TechDays 2011 – Developer track sessions update

TechDays 2011 on April 25 to 28th will bring more than 25 different developer track speakers to Belgium. While most of the sessions can be viewed through filtering in the Sessions tools on the website, I’d thought it might be useful to have them in a list form as well. I’ve mentioned (Deep Dive Post Conference) to the ones that occur on April 28th which is our Deep Dives day.
Don’t forget: early bird discount ends February 28th 2011!

Note: also take a look at the IT-Professional sessions update that my colleague Arlindo blogged about.

Sessions and speakers

Trends in Programming Languages - Bart De Smet
Lately, we’ve seen many industry trends shaping the evolution of programming languages in various directions. The many-core revolution has forced us to think hard about ways to leverage the massively parallel architectures available to the masses. Cloud, web, and mobile programming have put additional emphasis on the need for asynchrony in our applications. Dynamic languages are going through a rebirth, driven by a desire to shy away from schematized data, and accelerated by the renaissance of JavaScript. Oh, and we can’t count out native languages either, with C++0x’s final draft lurking around the corner.
In this session, we’ll discuss modern trends in programming languages, correlating those to everyday developer tasks. Come and learn why functional programming matters, how F# fits in the language landscape, why dynamic and native languages deserve a second chance, how frameworks like TPL and Rx help with asynchronous programming, and – last but not least – what the future of C# and Visual Basic has to bring.
Don’t miss out on sharpening your knowledge about your single most important developer tool: the language you use to express your coding dreams.

Introducing Agile Into The Enterprise - Phil Japikse
Scrum and XP have found a strong following in the development community. But most non-development groups (such as Web Administrators, Production Support, Security, Testing, and Users/Stake Holders) inside the enterprise are far from agile, nor are they trying to move to be more agile. This session starts with a refresher on Scrum, and then uses real experiences from large enterprise development projects to show how to effectively work with those teams. Instead of trying to "convert" them, we discuss strategies to adapt to their needs while remaining agile in the development realm.

Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, Windows Azure, jQuery, OData and RIA Services. Shaken, not stirred - Maarten Balliauw and Kevin Dockx
Have you ever been jealous of James Bond and his gadgets? Don’t be: as a .NET developer you have plenty of cool gadgets at hand. If you are interested in how our .NET gadgets can be mixed together, let Kevin and Maarten guide you along the path of building a live event feedback application that leverages Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, Windows Azure, jQuery, OData and RIA Services.
This is the perfect session to give you an update on the newest technologies to build web, Silverlight, client and phone applications.

Switch on the LightSwitch - Gill Cleeren
Microsoft LightSwitch is a new part of the Visual Studio family and makes it possible to more easily create create professional-quality business applications for the desktop, the web, and the cloud. The big question of course: Is LightSwitch something for you? In this session, you’ll get the answer!
We'll show how you can build professional LOB applications quickly using LightSwitch. We will cover why you should look at LightSwitch, binding to data, and building out the user interface. LightSwitch is however more than just some predefined screens: developers will love it for its extensibility, which we’ll cover deeply.
Note: LightSwitch is currently still in Beta.

To OData or Not to OData - Chris Eargle
The Open Data Protocol is an open, RESTful protocol that utilizes existing standards such as HTTP, AtomPub, XML, and JSON. A service using OData is resource-oriented by its nature, contrasting it with the operation-based, RPC-styled services typified by SOAP. There is a movement toward RESTful services, but care must be taken to identify whether a service should be designed resource or operation oriented. Participants will also learn the advantages of the OData protocol and other RESTful technologies.

WCF Web APIs, HTTP your way - Glenn Block
Are you building Web APIs for reaching any device, enabling mash-ups, or providing highly connected Web experiences? Then come to this session and learn how to build Web APIs your way with Windows Communication Foundation. We put you in control of patterns (REST, pub/sub, RPC, Hypertext) and formats (XML, JSON, URIs, Atom, OData) and enable you to leverage new technologies to build Web APIs exactly the way you want them.

ASP.NET MVC 3 - Deep Dive - Hadi Hariri
In this talk we’ll discuss the internals of ASP.NET MVC 3. We’ll see what extensibility points it offers us, how we can change things and where the pain points continue to be despite its third incarnation. This is a deep-dive coding session.

Rock Hard: C++ Evolving - Boris Jabes
From Kinect to capacitive touch devices, users increasingly demand immersive experiences with amazing responsiveness and performance. With a new standard (C++0x) almost finalized, the largest in over a decade, C++ is poised for renewed importance. C++0x brings with it improvements in expressiveness and performance that are too numerous to cover. In this talk, we'll highlight mind-bending examples on the bleeding edge that give you an insight into the unique capabilities of C++ in the 21st century. Language geeks, join us for a lively conversation about a truly multi-paradigm language. Weary managed developers, come discover how C++ could be the language for your next evening project. Exalted C++ programmers, please honor us with your presence!

Data in the cloud and on-premise: A Look at the Forthcoming SQL Azure Services – SQL Azure Data Sync and SQL Azure Reporting - Mark Scurrell
In addition to SQL Azure Database, new SQL Azure services will be available in the near future.  In this session you’ll learn about the capabilities of these new services, in what scenarios they can be used and see them in action.  Data movement capabilities are critical for cloud-based applications; with SQL Azure Data Sync you will be able to share data between on-premises SQL Server and SQL Azure databases as well as between multiple SQL Azure databases, allowing you to link on-premises and cloud-based applications and make data available to users around the world.  Reporting and visualization of data stored in SQL Azure will be enabled with SQL Azure Reporting.  See how reports can be authored, deployed and made available to users on the web or embedded in applications.

Windows Phone and XNA for Fun, Games, Profit and Physics - Rob Miles
Windows Phone 7 is a great gaming platform. In this session you will find out how to create your own games using C#, Visual Studio 2010 and XNA and run them on the phone. You will discover how to use the touch screen and accelerometer in the phone to get player input to create fun packed games with real physics. Rob will also reveal how to get your games on sale in the Windows Phone Marketplace and maybe make a fortune. With plenty of demos and game ideas to explore this session will give a flying start to your mobile gaming career.

SharePoint 2010 Patterns and Best Practices - Serge Luca & Karine Bosch
In this session, you will have an overview of the work recently delivered by the Patterns and Practices group related to SharePoint 2010.
The session will also cover the role of Team Foundation Server 2010 as a major tool in any SharePoint 2010 project.
Some Unit testing frameworks like Microsoft PEX and Moles in the specific context of SharePoint 2010 will also be illustrated.
This session is also interesting for developers working on SharePoint 2007.

HTML 5 - that's what you need to know today! - Ingo Rammer
With Version 9 of Internet Explorer, Microsoft has set out to deliver one of the most standards-compliant  browsers to date. In this code-heavy session, Ingo will show you what HTML 5 (the driving force behind most of today's browser development) offers today and how you can take advantage of client-side storage of data, offline caching of web applications, canvas-based drawing, embedded microdata, semantic information, and corresponding extension to input elements. You will learn how to detect the various browsers' support for different features in your application and will also hear about advanced features like web workers and web sockets which will allow tomorrow's browsers to create user-friendly environments which can rival today's desktop applications in a cross-platform way.

Demystifying the .NET Asynchronous Programming Landscape - Bart De Smet
Asynchronous programming is no longer an option, it’s become a must on various platforms, including Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, and various data-centric frameworks. Unfortunately, dealing with asynchrony is way too hard in today's world of development tools and frameworks. The huge amount of manual and error-prone plumbing leads to incomprehensible and hard to maintain code. As we reach out to services in the cloud, the desire for asynchronous computation is ever increasing, requiring a fresh look on the problems imposed by reactive programming.
In this session, we explore various methodologies to address asynchronous programming, and explain how they relate and differ. First, we’ll explore existing patterns and libraries – such as the TPL – to sketch some of the pain-points. Armed with this knowledge, we’ll approach the problem from different angles, including a language-centric view with F#’s asynchronous workflows and the upcoming async and await features in C# and Visual Basic. Next, we’ll move beyond sequential composition of asynchronous computations, and introduce the Reactive Extensions (Rx) that enable you to express rich queries – even using LINQ syntax – over asynchronous push-based “reactive” event streams.

Designing and Building a Windows Phone 7 Application End-to-End - Isabel Gomez Miragaya & Katrien De Graeve
This session addresses an end-to-end scenario for building a Windows Phone 7 application that takes advantage of the top features of the phone OS as well as using the Cloud. Our session is comprised of the following main topics:
- design and build a Silverlight application with Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2010, taking advantage of controls, animations, transformations, transitions (projections), splash screen animation, data binding, …
- usage of Windows Phone specific features such as Push Notifications, Tasks, location services and mapping, and address tombstoning
- usage of Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) architecture
- OData WCF service to talk with the cloud in Windows Azure, Windows Azure Storage and SQL Azure
Dare to take all of this in, in just 75 minutes? Join us!

Building Robust, Maintainable Coded UI Tests with Visual Studio 2010 - Brian Keller
Coded UI tests allow developers to create fully-automated, functional UI tests which can be used to quickly alert a team about regressions. These are easy to create, but can become tricky to build in a robust manner which can sustain changes to your application over time. In this demo-rich session we will examine patterns and practices you can employ for building great coded UI tests.

Identity & Access Control in the Cloud with Windows Azure - Vittorio Bertocci
If you don’t yet know what claims-based identity is, it’s time to get busy. Signing users in and granting them access is a core function of almost every cloud-based application, and claims-based identity is the best way to take care of that. In this session we will show you how to simplify your user experience by enabling users to sign in with an existing account such as a Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or on-premises Active Directory account, implement access control, and make secure connections between applications. You will learn how the AppFabric Access Control Service, Windows Identity Foundation, and Active Directory Federation Services use a claims-based identity architecture to help you to take advantage of the shift toward the cloud while still fully leveraging your on-premises investments.

LINQ, take two – Realizing the LINQ to Everything dream - Bart De Smet
At PDC a few years back, we introduced the LINQ project to solve the impedance mismatch between various data models by means of integrated query syntax in mainstream programming languages. Today, we’re seeing a rich ecosystem around LINQ providers that allow developers to reach out to many more data models. However, there’s a lot of opportunity left to democratize even more data models.
Based on the theory of monads, we’ll explore the incredibly powerful nature of query comprehensions to do things like constraint solving using Z3 and Solver Foundation, build reactive queries with the Reactive Extensions, carry out various forms of query optimization, split execution of queries across tiers, etc. In addition, we revisit the art of writing query providers, introducing some novel approaches to ensure better compile-time checking. After this talk, you’ll truly understand the (underestimated) power that LINQ has brought us.

Windows Azure AppFabric: Building, Managing, and Connecting High-Density, Multi-Tenant Cloud Applications - Clemens Vasters
Windows Azure AppFabric is Microsoft’s next-generation middleware application platform in the cloud, providing access control with federated identity, high-density, multi-tenant component-hosting, caching services, on-premise connectivity, rich publish/subscribe messaging, and integration services. In this session, Clemens Vasters, an Architect on the AppFabric product team at Microsoft will provide an overview of the AppFabric services that are already commercially available and the new services that Microsoft will bring to market until the end of this year.

MEF in the real world - Glenn Block
No this is not yet another MEF 101 talk J Since MEF V1 shipped, we’ve seen a ton of folks building extensible solutions and frameworks including a host of OSS solutions. In this talk we will explore these real world solutions and how MEF plays in. The list will include frameworks like MefContrib, RavenDB, Caliburn and the Silverlight Media Framework. As a bonus, will also take a sneak peak at what is to come in MEF v2.

Parallel Programming in .NET 4.0 - Tasks and Threading
Scaling applications to the current and future multiple-core machines can really be a daunting task --- but it doesn't have to be! In this session, Ingo Rammer shows you the new task-based API and how it simplifies the creation of multi-core supporting applications. You will learn how you can take advantage of the fine-grained parallelism and control which is offered by this new .NET feature. Ingo will also show you how to extend your in-memory LINQ query to run in parallel, and how the new Visual Studio 10 debugging tools will make troubleshooting this kind of applications a lot easier.

Dive into Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010 - Brian Keller (Deep Dive Post Conference)
This session starts our Deep Dive post-conference into Application Lifecycle Management.
In this demo-rich session we will take a tour of many of the new capabilities of Visual Studio 2010 for application lifecycle management. This includes a look at the new build automation, project management, branching and merging, and related capabilities of Team Foundation Server 2010. We will also look at the new design and modeling tools and software testing capabilities of Visual Studio 2010.

Architecting for a cost effective Windows Azure solution - Maarten Balliauw (Deep Dive Post Conference)
Cloud computing and platforms like Windows Azure promise to be “the next big thing” in IT. This is certainly true as there are a lot of advantages with cloud computing: computing and storage become an on-demand story that you can use at any time, paying only for its effective usage. But this also poses a problem: if a cloud application is designed like one would design a regular application chances are that the cost perspective of that application will not be as expected. This session covers common pitfalls and hints on improving the cost effectiveness of a Windows Azure solution.

Implementing Lean Software Delivery with Kanban and Team Foundation Server 2010 - Adam Gilmore (Deep Dive Post Conference)
Kanban is becoming an important tool for teams wishing to become agile and continuously improve their processes. In this session we'll discuss why and how to implement a Kanban system for your team. In adddition, we'll demonstrate how to use Team Foundation Server 2010 to model and visualise your existing processes as a Kanban board and how you use this to drive improvement in your project.

Ubiquitous Communication with the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus - Christian Weyer (Deep Dive Post Conference)
Today's applications are faced with several communication and connectivity obstacles in their daily life. Often secured connections are not allowed through firewalls and NAT devices at all. What to do if you need ubiquitous connectivity? Windows Azure AppFabric's Service Bus can be seen as the Swiss Army Knife of communication. Christian Weyer shows you how to build mighty cross-platform communication patterns like publish/subscribe – all in a secure manner, programmed with WCF or pure REST.

Advanced Debugging with Visual Studio 2010 - Ingo Rammer (Deep Dive Post Conference)
In the newest version of Ingo's classic talk you will learn how to make the most out of your debugging time with Visual Studio 2010. Ingo will show you the most important advanced debugging techniques, including the use of Intellitrace and how to prepare your applications to take advantage of crashdump debugging with Visual Studio 2010 (which is quite likely the number #1 feature to dramatically reduce your bug-hunting time for hard-to-reproduce issues.)

Practical Guidance on Visual Studio Database Projects - Jens K. Suessmeyer (Deep Dive Post Conference)
Most of the applications today are based on a database backend. While common application development makes it easy to deploy database changes and maintain source code in source control it was always hard getting your database code supported throughout the versions of the application. With Visual Studio Database Projects, you can ease your development, deployment and change management using the integration in Visual Studio and team Foundation server. While giving you the fundamentals of what database development under Visual Studio Database Projects means, we will also jump into the culprits you might face in reality. We will show you how the published Database Guidance on Codeplex can help you preventing common problems and getting around limitations you might face in your daily work.

Real World Azure: Elasticity from on-premise to Cloud (and back) - Christian Weyer (Deep Dive Post Conference)
All the talk about the Cloud and the Windows Azure platform. But where does it make sense? In this session, Christian shows you one example of how you can leverage the pros of Windows Azure and SQL Azure in order to expand your web-based data-driven applications from a local installation into the cloud. Whether you want to handle predictable or likely unpredictable bursts or you want to prepare for moving your existing applications into the Cloud: experience a hands-on demonstration powered by IIS, SQL Server, Windows Azure, SQL Azure, Sync Services and PowerShell.

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 25, 2011
  so please record these sessions and upload them to Channel9, the sooner the better, thanks :-)

• Anonymous
  February 26, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 03, 2011
  Will there be a session about Entity Framework 4.1 which will be released soon?