Applied Business Intelligence

A look at Analysis

Tom Snider

Modern business decision makers are awash in terabytes of transactional and archived data as they search for solutions to problems or for opportunities for growth. Many of these decision makers use dimensional modeling and analysis to draw actionable business intelligence from these vast data stores. The goal of this presentation is to show, using a real world example, how a dimensional model is derived from raw data, how to create a cube from the dimensional model, and how to analyze the data in the cube. The example will use many of the products in the Microsoft Business Intelligence stack, including SQL Server 2005 Integration and Analysis Services, Excel, and PerformancePoint.

Learning BI

Scott Zimmerman

This session will discuss fundamentals of business intelligence, including dimensional modeling, ETL, cube processing, and reporting. We'll explain key terminology that comes up in tasks in typical BI development projects and provide links to resources that can assist with certification training. This talk is level 100-200 oriented toward developers and business users new to BI.

Constructive Code Reviews

Josh Patterson

Tips, techniques, and opinions on instituting and performing constructive and beneficial code reviews.

Business Performance Monitoring with PerformancePoint 2007

Ed Mullin

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 provides a compelling, enterprise grade solution for the rapidly growing Business Process management market. Finance and IT staff, as well as developers and system integrators, must decide how to best to utilize this new addition to Microsoft’s already formidable Business Intelligence offering. PPS is tightly integrated with Microsoft Office Excel, SharePoint, SQL Server 2005, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services. During the presentation we will demonstrate the key points in how to build a performance management application using PPS monitoring and dashboarding capabilities and discuss the roles of application developers and database architects in this process.

Create AJAX Applications Using JQuery and ASP.NET MVC

Emad Ibrahim

Use the ASP.NET MVC Framework to create a web application using jquery to implement ajax functionality as well as other web 2.0 features.

A Gentle Introduction To Mocking

Scott Allen

Have you ever tried to use mock objects in your unit tests, or as part of a TDD? If not, this session will cover the very basics of mocking and look at a handful of mocking frameworks. We'll talk about state versus interaction testing and see how good mocking can produce better tests, and better production code.

TDD: Driving Design and Driving Implementation

Jay Flowers

Get a taste for knowing when to drive design and when to drive implementation. This session will make use of an xUnit framework and a mocking framework.

Welcome to the Church of Agile

Michael Neel

Agile is a hot – there is no denying it. Odds are your IT department has gone agile or seriously considering it. New terminology, tools, and rules; it can be overwhelming. Fortunately, the core idea of Agile is very simple. This session will take you though the "why" that’s often over looked, and help you learn to "think Agile".

Decouple Your Applications with Dependency Injection and IoC Containers

Matthew Podwysocki

Tight coupling in your applications have lead to very difficult applications to test in isolation. Refactor your applications with loose coupling, Dependency Injection (DI) and Separation of Concerns (SoC). Inversion of Control containers can help manage those dependencies and lifetimes through configuration. Let's walk through the concepts of dependency injection and aspect oriented programming for cross-cutting concerns.

Advanced Techniques for Everyday Development

Building a basic text messaging system using Behavior Driven Development with Mock Objects

Edwin Ames

Confused by the new techniques coming in from the Alt.Net crowd? Don't know the difference between a mock and a fake and not sure why you should care? We'll look at a complex business problem (as a state diagram), see how to convert it into an executable behavioral specification (in C# using NUnit, Test Driven.Net and NMock2) and implemented a solution in C#.

WPF for Developers

Mark Lindell

An introduction to the Windows Presentation Foundation from the developers perspective. The goal is to understand XMAL, the most common UIElement types, and how the layout engine functions and how to utilize compositing, templates, and layouts. There will also be a brief introduction to data binding.

Silverlight 2 and Microsoft Expression

Pete Brown

An end-to-end Silverlight 2-focused introduction to and demo of key Microsoft Expression tools (Encoder, Blend and Design) combined with Visual Studio 2008. Learn how everything fits together to create a working Silverlight 2 solution.

WPF - From Zero to XAML

Michael Neel

Windows Presentation Foundation is "the most significant technology to come out of Microsoft. Ever." according to Mark Miller. We've all seen the demos of Visual Studio 2008 with Blend to create breathtaking UIs, but what is under the hood? Is WPF useful to the average developer cranking out WinForms applications for internal corporate use? To answer this question we will take a close look at WPF code - without Design Mode or Blend. Warning: This is a no Technotainment Zone!

Introducing .Net 3.5 "Extensions" ADO.Net DataServices

Greg Galipeau

ADO.Net Data Services consists of a combination of patterns and libraries that enables any data store to be exposed as a flexible data service, naturally integrating with the Web, that can be consumed by Web clients within a corporate network or across the Internet. ADO.Net Data Services uses URIs to point to pieces of data and simple, well-known formats to represent that data, such as JSON and ATOM/APP. This results in data being exposed to Web clients as a REST-style resource collection, addressable with URIs that agents can interact with using standard HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, or DELETE" (reference http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/ ).

This session will be an introduction and coding demo on the uses for ADO.Net DataServices. We will be introducing this new technology and we will be going through some code demos to demonstrate the power, and flexibility, of ADO.Net Data Services.

Easy Entites and a Solid DAL the .netTiers Way

Jim Tomney

You may be familiar with CodeSmith, the code generating application with a slew of templates to wip up boiler plate code. But where it really shines is when you team it up with the free .netTiers templates to rapidly generate business objects (entities) and a DAL from a SQL Server database. This presentation will walk through how to leverage this amazing tool to create a tiered "bug" tracking web application in little over an hour.

Hands on with NHibernate and ActiveRecord

John Morales

With all the choices of ORM's out there and with the imminent release of the Entity Framework from Microsoft, it's good to know what the options are. In this presentation we'll look using at NHibernate and Castle's ActiveRecord and discuss it's strength and weaknesses. We'll wrap up with comparing it against Entity Framework.

Introduction to LINQ

Scott Allen

Language Integrated Query (LINQ) gives .NET developers the ability to query and transform data using their .NET language of choice. The data can live inside XML documents, inside relational database tables, or inside collections of objects. What truly distinguishes LINQ from other data access APIs in .NET however, is LINQ's deep integration into the .NET languages like C# and VB. In this session, we will explore the basic features of LINQ and demonstrate the beautiful integration.

LINQ to SQL in an N-Tiered Application

Steve Michelotti

Creating an N-Tiered design with clear "separation of concerns" in crucial to successful solutions. However, there have been considerable misconceptions that using LINQ essentially means putting SQL statements directly in the code behinds of web pages. This presentation will create a tiered application from the ground up in order to debunk this misconception. The presentation tier for the application which will be built "on the fly" will not have any knowledge that LINQ is even being used behind the scenes in the data layer. Rather than simple CRUD operations on a single row, the presentation will highlight real-world scenarios with complex objects (e.g., parent/child relationships). The presentation will first show out of the box LINQ auto-generated SQL and then, in minutes, switch to all stored procedures in order to examine the differences. Throughout the talk, the "gotchas" for building N-Tiered LINQ applications will be presented with their appropriate solutions.

Moving from DTS to Integration Services

Dan Clark

With the release of SQL Server 2005, Microsoft has overhauled and replaced Data Transformation Services (DTS) with SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). SSIS provides a high performance solution for extracting, transforming, and loading data. This session explores the process of creating SSIS packages using the SSIS Designer available in the new Business Intelligence Development Studio. You will examine the steps necessary to extract, transform, and load data using the tools exposed by the SSIS Designer. This session also covers the process of running and debugging a package in the design time environment.

Introduction to SQL 2008 for Developers and DBAs

Kevin Jones

Learn what’s coming in SQL 2008, how it will effect DBAs and developers.

The Laws of ASP.NET

The Page (Web Form) Model, its MVC Scenarios, and How to Apply them

Osama Morad

This session examines the presentation layer MVC pattern and how it is implemented by the ASP.NET Page (Web Form) Model. The ASP.NET server control-based implementation of the MVC is presented and analyzed. This implementation of the MVC pattern makes possible many different scenarios. We will examine and explain the different scenarios to help you decide when to apply each in your application. This session also include several code demonstrations of applying these MVC scenarios to meet the presentation requirements of a sample web application.

Using Features to Modify the SharePoint Environment

Gary Blatt

Learn how to manipulate the look and feel by writing code based features.