Prototyping with SketchFlow

Microsoft's Expression Blend 3 has a baked-in tool called SketchFlow, targeted directly at prototyping your WPF and Silverlight applications. In this talk, I'll walk through building a prototype and exercising several SketchFlow features available out-of-the-box. I'll also show how easy it is to distribute a prototype and get back annotated feedback from your reviewers.

Data Binding in Expression Blend 3

Data Binding is one of the key features of WPF and Silverlight. This presentation demonstrates and explains the Data Binding tools and features of Blend 3. Includes discussions of Value Converters and the new Sample Data feature. With these tools you really can bind anything to anything.

Getting Started with Blend 3

An introduction to Microsoft Expression Blend 3

Blend is a powerful tool for designing GUI for WPF and Silverlight. In this session, you will learn how to navigate and configure Blend, create solutions, and layout applications. Light on slides and heavy on demonstration and discussion, this presentation will give you practical knowledge and help you start using this exciting tool.

Web Development Debugging Tools

Do you cringe when you have a bug in your HTML, CSS, or JavaScript? Do you have no clue where to begin? If you want to improve your chances of solving ClientSide issues in a timelier manner, you may want to find a seat in this talk.

We will explore some common tools that we can use to debug ClientSide problems in Web development. We will examine what the tools have to offer and how to use them.

• Debugging with IE6/7
  • Web Developer Toolbar
  • "Classic" debugging techniques
• Understanding compatibility mode in IE8
  • What it is
  • How to switch between them
  • How to know which mode you are in
  • Why you may not see compatibility mode
  • How to force IE7 on your page
• IE8 Developer Tools
  • How to access it
  • What it has to offer
  • Switching between rendering modes
  • Working with console
  • Debugging JavaScript, setting break points, watching variables, and walking your code
• Fiddler
  • What fiddler is and why I use it 24/7
  • Installing
  • Enabling [IE/Firefox]
  • Understanding the basics [https calls, Requests, and Responses, headers]
  • Viewing POST/GET data
  • Viewing Ajax calls
  • Replacing production code with auto responders to debug and test fixes
• Debugging JavaScript with Visual Studio
  • Setting up the browser to debug
  • Debugging JavaScript, setting break points, watching variables, and walking your code
• Firebug
  • Debugging JavaScript
  • Examining and Editing HTML/CSS
  • Shortcuts
  • Add-ons
• Quickly touch on Chrome/Safari consoles and MS Script Debugger

Processing Two Terabytes of Sky in Two Days

The number and size of sky surveys keep increasing ad the unit cost of storage is declining. This drives a fundamental change in the way we do computing and science in general. Although non-visual data mining tools to their work without human supervision, there is always a need for visual browse products for even the largest of catalogs.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is one such catalog of over 300 million galaxies, and quasars interesting to cosmologists. In Data Release 7 (DR7) there are almost half a million frames of multiband data that needed to be converted to visual pictures. We built a distributed system using .NET which performs the necessary data reduction including post-processing with Adobe Photoshop of all images in less than two days.

A Lap Around Microsoft StreamInsight

Microsoft® SQL Server® StreamInsight is a platform for the continuous and incremental processing of unending sequences of events (event streams) from multiple sources with near-zero latency. These requirements, shared by vertical markets such as manufacturing, oil and gas, utilities, financial services, health care, web analytics, and IT and data center monitoring, make traditional store and query techniques impractical for timely and relevant processing of data.

StreamInsight allows software developers to create innovative solutions in the domain of Complex Event Processing that satisfy these needs. It allows to monitor, mine, and develop insights from continuous unbounded data streams and correlate constantly changing events with rich payloads in near real time. Industry specific solution developers (ISVs) and developers of custom applications have the opportunity to innovate on and utilize proven, flexible, and familiar Microsoft technology and rely on existing development skills when using the StreamInsight platform.

What's new in ASP.NET and AJAX 4.0

Are you an ASP.NET Developer? Want to know what's coming in the .NET Framework 4.0 for you? We'll explore what neat and exciting features will be available in ASP.NET 4.0 and AJAX 4.0.

Anatomy of an SQL Statement

This session will demonstrate how to effectively use the standard SQL clauses in a Select statement, how to retrieve what you want, and how to optimize the statement for efficiency. The following clauses will be covered (SELECT, FROM, WHERE, JOIN, HAVING, GROUP BY, ORDER BY)

Extending ASP.NET Applications with the AJAX DynamicPopulate Extender

Compared to using UpdatePanel controls or using client-centric JavaScript coding, the AJAX Toolkit DynamicPopulate extender is a quick and flexible way (relatively!) to extend your existing ASP.NET application with AJAX behavior. This session will define what the DynamicPopulate extender is and how does it work. It will address situation where the DynamicPopulate extender is more appropriate to use than other approaches to AJAX-ize your ASP.NET applications. We will then examine and demonstrate the different alternatives of implementing the DynamicPopulate extender with PageMethods, ASMX web services, or WCF web services and explain the situations where each is most appropriate.

Coding with Confidence: Adding TDD to Your Toolset

Testing has traditionally been perceived as a means for finding bugs in software. More recently, the discussions surrounding testing have been about more than just finding and fixing defects. Instead, the focus has been placed on the other benefits that testing practices, specifically Test Driven Development, provide for developers and development projects. Among these are instantaneous feedback on design decisions, the ability to refactor with confidence, and the promotion of collective code ownership.

In the first part of this session, we will explore these benefits and the pitfalls that developers may encounter when learning to test first. For the second part, I will demonstrate my approach to testing in Ruby by building a small library using TDD.

Developing a TDD Practice Kata

Getting started with Test Driven Development sounds easy from the start doesn’t it? Write a test that demonstrates what you want your code to do, write the code to make the test pass, and clean it up. Then rinse repeat. Once you actually start though, you find out quick that going from test writer to code writer and keeping it straight which you are at any given time is not so easy. You bounce back and forth and more often than not you find you are doing both at the same time and getting lost in the code you are trying to write. This session through the use of a daily TDD Kata (memorized practice) will give you a way of getting into the rhythm of TDD and even teach you a few of the principles along the way.

Async, Parallel and Reactive F#

Concurrency is increasingly important for many applications. With the shift to manycore many opportunities for performance gain. The Web, Microsoft Silverlight, and distributed systems increase the demand for asynchronous solutions. F#, a functional and object-oriented language for Microsoft .NET, adds many tools to make parallel, asynchronous and reactive programming easier. Come hear the core concepts of the F# language, and see how ideas like immutability, functional design, async workflows, agents, first class-events and observables and more can be used to meet the challenges of today’s real-world applications.

Rake for .NET Build Automation

Being able to build your project in one step is an important part of any project. Fortunately, there are many technologies that provide this capability. Rake, while being mostly recognized in the Ruby world, is an easy-to-use building framework that can make your build scripts easier to read. We'll examine the fundamentals of build scripts, how they relate to continuous integration and tackle a script for our demo project.

MVC in the Real World

Move beyond MVC 101 and dive into aspects of building robust, real-world MVC applications. This demo-heavy presentation will show how to fully unit test the presentation layer with mocking and Dependency Injection. This session will show the benefits of using Inversion of Control (IoC) containers to create controllers with a custom controller factory. In addition to AJAX-enabling Views, we will explore how to build your own custom HTML helpers that can be reused across Views. By the end of the session we will cover Action filters, security, T4 templates, MvcContrib, FluentHtml, and more!

ASP MVC - The Novice Approach

You're hearing the buzz about Microsoft MVC framework but can't seem to grasp what it is about. In this session I am hoping to have an interactive session where we'll build a simple MVC application from start to finish - together.

Ignite your ASP.NET MVC application with Spark View Engine

This talk is intended to educate ASP.NET MVC web developers on Spark View Engine. We will discuss what it is, how it can be used in ASP.NET MVC applications, and where it came from. In addition, practical guidance will be provided on how to start using Spark in your MVC application today.

ASP.NET MVC Lessons Learned

This talk will feature ASP.NET MVC highlighting the lessons learned from my total imerssion in the ASP.NET MVC platform over the last year. You’ll see various techniques, from paging grids, partial data updates on the page, we'll touch on using JQuery and AJAX. If you're considering MVC, we will look at the feature set and understand how to create applications with this technology.

Seven Habits of Highly Effective ASP.NET MVC Developers

This will be a discussion on "A best way" to approach ASP.NET MVC development with the goal of being highly productive and effective.

Getting to know the Entity Framework

There are quite a few choices when it comes to how to do data access for your .Net application. With .Net 3.5, Microsoft introduced Linq2Sql which is a powerful ORM solution leveraging Linq technology. The Entity Framework was released with .Net 3.5 SP1 and took the concepts of Linq2Sql to a new level. The Entity Framework brought additional features over Linq2Sql as well as laying a new foundation for the future of data access in .Net. In this session we will at a brief history of ORM and then go through a walkthrough of the Entity Framework and flesh out the data access layer of a simple application. We will look at similarities of Linq2Sql and the Entity Framework as well as some common “gotchas” associated with EF. We will also take a lap through the new exciting features coming in Entity Framework 4.

Using the Entity Framework behind Web Services

Web services are everywhere and have become a normal part of our lives as developers and most of those services communicate with a database at some point. Building services in .Net got a lot easier with the introduction of WCF, but using any ORM solution with those services can be a bit tricky, especially if you are doing REST services. In this session we will look at what it takes to wire web services using the current version of Entity Framework as well as the new features coming in Entity Framework 4. We will look at several methods of building web services, including WCF, ASMX and REST in both WCF and Asp.net MVC. You will learn about the common issues with building any service with an ORM framework and how you can leverage the Entity Framework in building them.

Introduction to Entity Framework and ADO.NET Services

Planning to present on the new Microsoft O/R mapper with Entity Framework and exposing the SQL Server Data as a Service using ADO.Net Data Services.

C#: A .NET Framework Love Tale

In this fast-paced session filled with nostalgia and excitement we will cover the ins and outs of C# and its various incarnations from the .NET Framework 1.0 all the way up to the not yet released 4.0. We will explore many of the new and not so new syntax and language features that numerous developers have neglected to adopt or were just too busy to learn. After this session you will be sure to walk away with a new found affection for Microsoft's flagship application development language.