     System.Collections.Special...
                    CheckAllocationsDataOnly         Method     System.Collections.Special...
                    CheckCatalog                     Method     System.Collections.Special...
                    ....
                    UserName                         Property   System.String UserName {get;}
                    Users                            Property   Microsoft.SqlServer.Manage...
                    Version                          Property   System.Int32 Version {get;}
                    Views                            Property   Microsoft.SqlServer.Manage...
                    XmlSchemaCollections             Property   Microsoft.SqlServer.Manage...
                    

And then quickly find the users in the Scratch database?

                    PS C:\demos> $scratch.Users | format-list -property Name

                    Name : dbo
                    Name : guest
                    Name : INFORMATION_SCHEMA
                    Name : PARSEC5\Dawn
                    Name : sys
                    

PowerShell is a new object based command shell from Microsoft. It provides direct support for system level Windows technologies such as WMI and Active Directory. It also supports the use of any objects that can be created by .NET. An you can make any script a function so you can reuse it later.

This talk will be an introduction to PowerShell and using it conjunction with SQL Server Management Objects. Both developers and dba’s will find PowerSMO a very useful new arrow in their quiver for working with SQL Server. It makes it easy to “poke” at a database to see what’s going on, create test data, do some quick testing and make your own test and management scripts.

October 2006: Introducing ASP.NET AJAX

Atlas is a new Web development technology that integrates client script libraries with ASP.NET 2.0. It enables Web sites built with ASP.NET 2.0 to integrate Asynchronous JavaScript calls using XML (AJAX) into their interfaces with ease. This session will introduce you to the fundamentals of working with Atlas including both the client components and server components of the framework. Emphasis will be placed on demonstrating practical examples of building responsive sites using Atlas controls, so come prepared to be dazzled with many demos of the power of Atlas.

Speaker:
Fritz Onion is a co-founder of Pluralsight, a premier Microsoft .NET training provider. Fritz is the author of Pluralsight's ASP.NET curriculum, with courses delivered around the world. He is the author of the highly acclaimed book "Essential ASP.NET" and the much anticipated book "Essential ASP.NET 2.0" coming in November 2006 (both Addison Wesley). He is a columnist for MSDN Magazine and is also a regular speaker at industry conferences. You can read Fritz's blog at http://pluralsight.com/fritz/.

June 2006: Introduction to Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation

At the last PDC Microsoft unveiled a revolutionary new part of the .NET Framework: Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF). Part of the WinFX runtime components, WWF is an extensible framework for building workflow based solutions on the Windows platform.

This talk will explain the fundamentals and basic patterns of WWF including process, activities, state, and transitions. Starting with the simplest possible example, the talk will incrementally demonstrate how to incorporate the WWF engine into an application that spans human and automated workflow. Finally, the talk will show that by combining workflow with service orientation you have a powerful approach to building modern business applications.

Speaker:
Michael Stiefel,

principal of Reliable Software, Inc. is a consultant on software architecture and development, and the alignment of information technology with business goals. His current work involves:

• Training in distributed applications development, software best practices, in .NET, C#, Web services, C++, SQL Server, COM, DCOM, and MTS
• Advising on IT strategy and planning, including budgeting, hiring, and growth management.
• Design and implementation of middle-tier and back-end components for transactional n-tier Internet and Intranet applications including Web services.
• Requirements analysis, project plan development, and design document development.
• Expert Witness for intellectual property cases.

May 2006: The Art of Mobile Application Development with Visual Studio 2005

How do you define a mobile application? Connected, disconnected or occasionally connected Visual Studio 2005 has an answer for it all! Mobile applications are becoming an important part of the enterprise application infrastructure. In this session we will cover each of these design patterns and see how these types of applications are developed using Visual Studio 2005. We'll examine the SqlDataSource and ObjectDataSource controls that serve data, as well as the GridView, DetailsView and FormView controls to display said data. We'll conclude by showing templates in these data bound controls and two-way data binding support.

Speaker: Thom Robbins is a senior technology specialist with Microsoft. He is a frequent contributor to various magazines that include .NET, Visual Studio.NET and Web Services Journal. Thom is also a frequent speaker at a variety of events that include VS Live and others. When not writing code and helping customers he spends his time with his wife at their home in New Hampshire.

March 2006: Declarative Data Binding Model in ASP.NET 2.0

This talk explores the new declarative data binding model in ASP.NET 2.0. We'll examine the SqlDataSource and ObjectDataSource controls that serve data, as well as the GridView, DetailsView and FormView controls to display said data. We'll conclude by showing templates in these data bound controls and two-way data binding support.

January 2006: Visual Studio 2005 Launch Highlights

Dermot Bostock, Is a Systems Consultant with Infrastructure Shared Services with responsibility for supporting tools at UnumProvident. He has been with UnumProvident for about 13 years. Prior to that he worked for Keane Consulting since 1987 and even prior to that across the pond in the UK he was involved in IT since 1981. He has a BSc. in mathematics from the University of Sheffield.

His interests include BMW cars and traveling the world. He keeps up to date with American politics! He will not answer questions about Benny Hill or Princess Diana.

December 2005: VSTO

Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System delivers unprecedented support for developers building solutions based on Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003. In this MaineBytes talk discover new features that enable developers to construct powerful business solutions using Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft Office Professional Edition. From the new programming model to the ability to host Microsoft Office applications within the Visual Studio designer, we'll give you the inside scoop on Microsoft Office solution development with Visual Studio 2005.

Speaker: Paul Stubbs works as a Program Manager with the Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) team in Redmond. Paul is currently focused on driving the development of a new managed code application programmability development tool. In addition to VSTA Paul works with the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) team developing Office solutions. Paul has worked at Microsoft for over 2 years and has spoken at such events as TechEd and TechReady. Paul also participates in the developer community on the Microsoft forums and his blog.

Prior to Microsoft, Paul worked at UnumProvident where he co-founded MaineBytes with Tim Durgan in January 2001. This is Paul's first return trip to MaineBytes. Welcome Back!

December 2005: ASP.NET 2.0 Odds and Ends

This talk will present a collection of small but interesting and useful features of ASP.NET 2.0 that are typically not well known. Come hear about some of the smaller features of this big release!

Speaker: Fritz is a co-founder of Pluralsight where he focuses on Web development with ASP.NET.

Fritz is the author of the book 'Essential ASP.NET' published by Addison Wesley, available in both C# and Visual Basic .NET editions. He is currently working on a second edition to cover ASP.NET 2.0. He frequently publishes articles on .NET in journals such as MSDN Magazine, DOTNETPRO, MSDN Online, and InformIT. He is a regular speaker at industry conferences and is the track chair for Web development at Win-Dev in Boston. Prior to .NET, Fritz's work focused on Windows development with C++ and COM, and has written several courses and many articles on C++, MFC, COM, and ATL.

Fritz lives in Southern Maine with his wife Susan and two children Zoë and Sam.

October 2005: What's New in ASMX 2.0 and WSE 3.0

The Whidbey release of the .NET framework brings numerous enhancements and improvements to the ASP.NET Web services framework (ASMX), which implements the WS-I Basic Profile 1.1. WSE 3.0, on the other hand, provides major simplifications to some of the more advanced Web services protocols, especially those around security. But what's most compelling is the combination of these two new Web service technologies and how they can be used to complement one another. In this session will discuss how to use the new features of ASMX 2.0 + WSE 3.0 to have a better experience with Web services today.

Speaker:

Aaron Skonnard is co-founder of Pluralsight, a premier Microsoft .NET training provider. Aaron is the author of Pluralsight’s Applied Web Services, Applied BizTalk Server 2004, and Introducing Indigo courses delivered worldwide. Over the years, Aaron has written numerous articles and books on XML and Web services technologies. He currently writes MSDN Magazine's Service Station column, along with his weblog of the same name, which serves as a more frequent pit stop through the Service Oriented universe - http://pluralsight.com/aaron/.

August 2005: SQL Server 2005 SMO

SMO is an object model used to build applications that manage SQL Server. SQL Server Management Studio and Visual Studio 2005 are examples of applications that use SMO internally to manage SQL Server. SMO replaces SQL_DMO, the COM based package for developing management applications

SMO makes it straightforward to do typical database management tasks using a .NET language. It presents SQL Server as a hierarchy of object starting with a Server object. For example here is the C# code to add a table to a database.

Server pluto5 = new Server("PLUTO5");
Database scratch = new Database(pluto5, "Scratch");
scratch.Create();

Notice that this code does not use an T-SQL, it just uses typical object oriented programming techniques. This is just the tip of the iceberg for SMO capabilities though; it can manage SQL Agent, create deployment scripts, and work with WMI and do many other things. This talk will be an introduction to SMO, its object model and some of it capabilites.




Speaker: Dan Sullivan started his professional life at Digital Equipment Corporation working on the development of the PDP-11's. Later, he was the Director of Engineering at Data Translation Incorporated, which developed software and hardware data acquisition products for PDP-11's and introduced their first products for the IBM PC. Dan was also the Chief Engineer at Delta Lab Research and introduced their first microprocessor-based sound equipment.

For the past 20 years Dan has been an independent software consultant, initially for DOS and now for Microsoft Windows NT. His consulting projects spanned the range from GUI-based products for the electronics manufacturing industry to software support for high data rate MPEG2 processing systems. Almost all of the projects he has worked on wove together a database, GUI, engineering data and performance, and required mentoring the customer's programming staff. He is the president of Danal Technology Inc, his consulting company.

Dan started developing for DOS when it first shipped and, similarly, for Windows when it first shipped. His first production Windows application ran on version 1.01 and was used in manufacturing to align some complex electronics in microprocessor-based equipment. Over the years, Dan has been awarded six patents in the area of computers. He shipped his first production COM solution in the last century.

In the last couple of years, Dan has been working with XML and has found it to be one of the most fascinating technologies to appear in a long time.

July 2005: Indigo

This talk will present Microsoft?s next generation messaging technology, code-named "Indigo".

We?ll present the basics of Indigo, as well as some advanced features including duplex communication, versioning and large message streaming.

Expect lots of demos!


Speaker: Jeromy Carrière is a Senior Architect Advisor on Microsoft?s National Architecture Team. The National Architecture Team exists to enable successful adoption of the Microsoft platform in four key industry verticals ? financial services, state and local government, retail and hospitality, and healthcare ? by fostering core architectural principles enabling agile Connected Systems.

Jeromy?s focus is on the financial services industry.

Most recently, Jeromy was the Chief Technology Officer of Kinitos, where he was responsible for guiding the development of a .NET-based distributed application server platform. Prior to Kinitos, Jeromy was a Chief Architect for America Online, Inc. Jeromy joined AOL through the acquisition of Quack.com, where was a co-founder and Chief Architect. Jeromy had previously worked at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, doing architecture research and analysis.

May 2005: SOA is not hot air

Practical Service Oriented Architecture for Developers

Developers often have trouble understanding Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) because it is frequently talked about in very abstract terms. This is unfortunate because corporate economics and technology improvements are driving the use of service orientation to develop modern business applications. This talk will explain in very clear and concrete terms what a SOA is, why it is important, and what it means to develop a SOA application.


Speaker: Michael Stiefel,

principal of Reliable Software, Inc. is a consultant on software architecture and development, and the alignment of information technology with business goals. His current work involves:

• Training in distributed applications development, software best practices, in .NET, C#, Web services, C++, SQL Server, COM, DCOM, and MTS
• Advising on IT strategy and planning, including budgeting, hiring, and growth management.
• Design and implementation of middle-tier and back-end components for transactional n-tier Internet and Intranet applications including Web services.
• Requirements analysis, project plan development, and design document development.
• Expert Witness for intellectual property cases.

April 2005: Overview of Whidbey Wave

Visual Studio 2005 builds on Microsoft?s proven leadership in delivering productive and integrated developer tools by offering a complete set of tools for building dynamic mobile solutions, Windows applications, Web sites, and Web services. In this session we?ll give you an overview of Visual Studio 2005. We?ll begin with an introduction to help you understand the goals we set when we designed Visual Studio 2005. We?ll review the enhancements in all the major sections of Visual Studio as well as look at the new Visual Studio Team System.


Speaker: Thom Robbins is a senior technology specialist with Microsoft. He is a frequent contributor to various magazines that include .NET, Visual Studio.NET and Web Services Journal. Thom is also a frequent speaker at a variety of events that include VS Live and others. When not writing code and helping customers he spends his time with his wife at their home in New Hampshire.

March 2005: Compilation in ASP.NET 2.0

The number of ways you can compile your code increases many times over with the release of ASP.NET 2.0. In addition to the pre-compiled bin-directory and the delay-compiled src attribute deployment options in ASP.NET 1.x, you can now deploy raw source files in a /code directory as well as resources in a /resources directory to have them auto-compiled at request time. The /code directory also supports auto proxy generation for things like .wsdl or .xsd. There is a new utility, aspnet_compiler.exe which will pre-compile an entire virtual directory to create a zero-source deployment (including .aspx file content). This talk will look in detail at these and other new compilation features in ASP.NET 2.0 with an eye toward how best to incorporate them into your deployment decisions going forward.


Speaker: Fritz is a co-founder of Pluralsight where he focuses on Web development with ASP.NET.

Fritz is the author of the book 'Essential ASP.NET' published by Addison Wesley, available in both C# and Visual Basic .NET editions. He is currently working on a second edition to cover ASP.NET 2.0. He frequently publishes articles on .NET in journals such as MSDN Magazine, DOTNETPRO, MSDN Online, and InformIT. He is a regular speaker at industry conferences and is the track chair for Web development at Win-Dev in Boston. Prior to .NET, Fritz's work focused on Windows development with C++ and COM, and has written several courses and many articles on C++, MFC, COM, and ATL.

Fritz lives in Southern Maine with his wife Susan and two children Zoë and Sam.

January 2005: .NET to Go - MS Mobility Show

Attendees of this FREE deeply technical and eminently useful mobile applications solutions workshop receive:

• A complete view of the .NET Compact Framework from the ground up and how it can be used within your application.
• Information on what's to come in the mobile applications arena.
• The Mobile Applications Development Toolkit.
• The .NET Compact Framework Pocket Guide.
• A chance to win a great new mobile device.

December 2004: Tips and Tricks for Building Server Controls

Explore advanced control building topics, including state management, composition, templates, data-binding, and providing rich design-time support for tools like Visual Studio .NET. This tips and tricks filled session presents everything in digestable nuggets, so you can go home and start building advanced server controls immediately.


Speaker: Patrick J. Hynds,

MCSD, MCSE + I, MCDBA, MCP + Site Builder and MCT, is the Chief Technology Officer for CriticalSites. He is one of the only certified trainers in New England for Site Server. An expert on Microsoft technology and experienced with other technologies as well (Websphere, Sybase, Perl, Java, Unix, Netware, C++, etc.), Patrick previously taught freelance software development and was a successful contractor who enjoyed mastering difficult troubleshooting assignments. A graduate of West Point and a Gulf War veteran, Patrick brings an uncommon level of dedication to his leadership role at CriticalSites. He has experience in addressing business challenges with blended IT solutions involving leading-edge database, web and hardware systems. In spite of the demands of his management role at CriticalSites, Patrick stays technical and in the trenches acting as Engagement Manager and/or developer on selected projects throughout the year.

November 2004: SOA and WSE 2.0

Service Oriented Architecture is a design pattern that enables business to quickly adapt and build software applications to meet changing customer needs. These applications are typically implemented as Web services. Since these applications often span trust boundaries, security is an essential part of these applications. Microsoft's Web Service Enhancements 2.0 enables developers to secure Web services using industry standard specifications such as WS-Security.


Speaker: Michael Stiefel,

principal of Reliable Software, Inc. is a consultant on software architecture and development, and the alignment of information technology with business goals. His current work involves:

• Training in distributed applications development, software best practices, in .NET, C#, Web services, C++, SQL Server, COM, DCOM, and MTS
• Advising on IT strategy and planning, including budgeting, hiring, and growth management.
• Design and implementation of middle-tier and back-end components for transactional n-tier Internet and Intranet applications including Web services.
• Requirements analysis, project plan development, and design document development.
• Expert Witness for intellectual property cases.

October 2004: ViewState 2.0

How ViewState changes in the next release of ASP.NET and the impact it will have on your applications

This talk explores the details of ViewState in ASP.NET 2.0 and how the new implementation addresses many of the issues developers have with ViewState today. Among the most notable changes is the separation of state into 'Control State' and 'View State' distinguishing between the state retention that is necessary for a control to function properly and the state retention that is a convenience to avoid re-population.


Speaker: Fritz Onion

Fritz is the author of the best-selling book 'Essential ASP.NET' published by Addison Wesley, available in both C# and Visual Basic .NET editions, and is currently working on a second edition to cover ASP.NET 2.0. He frequently publishes articles on .NET in journals such as MSDN Magazine, DOTNETPRO, MSDN Online, and InformIT. He is also a regular speaker at industry conferences and is the track chair for Web development at Win-Dev in Boston.

September 2004: Hacked! How Evildoers Attack ASP.NET Web Sites--and What You Can Do About It

Security is a big deal in all network applications, but it's even more important in applications deployed on the Web. Every day ASP.NET developers unwittingly deploy sites that are vulnerable to SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting attacks, and other hacks. Join the fun as Jeff demonstrates the common attacks used against ASP.NET Web sites and provides step-by-step instructions on how to code against them. Fair warning: What you see here might scare you!


Speaker: Jeff Prosise

Jeff Prosise makes his living programming Microsoft .NET and teaching others how to do the same. His latest book, Programming Microsoft .NET, was published by Microsoft Press in May 2002. His previous book, Programming Windows with MFC, has won awards for readability and is widely considered to be the definitive work on MFC programming.

A former engineer who discovered after college that programming is immeasurably more fun than designing lifting fixtures and computing loads on mounting brackets, today Jeff travels the world teaching ASP.NET programming and enlightening conference audiences about the new platform. He works closely with Microsoft developers in Redmond, WA, to track the development of the .NET Framework. Jeff is a contributing editor to MSDN Magazine, where he writes feature articles about Microsoft .NET and authors the Wicked Code column, and to asp.netPRO magazine, where he writes the monthly Ask the PRO column. And in 2000, Jeff cofounded Wintellect to provide .NET consulting and education services to developers everywhere.

July 2004: Refactoring, Serialization and Version Hell

With the introduction of assemblies, the Global Assembly Cache, strong names, and version policy, .NET developers need not suffer with the "DLL Hell" that has plagued Windows development for years. While that is a gigantic step in the right direction, a large, but manageable problem has emerged: "Version Hell".

"Version Hell" arises from two facts of .NET life if you use assembly versions to build bullet-proof installations and deinstallations. First, strongly named executables must call into strongly named class library assemblies. Second change the version of an assembly, and you have a different version of that type.

What happens when you want to move a type from one assembly to another? What happens when you want to refactor a type so that its functionality is moved among several assemblies? What happens when you have changed the assembly version, or refactored a type, and you want to bring back a serialized type of a previous version? Or you want to bring back a type that no longer exists? Is there some optimal number of assemblies to break your application up into?

These are all issues that all .NET developers will encounter sooner or later and should be prepared to solve.


Speaker: Michael Stiefel, principal of Reliable Software, Inc. is a consultant on software architecture and development, and the alignment of information technology with business goals. His current work involves:

• Training in distributed applications development, software best practices, in .NET, C#, Web services, C++, SQL Server, COM, DCOM, and MTS
• Advising on IT strategy and planning, including budgeting, hiring, and growth management.
• Design and implementation of middle-tier and back-end components for transactional n-tier Internet and Intranet applications including Web services.
• Requirements analysis, project plan development, and design document development.
• Expert Witness for intellectual property cases.

June 2004: Performance by Design

Synopsis:   Without argument, the two most important metrics used to judge the successes or failures of an application are performance and usability. How well your development effort is received by its intended audience has very much to do with how well the application performs under often unpredictable circumstances. In this two hour presentation we will look at common factors that affect application performance and provide easily adopted tips and tricks for .NET development that can significantly improve your application’s performance.

Speaker: David Falkenstein is an evangelist of tools and practices for Compuware Corporation. David has been a developer of Microsoft technologies in excess of twelve years and frequently conducts seminars focused around improving development. David’s presentations have been featured by Microsoft and DevX.com.

Compuware Corporation is the fifth largest ISV and a global leader in application lifecycle development. With revenues in excess of $1.7 billion and over 9,000 employees, Compuware serves more than 23,000 customers world-wide.

May 2004: ASP.NET 2.0 (aka Whidbey)

Synopsis:   Come see what all the buzz is about as I walk you through building a complete application in an hour. With more than 40 new server-side controls, more than double the number of classes in the System.Web namespace, and claims of 70% code reduction for the average application, there is plenty to talk about.

Speaker: Fritz is the author of the best-selling book 'Essential ASP.NET' published by Addison Wesley, available in both C# and Visual Basic .NET editions, and is currently working on a second edition to cover ASP.NET 2.0. He frequently publishes articles on .NET in journals such as MSDN Magazine, DOTNETPRO, MSDN Online, and InformIT. He is also a regular speaker at industry conferences and is the track chair for Web development at Win-Dev in Boston.

Fritz signing his best-selling book

April 2004: SQL Server "Yukon" Service Broker

Synopsis:   SQL Server Service Broker is a new part of the database engine that is used to build reliable, asynchronous, message-based distributed database applications. Service Broker makes it easier to make use of two compelling features of message-based applications: deferred processing and distributed processing.

Businesses often deal in long running transactions, sometimes called business transactions. A simple request from an application that is used to request maintenance on a piece of equipment can start a business transaction the might take days or longer to complete. An initial message making the request might need an immediate response that included a serial number for the request so that its status might be checked at a later time.

Further processing of the message might take place late in the evening when work crews are put together to perform the next day's maintenance tasks. Further processing might be required when the maintenance is completed. Each step in the processing probably would update one or more databases located n different parts of the enterprise.

Service Broker provides an infrastructure for processing arbitrarily long business transactions over an entire enterprise. This talk will cover some of the features of Service Broker that are used to implement these business transactions and look at some simple examples of them.

Speaker: Dan Sullivan along with Bob Beauchemin and Niels Berglund are the authors of an upcoming Addison-Wesley on SQL Server Yukon.

Dan and Bob are also the authors of Developmentor's Essential Yukon course, which was initially only taught inside of Microsoft, but now is available as both as an open enrollment or on-site course.

February 2004: Using Authorization Manager on Windows Server 2003

Synopsis:   Today, applications use a variety of diverse and often incompatible mechanisms to control authorization to application resources. Often authorization is repetitive and tedious code that the developer has to build from scratch and maintain. In this advanced session, we will learn how to leverage the Authorization Manager API that’s built into Windows Server 2003 to control access to resources and limit the tasks that a user can perform. We’ll write code to perform dynamic access checks on specific tasks. We’ll compare and contrast controlling authorization via a custom-built SQL scheme and using the Active Directory and Authorization Manager in Windows Server 2003. Finally, we’ll explore how roles can be inherited and integrate auditing.

Speaker:   Joe Stagner is a Developer Community Champion with Microsoft’s MSDN, and has been developing Software for 25 years - on Microsoft platforms since DOS 1.0. Prior to joining Microsoft, Joe served as the President, CEO, and Principal Technologist of USWeb/Cornerstone, a publicly traded consulting company based in New York City. He joined USWeb/Cornerstone when they purchased his company, ASPGurus, a boutique consulting organizations specializing in performance and scalability problem solving, and Geo-Scalable architectures for distributed web applications based on Microsoft Technology. Joe currently focuses on working with Microsoft’s US Developer Community to help make the most of .NET Developer Technologies. Joe can be contacted at JoeStag@Microsoft.com, or through his personal web site at www.ManagedCode.com

December 2003: Security

Synopsis:   Security

Speaker:  Patrick J. Hynds, MCSD, MCSE + I, MCDBA, MCP + Site Builder and MCT, is the Chief Technology Officer for CriticalSites. He is one of the only certified trainers in New England for Site Server. An expert on Microsoft technology and experienced with other technologies as well (Websphere, Sybase, Perl, Java, Unix, Netware, C++, etc.), Patrick previously taught freelance software development and was a successful contractor who enjoyed mastering difficult troubleshooting assignments. A graduate of West Point and a Gulf War veteran, Patrick brings an uncommon level of dedication to his leadership role at CriticalSites. He has experience in addressing business challenges with blended IT solutions involving leading-edge database, web and hardware systems. In spite of the demands of his management role at CriticalSites, Patrick stays technical and in the trenches acting as Engagement Manager and/or developer on selected projects throughout the year.

November 2003: YUKON!

Synopsis:   Yukon

Speaker:  Dan has been an independent consultant for 20 years. Now he specializes in Microsoft .Net based systems, web services, XML, and databases. Over the years he has worked in many facets of the computer industry from the design of computers at Digital Equipment Corporation to the development of PC based software that graphically manages production lines.

Besides consulting he teaches and authors courses for Developmentor. The courses he teaches include Essential XML, Essential .Net, Essential Web Services, Essential XSLT, Developing SQL Server Applications, and Essential SQL Server Notification Services.

He is currently working on a book titled “First Look at SQL Server Yukon” to be published by Addison-Wesley in April 2004. If you are lucky enough to be going to the PDC you will get a chapter from it.

Dan can be contacted at dsullivan@develop.com  

October 2003: ASYNCHRONOUS HANDLERS & PAGES

Synopsis:   While most pages and handlers in general in ASP.NET are serviced synchronously on threads drawn from the process-wide thread pool, it is possible to create handlers (and even pages) that service requests asynchronously. Asynchronous handlers implement the IHttpAsyncHandler interface, which derives from IHttpHandler implemented by synchronous handlers. This talk discusses techniques and best practicies for implementing asynchronous handlers and pages, and even more importantly, when and why to use them.

Speaker: Fritz Onion is an independent consultant, author and instructor specializing in ASP.NET. He is the author of the best-selling book 'Essential ASP.NET' published by Addison Wesley, available in both C# and Visual Basic .NET editions. He writes and teaches courses for DevelopMentor, and frequently publishes articles on .NET in journals such as MSDN Magazine, DOTNETPRO, MSDN Online, and InformIT. He is also a regular speaker at industry conferences and is the track chair for Web development at Win-Dev in Boston. 

June 2003: Deploying Applications using VS.NET

Synopsis:   This session examines the differences in deployment, contrasting the issues surrounding VB6, COM Objects and the Registry, with the simpler VB.NET deployments that utilize .NET “No-Touch” deployment and Windows Installer (MSI). We’ll look at all aspects of a successful VB.NET deployment, including installation, application manifests, versioning, Windows Application setup projects, Web Application Setup projects, a Microsoft .NET Framework Setup.exe Bootstrapper Sample, and shared components. A must see!

Speaker:  Russ Fustino is a Microsoft Principal Technology Specialist and a Microsoft Certified Professional with over 20 years of software development experience. He has an expertise in developing Visual Basic and Visual InterDev solutions. Prior to Microsoft, Russ was a VB instructor, headed up a development department and created several client/server application and system software products. Russ' specialties include Visual Source Safe, team development methodologies, COM development with VB, XML, Biztalk and is a Subject Matter Expert for Devdays.

May 2003: Building Reliable Web Applications on Windows Server 2003

Synopsis:  Learn about Windows 2003 and IIS6 and the significant new architecture that Microsoft shipped this month to make Web Apps delivered on the Windows Platform Secure, Reliable, and Scalable. Will include Architectural Application Design Considerations, Tips & Tricks, and Liberal Q&A

Speaker: Joe Stagner is a Technical Evangelist of Developer Technologies at Microsoft, and has been developing Software for 25 years, on Microsoft platforms since DOS 1.0. Prior to joining Microsoft Joe served as the President and CEO of USWeb/Cornersotne, a publically traded consulting company based in New York City. He joined USWeb/Cornerstone when they purchased his company, ASPGurus, a boutique consulting organizations specializing in Geo-Scalable architectures for distributed web applications based on Microsoft Technology. Joe currently focuses on helping Microsoft’s Independent Software Vendors make the most of .NET Developer technologies and also works with Medium Business Developers and the Academic Community in New England. Joe can be contacted at JoeStag@Microsoft.com

April 2003: Extending VS.NET IDE

March 2003: 5 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT ASP .NET (BUT PROBABLY DON'T)

December 2002: Visual Studio .Net 2003 (Everett)

Synopsis: Visual Studio .NET 2003 contains an enhanced version of the .NET Framework. The .NET Framework version 1.1 builds upon the previous version with new capabilities, enhancements, and improvements to documentation. With integrated support for the .NET Compact Framework, Visual Studio .NET 2003 brings mobile and embedded devices such as the Pocket PC, as well as other devices powered by the Microsoft Windows CE .NET operating system, to .NET. Now, developers can use the same programming model, development tools, and skills to build applications that span from small devices to the largest data center.

Speaker: Jeff Horrigan is a Senior Consultant in Microsoft's Financial Services Group. Jeff is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer who has been developing systems on a variety of platforms using a number of different languages including C, C++, C# and Visual Basic for the past 14 years.

November 2002: Resources and Localization

Synopsis: Keith will talk on the resource model in the .NET Framework. He’ll cover the System.Resources namespace as well as creating, manipulating, and using binary and text resources, You will learn how to use resources in both smart client and Web-based applications, how to localize for different cultures, and how to put together an automated build process.

Speaker: Keith Pleas is a former contributing editor for Windows & .NET Magazine. He is an independent consultant and trainer, and he developed Microsoft's Visual Basic Professional Certification Exam.

October 2002: Reflection and Attributes

Synopsis: The Common Language Runtime makes virtually every facet of a type definition available to programmers in any language. The presence of such rich type information, as well as an API for accessing it easily at runtime, enables numerous forms of tool development and type system interoperability. In this talk we will explore the Reflection APIs and look at building Custom Attributes.

Speaker: Brock Allen is a trainer for DevelopMentor as well as an independent consultant specializing in .NET and ASP.NET. He resides in Medfield, MA with his wife and two dogs. He can be contacted at ballen@develop.com.

September 2002: Create Windows® Applications with Visual Studio® .NET

Synopsis: Windows Forms are a framework for building client applications in order to take advantage of all the processing power that client applications can provide. Because Windows Forms applications are built on top of the .NET framework they can seamlessly take advantage of things such as Web Services, ADO.NET, etc. Windows Forms are also an architecture for controls and containers. We are going to do an overview of .NET forms and cover how Windows Forms deal with some of the problems that we had before in earlier Windows Application development. First, we are going to look at just what Windows Forms are. Then we are going to look at some of the graphical enhancements that have been added to Windows Forms in comparison to earlier development tools. Next we are going to look at how we can host our applications in the browser. Then finally we are going to look at some of the deployment and debugging considerations for Windows Forms applications.

Bio: Russ Fustino is a Microsoft Principal Technology Specialist

August 2002: How to implement security in .NET

Synopsis: This advanced session will focus entirely on .NET security implementation. The .NET Framework introduces a number of important new concepts in security. Code Access Security together with the policies that govern it, are referred to as Evidence Based Security. We’ll see how to utilize both Role Based and Evidence Based security to control access to resources within your application. This session will introduce how .NET’s powerful attribute-based programming can simplify security for your Enterprise Applications. The session will close with a discussion of Isolated Storage and Cryptography.

Bio: Thom Robbins, Senior Technology Specialist, Microsoft New England

July 2002 (special edition): .NET Framework

Synopsis: The .NET Framework by Jeff Richter

July 2002: .NET Compact Framework

Synopsis: The .NET Compact Framework (.NET CF) provides developers with unprecedented power to develop Pocket PC, Smart Phone and Windows CE applications. In this talk we'll take a close look at how .NET CF empowers developers to use their existing .NET knowledge to build true mobile device applications. We will also cover how to use .NET CF to communicate with desktop & server applications through Web Services and how to take advantage of device expansion packs such as GPS (Global Positioning Systems).

Bio: Jim Wilson has been developing large-scale software systems for more than fifteen years. He is President of JW Hedgehog, Inc. http://www.jwhedgehog.com a consulting company specializing in component and data management solutions for the Windows/WinCE platform. Jim is an instructor with DevelopMentor http://www.develop.com teaching classes in .NET, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, XML and .NET Compact Framework. You can hear more about .NET CF from Jim in his upcoming article on .NET CF at MSDN Online in July http://msdn.microsoft.com/columns/winforms.asp or at WinDev East in October http://www.win-dev.com

June 2002: ASP .NET Viewstate

Synopsis: Understanding the view state mechanism in ASP.NET is critical for anyone building web applications. In this talk, we will discuss the motivation for view state in general, how it is implemented in ASP.NET, and perhaps most importantly, when and how to turn it off. We will also look at the internal details of view state including how to decode it.

Speaker: Fritz Onion is a senior computer scientist at DevelopMentor. His research and development work focuses on the presentation tier of scalable systems built with component technologies such as .NET and COM. Fritz is the author of the upcoming book 'Essential ASP.NET' published by Addison Wesley, to be released in Q4 of 2002. He has authored or co-authored several DevelopMentor courses on a variety of technologies including ASP.NET, COM, ActiveX controls, and MFC. He is a former columnist for C++ Report and has worked as an instructor at the University of California, Irvine, and as a software engineer for Oracle Corporation..
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May 2002: Why ADO.NET?

Synopsis: You've probably heard, "In the .NET world, if you need data access, just use ADO.NET". Hmmm...ADO.NET, just a maturation of ADO? Hardly. ADO.NET is a completely different paradigm in data access and manipulation. Whether you are new to database development or are an old ADO user, you will need to understand why ADO.NET was written. This is not your father's ADO.

Speaker: Shawn Wildermuth has been building data driven software for over sixteen years. He is an author of several articles for MSN, MIND and Windows 2000 Magazines. In addition, he is currently finishing up his treatese on ADO.NET. He can be reached at his website, ADOGuy.com or swildermuth@adoguy.com.
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April 2002: .NET Resource Management

Synopsis: For many, .NET will be the first time developing in a garbage collected environment. Even for seasoned developers issues like Non-Deterministic Finalization (NDF) and the Dispose pattern are new concepts that help move memory management book keeping from the mind of the developer to the runtime. But, how do you use them and when? Also, a little behind the scenes look at how the CLR garbage collector works.

 March 2002: ASP .NET vs ASP

The principal difference between ASP.NET and ASP is that the new programming model is more object-oriented and more event-driven. This will be illustrated by extracting records from a database and filling a DataGrid in a web form, coloring some records based on their content, and responding to the ItemDataBound event. Along the way we'll also examine how you create code-behind pages for Web forms, how you retrieve data from a database and how you populate the DataGrid.

 February 2002: ASP .NET Tips and Tricks- 300

This session demonstrates a variety of advanced techniques that you can leverage to build more powerful and scalable ASP.NET web applications and XML web services. We'll cover debugging on the server side, application tracing and profiling, and event logging. We'll examine the use of performance counters to find bottlenecks, and how ASP.NET and robust exception handling changes error handling for Web Applications. The session will walk through code showing how to programmatically send email and upload files. We'll finish up with and intensive look at how Web Forms maintain their state between pages and exploit the new, improved Session object.

What We Will Cover:

• Debugging ASP .NET Applications
• Web Form Session States
• Other ASP .NET tips and tricks

Prerequisites:

• Web Application Development
• Visual Basic, Visual C#, ASP Programming
• .NET Framework and Web Services

 January 2002: XML Schema and .NET

When reading an XML file it is important to catch any errors in the data or file structure. If this code is written manually, a developer can easily spend more time writing error-checking code then writing the actual application code. Using XML Schema, it is possible to eliminate the majority of error-checking code from the application. This talk introduces XML Schema and demonstrates the use and behavior of XML Schema in .NET. We will examine XML Schema's ability to expose explicitly typed data (versus simple text) and schema's affect on application performance and how caching can overcome this issue.

 December 2001: Debugging .NET

All the rules for debugging have completely changed with the advent of Microsoft.NET. This session will help get you up to speed on the core concepts you need to understand in order to debug effectively with .NET. Additionally, .NET offers many advanced features that will allow you to write much better diagnostic and error handling code than you have ever done before. After this session you will be up to speed on writing the best code possible for .NET.

 November 2001: Building Server-side Controls in ASP.NET

ASP.NET defines an architecture for extending its existing control set with custom controls. You can write controls to encapsulate portions of your web applications into truly reusable components. This talk looks at techniques for building custom controls in ASP.NET. We will cover basic control construction, browser independent rendering, composite controls, and designer integration for VS.NET.

  October 2001: Multi-Platform Web Services

Multi-platform Web Services Topic:
Web services give applications a new way to interoperate, using programmatically available application logic, SOAP, and XML. You can expose Web services using the Internet, taking advantage of their programmability and feature enhancement. We'll show you how to create Web services with the .NET platform. We'll also show you how to access these web services using many different clients including Windows, web and mobile devices.

  August 2001: XML Web Services

Using XML in .NET

• XML .Net Architechture
• XML Parsing (DEMO)
• Navigating XML
• Data and XML

  July 2001: Using XML in .NET

Jim Wilson has been developing large-scale software systems for more than fifteen years.  He is President of JW Hedgehog, Inc. (http://www.jwhedgehog.com) a consulting company specializing in component and data management solutions for the Windows platform.  Jim is also an instructor with DevelopMentor teaching classes in .NET, XML, COM and OLE DB.  He is currently working on a .NET XML programming book to be published as part of the DevelopMentor book series.

  June 2001: ADO.NET

Fritz Onion is a senior computer scientist at DevelopMentor. His research and development work focuses on the presentation tier of scalable systems built with component technologies such as .NET and COM. Fritz has authored or co-authored several DevelopMentor courses on a variety of technologies including ASP.NET, COM, ActiveX controls, and MFC. He is a former columnist for C++ Report and has worked as an instructor at the University of California, Irvine, and as a software engineer for Oracle Corporation.

  April 2001: Using Data and XML .NET

  Sample Code

This session will look at using data and XML in Microsoft .NET Framework. It provides an overview of the new suite of XML APIs built on industry standards such as DOM, XPath, XSD, and XSLT. It will also discuss how the .NET Framework XML classes can offer convenience, better performance, and a more familiar programming model, tightly coupled with the new .NET data access APIs, the ADO.NET.

Know the Code!

Russ Fustino is a Microsoft Principal Technology Specialist and a Microsoft Certified Professional with over 20 years of software development experience. He has an expertise in developing Visual Basic and Visual InterDev solutions. Prior to Microsoft, Russ was a VB instructor, headed up a development department and created several client/server application and system software products. Russ' specialties include Visual Source Safe, team development methodologies, COM development with VB, XML, Biztalk and is a Subject Matter Expert for Devdays.

  March 2001: ASP.NET

ASP.NET is a dramatic change over its predecessor, providing real compiled-languages (C# and VB.NET) for implementing web-page logic and a true object model (Web Forms). In addition to the fundamental change in programming model, ASP.NET provides many higher-level features which simplify what used to be time-consuming, and tedious programming tasks. Server-side controls provide implicit state-retention, validation controls simplify form validation, and web controls provide a more consistent programming model than HTML. Perhaps most compelling is the fact that the HTML generated by an ASP.NET application will change to accommodate the capabilities of the client browser.

In this talk, we will walk through the basic architecture of ASP.NET, look at how server-side controls are implemented, and discuss the web forms object model and how it will change the way you build web applications.

Fritz Onion Fritz Onion is a software development consultant and instructor for Developmentor specializing in C++, COM, ATL, and MFC. He has been teaching and lecturing on software development since 1990.

  February 2001: Introduction to Visual Studio .NET

  Sample Code.Zip

Mike Helstrom is a Solution Architect with Integrated Information Systems (IIS) in Boston. IIS is a full-service e-business solution provider concentrating on the development and implementation of network applications and services. Mike has been working with Visual Studio and Visual Basic since its inception and is currently engrossed in the .NET initiative. Mike is an MCSD, MCSE+I, MCDBA, and MCT.

 January 2001: Introduction to the .NET Platform