TechDays 2012 Developer Content Update

We’re almost ready to confirm 100% of the developer agenda for TechDays 2012, February 14th to 16th 2012. Take a look at the online session listing and speakers where you can see for yourself and have your preferred agenda in mind.
Just in time for the end of the early bird, ending today!

Top speakers

This year we are welcoming some regulars as well as some new faces to the event. Speakers like Jeff Prosise, Bart De Smet, Brian Keller, Wade Wegner, Tarek Madkour, Matt Milner and more. Alex Turner is also back after a few years away, as is Nikhil Kothari the creator of Script#. From over the English channel we are welcoming Steve Sanderson and Richard Finn for the first time, as is Rob Miles joining us for the second year.

Local speaker favorites and again a few new faces for TechDays: Gill Cleeren, Maarten Balliauw, Kevin Dockx and Sam Vanhoutte, and Peter Himschoot and Jurgen Postelmans for the post-conference deep dive.

As for the keynote: we still have an announcement to be made there once we are ready to confirm.

The big content themes

Our big focus is giving developers get a head-start on the platform and tools such as the next generation of Visual Studio Tools and Languages, the main patterns and paradigms to build applications leveraging cloud services and targeting multiple devices.
At the same time we also ensure there are enough sessions that go deep on current technology learning’s and real world architectures.

Post-conference deep dive

This year the developer deep dive on “Web Development Futures” is delivered by Jurgen Postelmans and Peter Himschoot from U2U. Peter and Jurgen prepared a full day of sessions focusing on Visual Studio 11 for web development, ASP.NET (4.5) Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC 4, HTML5 and WCF. If you are looking at how to leverage new tooling for HTML5 and JavaScript development, target multiple devices, take advantage of ASP.NET features you should not miss this deep dive.

A grab at some of the sessions

The Future of C# and Visual Basic (Bart De Smet)
Today's trend of connected, service-oriented, cloud-centric applications forces us to rethink everyday programming tasks such as I/O, ensuring responsiveness and scalability. Asynchronous programming is an essential tool in achieving those goals, unfortunately lacking language support.
With C# 5.0 and Visual Basic 11 this changes, thanks to the introduction of the new async and await keywords. Come and learn how to use those exciting new programming language features for a variety of asynchronous tasks, including the usage of new Windows 8 Runtime APIs.
After covering caller-info attributes - a little language feature introduced in this iteration of the languages as well - we'll have a look at project "Roslyn", turning compilers into services that can be leveraged to write custom refactorings, great IDE experiences, meta-programming, REPLs, and more.

Project Roslyn: Exposing the C# and VB compiler’s code analysis (Alex Turner)
Until now, the VB and C# compilers have been used as black boxes. You put text in, and you get out a binary file. In our long-lead project, codename “Roslyn”, we’ll be changing that dynamic by building an API that exposes our compilers’ analysis engines. In this session, we’ll give an overview of the Roslyn project and share our early plans for the future version of the C# and VB compiler and language services. We’ll look at object models that can be used for code generation, analysis, and refactoring, and upcoming support for scripting and interactive use of C# and Visual Basic.

Devices + Cloud: Using Windows Azure with Windows Phone, iOS, Android (Wade Wegner)
So, you’re building apps that span multiple devices apps and you’re curious about what the cloud can offer. Is it possible to deploy scalable Web apps and services on Windows Azure? How about storing data in the cloud? Is it possible to use the cloud for push notifications to the device? In this session, you'll learn how to build Windows, Windows Phone, Android and even iOS apps that are backed by scalable cloud services with the Windows Azure platform. This demo-focused session will cover the end-to-end experience and address how to tackle issues such as authentication, storage and notifications across a wide range of devices.

Developing HTML5 Applications with Script# Compiling C# into JavaScript (Nikhil Kothari)
Script#, a free C# to JavaScript compiler, brings the power of Visual Studio and .NET Tools to build a productive and familiar development model for creating, testing and managing modern applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript along with popular frameworks such as jQuery. This session provides a hands-on look at using Script#, shares success stories and experiences from real-world use. More information about Script# is at https://www.scriptsharp.com and https://github.com/nikhilk/scriptsharp. Come learn about getting started, and contributing to the project.

Windows Phone Fast App Switching, Tombstoning and Multitasking (Ben Riga)
With Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) comes the ability for users to switch quickly between running applications. This dramatically enhances the end-user experience and will be expected by end-users. In this session you'll learn how fast app switching works and how to prepare your application for this functionality. Finally we'll cover how to incorporate background tasks into your applications for notifications, file transfers and audio.

Silverlight, MVVM & WCF RIA Services: an architectural story (Kevin Dockx)
At the start of each project, you’ll have to lay out your solution architecture - and it’s very important to “get this right”. Silverlight, MVVM & WCF RIA Services work nicely together, but as with each architecture, the best solution depends on your application requirements. What are your options in this case? What are the pitfalls? How can you tie these technologies together to provide you with a solid foundation for your projects? This is an in-depth session, based on real-life experience.

Building services for your phone and tablet applications using WebAPI (Matt Milner)
The Web API is a new framework for building web services in .NET. In this session you will learn how to use this framework by example as we build a service and show how it can be consumed from mobile clients such as tablets and phones.

More details to be announced soon for the last set of speakers and sessions, we do have a few sessions under the covers that will make developers happy

So what’s your top list of sessions? I’ll aggregate some of the lists blogged by the community soon, so don’t hesitate to put up your list to be referenced.

See you at TechDays!

Note: schedule, speakers and agenda are subject to change.