Full Day Workshops

Choose from a broad range of content and topics by expert presenters. VSLive!’s pre- and post-conference workshops give you more technical content than most development conferences’ entire programs.

Pre-conference Workshops – Monday, November 12, 2007

Maximizing WPF: Silverlight, Intermediate
Billy Hollis
9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
It’s time to move beyond fragmented user interface technology stacks. WPF and Silverlight together compose one common model for user interface development that spans applications from local utilities to web-based Rich Internet Applications. This session will introduce you to the basics of WPF and Silverlight, including the control set, the layout model, data binding, styling, and animation. You’ll learn the basics of XAML, and how to develop WPF and Silverlight based applications with Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend. This workshop is aimed at those with little or no exposure to WPF or Silverlight, and is intended to provide a foundation for you to understand where these technologies can be used in your projects and how to get yourself production-ready on them.

Getting the Most Mileage out of Team System: A Developer’s Perspective, Intermediate
Benjamin Day
9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Ok, you’ve heard all the Microsoft claims about Visual Studio Team System/Team Foundation Server: its features and benefits, and what it’ll do for you—blah, blah, blah. The question is: as a Developer, what do you need to know about Team System to be more productive? Visual Studio Team System is out there, has a ton of features and is supposed to be great for developers, but where do you start? What do you really need to know? More importantly, what do you need to know to make you, as a developer, be more productive? Bottom line: Team System is all about writing high-quality code. When you write quality code, you catch problems early and you try to make sure that those problems never come back. In this tutorial, Ben will show how Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server can help you write quality code.

Post-conference Workshops – Thursday, November 15, 2007

Building Applications with Windows Workflow Foundation, Intermediate
Michael Stiefel
9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) arrived with .NET Framework 3.0, and offers a programming solution that lets you focus on writing business workflows immediately without having to solve the difficult problems of workflow plumbing. Starting from the basics, this workshop will teach you how to use the WF-supplied runtime engine and framework to build applications that use workflows, custom activities, business rules, and can interact with events from humans as well as machines.

Advanced C#: Moving up to LINQ, VS2008 and Framework 3.5
Richard Hale Shaw
9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
To look at the new LINQ constructs along with other new features in C# 3.0, you’d think they created an entirely new language. Just the from-each construct, the => operator and extension methods alone make it pretty bizarre. Throw in var, and it starts to look like JavaScript! But the fact is: C# 3.0 and LINQ are built on features of C# 2.0 that have been around for some time, and these new features are, in many respects, logical extensions to technology that’s long been tested and put into play.

In this workshop, we’ll spend a day exploring these new features of C# 3.0, VS2008, LINQ and LINQ-derivatives such as LINQ-to-SQL (formerly known as DLINQ) and LINQ-to-XML (formerly called XLINQ). You’ll even learn how to leverage many of these features today –-  without having to wait for VS2008, and without having to deploy Framework 3.5. Along the way, Richard will build a large number of live code examples (which you’ll get a copy of, afterwards) using the technologies involved.

We’ll start where his earlier session, “C# 3.0 & LINQ –  Under-the-hood” leaves off, and briefly review its key points: lambda expressions (a cleaner, simpler way of creating C# 2.0 anonymous methods), and extension methods, and how to use the latter to create even more powerful iterator methods (also from C#2.0) and you’ll learn how to create small, powerful building blocks that use deferred execution to query any sequence of objects. Then we’ll delve into LINQ expressions and how these let you do what you can do today but with more powerful syntactic implications. We’ll also explore some of the more powerful ways of leveraging LINQ for day-to-day development in any tier, and convert a full-fledged example of a C# 2.0 application -- step-by-step to where it takes advantage of C# 3.0 and LINQ features.

Along the way, we’ll also explore LINQ to SQL and LINQ to XML, so you’ll see how LINQ has been extended to take advantage of these disparate –  but highly used –  data sources. And you’ll see examples of a deployed application that uses LINQ in the middle-tier to solve a number of problems reading and searching through data –  even though the application only runs on .NET 2.0.

(Prerequisites: the “C# 3.0 & LINQ –  Under-the-hood” session presented earlier in the week, or previous experience with the VS2008 Beta, plus a minimum of 1 year of C# development experience with VS2005 and .NET Framework 2.0: no hand-holding if you don't.