Black-Belt Virtual Track
If you’re an experienced developer, our Black-Belt Virtual Track is aimed at your needs. It’s called Black-Belt, because we assume both programming experience and familiarity with the tools. It’s called a “virtual track”, because instead of having sessions one after another in one room, you’ll find Black-Belt sessions distributed through all our conference packages.
Check out these sessions. With your Gold Passport registration you can attend them all.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
VT13De-Mystifying TFS Reporting, Advanced
Benjamin Day
2:30 p.m.
If you’re using Team Foundation Server, it’s capturing a whole lot of data for you about your projects—code coverage, code churn, work item history, etc—and it’s all going into the TFS Data Warehouse. All that data is being captured so that you can easily figure out what’s happening on your project using Excel or SQL Server’s Report Builder. That’s great. Ever tried to actually do it? Ever looked at the TFS Data Warehouse? (Yeah. Clear as mud, huh?)
Then there are the SQL Server Reporting Services Reports that come out of the box. “Actual Quality vs. Planned Velocity”? (Whuh?) What do these reports mean? Better yet, how do you fix them after you’ve customized your Team Project’s Work-Item Templates? What are these “dimensions” and “measures” all about?
In this session, Ben will answer these questions and more and attempt to eliminate the mystery in the TFS reporting system. We’ll cover the reports mean, how you can access the warehouse with Excel, and then show you how you can customize the TFS SQL Reporting Services reports.
VT18Load Testing Your ASP.NET Applications, Advanced
Chris Menegay
4:00 p.m.
Far too often, performance and scalability testing is not performed until applications are ready to be rolled into production. At that point it is too difficult to correct what may be fundamental problems in application design and architecture. This session demonstrates how to create robust load tests and run them as part of a daily automated build process. This regular load testing allows you to see performance problems as they are created, and fix them in a much timelier manner.
VC14Creating Custom WCF Behaviors, Advanced
Rob Daigneau
2:30 p.m.
Custom behaviors provide a mechanism to modify the WCF runtime execution at the proxy (i.e., client) or dispatcher (i.e., service) via attributes, configurations, and even programmatic means. This powerful technique may be used to inject common and “cross-cutting” logic upon Services, Contracts, Endpoints, and Operations, which in turn yields limitless possibilities.
In this session, we will explore how WCF custom behaviors might be leveraged to implement a concept similar to Aspects. You'll learn how this powerful feature can be used to apply cross-cutting logic to your services in a manner that is both simple to understand and implement. You'll also see that the concepts of SOA, OOP, and AOP (i.e., Aspect-Oriented Programming) should be thought of as being complementary rather than competing.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
VA36Customizing the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Framework, Advanced
Jonathan Goodyear
2:45 p.m.
Do you like the idea of using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern for your Web applications, but wish you could take more control over the process? Well, you can! This session explores how you can customize the Microsoft
ASP.NET MVC Framework by building custom providers as well as plugging in existing alternatives. Demonstrations will include building a customized view engine, utilizing an alternative Inversion of Control container (Windsor) and using an alternative data provider (NHibernate or SubSonic). By the end of this session, you will feel empowered to take the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Framework to new levels.
VS42Service Development and Integration with BizTalk, Intermediate
Kent Brown
4:15 p.m.
When you think of integration, you may think of clunky old messaging formats (flatfile, EDI, HIPAA, SWIFT, FIX, etc.). Sure BizTalk does all that and it's important stuff. But BizTalk also plays very well in the Service-Oriented space. With the WCF Adapters in R2, BizTalk is perfectly suited to build and host your course-grained, business-focused services and broker, or "Orchestrate", to your fine-grained services built in WCF or ASMX. In this session, you will learn the capabilities, the How-To, and the Best Practices of using BizTalk to consume and expose Web services.
VT23Managing Software Releases with Visual Studio Team System, Advanced
Chris Menegay
8:30 a.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 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.
VT38Serious Team Foundation Server Source Control, Advanced
Benjamin Day
2:45 p.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 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.
VC39Exposing Workflows as Services through WCF, Advanced
Bayer White
2:45p.m.
Workflows can be built specifically within applications, but the real power is having workflows exposed to more than one application at a time. This trend is obvious within the new .NET Framework 3.5 which releases some new WF Activities, but this concept can also be done in .NET 3.0. By combining WF and WCF, services now gain all of the benefits of workflows. Services can now maintain state for long periods of time. Services can also be designed visually by using the workflow designer, and have a flexible flow pattern.
This session will show how to design and build workflows that are exposed as WCF services using the 3.0 and 3.5 .NET Framework. A basic understanding of Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation are required.
VC30Creating Advanced Custom Windows Forms Controls, Intermediate
Walt Ritscher
10:00 a.m.
Creating your own controls is a great way to augment your UI development. There's more to creating user controls, however, than dropping a few constituent controls on a designer and crafting a few properties or methods. This session illustrates the techniques you need to elevate your user controls to the next level. Since other developers use your control, you need a firm grasp on how to make your control interact with the Visual Studio Forms designer. Learn how to decorate your control with design-time adornments (example: sizing and rotation handles). We'll look at several powerful tools—Property Browser integration, Extender Property Providers, Type Converters, Designer Verbs, Custom Designers and UI Type Editors—that make your control easy to use, work effectively in the Visual Studio IDE, and also look professional. In addition, you'll see how to support data-binding to your control and learn how to debug your control effectively.
VC45Doing Something Useful with Enterprise Library 3.0, Advanced
Benjamin Day
4:15 p.m.
There are so many common problems that we run in to when we write applications—logging, exception handling, validation, data access, etc. Unfortunately, many of us end up writing and re-writing the same code over and over again in each application. Sure, it might be fun to write this code but if someone’s already done it, should we keep re-writing it? Enter P&P’s Enterprise Library. Enterprise Library aims to solve these common problems with standardized code so that you can focus on implementing your “real business problem”. There so much stuff in Enterprise Library, and it can be difficult to know how and where to start using it.
In this session, Ben will show you what some of the big pieces are and how to incorporate them into your application’s architecture including what “Policy Injection” is and why you should care.
