Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Visual Studio Team System Futures, Intermediate
Chris Menegay
10:30 a.m.
The latest information on what will be available for Team System in Visual Studio "Orcas" and "Rosario". We'll look at what is coming, why it's coming, and how it can be useful within your organization. This presentation will emphasize solving problems and using the tools for that purpose, not just showing off cool features. Demonstrations will be done using the latest stable public builds.

Serious Team Foundation Server Customization, Intermediate
Benjamin Day
11:45 a.m.
You’ve learned how to customize work item templates. It was fun but now you feel empty inside and need new challenges. How about a custom TFS event handler? Or a power toy to eliminate some tedious linking operations? Did you know that Team Foundation Server (TFS) has an API to control, customize, and consume almost any piece of TFS functionality, including version control, the build system, and work items? You need to learn how to customize TFS.
 
In this session, Ben will show you how the TFS Event Service works so that you can write your own event handlers. After that, he’ll dive in to the TFS APIs so that you can start writing your own tools to connect to TFS, manage work items, and link them using the linking service.

Building Applications with Windows Live SDK, Intermediate
Jackie Goldstein
2:00 p.m.
The Windows Live SDK exposes tremendous amounts of functionality that can
be incorporated into your browser or smart client applciations. Come and learn
what Windows Live is about, what services are available and how to incorporate
them using the provided controls and APIs. We'll also take a look at developing
Mashups with minimal code using PopFly.

Create Managed Code for Office 2007 in Visual Studio 2008
Ken Getz
3:15 p.m.
Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office provided an amazing set of tools for developers needing to create managed applications that interact with Office applications. You could create document-level customizations for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2003; or application-level customizations for Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint 2007. Visual Studio 2008 stretches the bar even further, adding support for document or application-level customizations for more products, an Office 2007 Ribbon designer, an Outlook 2007 custom form region designer, support for bound content controls in Word 2007, and more. If you’re considering leveraging the considerable power of Office 2007, and you want to continue to use the development platform you’ve come to know and love, you need to learn what Visual Studio 2008 offers in terms of interacting with Microsoft Office.

Using and Extending the Typed DataSet and TableAdapter, Intermediate
Jackie Goldstein
4:30 p.m.
Are you using the VS 2005 DataSet designer to design your data access code using Typed DataSets and Table Adapters? You should be, because doing so allows you to build better data-access code much faster. This session will consist of mainly demos that cover both the basic uses of these tools and objects, as well as techniques to extend the standard classes to meet your own specific needs. We will also take a look at some of the improvements in the "Orcas" release of Visual Studio.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Testing Web Applications with Visual Studio Team Suite (Orcas)
Trent Nix
10:30 a.m.
Visual Studio Team System brought forth a number of tools that can be utilized to quality assure web applications built in ASP.NET. However, knowing these tools is only half the battle. Testing web applications presents a new set of challenges that requires a different approach unfamiliar to tests who typically cut their teeth testing desktop applications. This session will investigate best practices for testing web applications and how to get the most out of the various testing tools available with Visual Studio Team System. Specific topics include unit testing ASP.NET code, writing custom validation rules, load testing web applications, and writing coded web tests.

Serious Team Foundation Server Source Control, Intermediate
Benjamin Day
11:45 a.m.
Did you know that there’s a command-line interface to the version control system called “TF” with 33 sub-commands? Also, you can help ensure quality by configuring check-in policies. You can create your own check-in policies, too. Have you played around with branching and merging yet? TFS’s source control is seriously powerful.
 
In this session, Ben will show you how to become a TFS version control power user. First, he’ll start with an overview of configuring source control, then dive into the TF command, give some advice on setting up your source control tree, some thoughts on branching & merging, and then show you how to create your own TFS check-in policy.

Create Your Own Configuration Management System, Intermediate to Advanced
Paul Sheriff
2:00 p.m.
In .NET 2.0 configuration management has been completely overhauled. The new ConfigurationManager class is now used, along with other Configuration classes, to handle configuration management. In this seminar you will learn how to create a configuration handler to read configuration settings from any "data store". You will learn how to create a set of Providers to be able to switch where the data is stored, simply by changing a configuration setting—not changing and recompiling code! You will see Provider examples that can read settings from your .Config file, an .XML file or from the Registry. Prior knowledge of how to build .NET 2.0 applications and create classes and components is recommended.

Managing Software Releases with Visual Studio Team System, Intermediate
Chris Menegay
3:15 p.m.
Team Foundation Server offers a wealth of tools to support new application development projects. But how do they apply to applications that are already released and need ongoing maintenance? What about the existing applications that you've migrated into TFS? Or even your new applications once they've reached production? In this session we'll look at branching, build and work item strategies to help with managing and auditing the rollout of releases and fixes for existing applications. Some of the techniques that we will examine are: promotion modeling, "merge by work item", cherry-picked merges, and builds based on branches. This approach will take into account application code, database schema and data changes.

VS Tools and Techniques for Distributed Data Access - Today and Tomorrow, Advanced
Jackie Goldstein
4:30 p.m.
This session will discuss several challenges facing developers who are creating distributed data-access applications. These issues include hierarchical updates, use of VS tools/wizards to generate truly N-tier applications, and separation of data entity and data access objects. We will demonstrate what tools and techniques can be used today in VS 2005 and then take a look at what new solutions are going to be offered in Visual Studio "Orcas.