Choose from a broad range of content and topics by expert presenters. VSLive!’s pre- and post-conference full day workshops give you more technical content than most development conferences’ entire programs.
| WORKSHOPS | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9:00a - 6:00p |
VPR1
VSTS 2008 for the Busy Developer |
VPR2
WPF and Silverlight: A Pragmatic Introduction |
VPR3
Windows Workflow: A Gentle Introduction |
VS3
LINQ — One Query Syntax to Rule Them All |
| WORKSHOPS | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9:00a - 6:00p |
VPO1
Order from Chaos: Leveraging .NET 2.0 to 3.5 |
VPO2
Building Applications with Windows Workflow Foundation |
VPO3
Getting the Most Mileage out of Team System: A Developer’s Perspective |
VPO4
SQL Server 2008 for Developers |
Pre-Conference Workshops:
VSTS 2008 for the Busy Developer, Intermediate
Brian Randell
For what was going to be a minor release, Visual Studio Team System 2008 and Team Foundation Server 2008 turned out to be much more. In this workshop you’ll learn how to upgrade your clients and server to the new 2008 release. More importantly, you’ll learn why you should upgrade as well as the possible issues you might have. You’ll learn about all the new VSTS specific enhancements by designing and building a simple solution that highlights the best practices for using Team System. You’ll learn about server changes like the totally revamped Build Server, enhanced version control features, and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 integration. You’ll see how new profiling features, integrated AJAX recording, and top-down system design can help you build better distributed solutions. By the end of the feature packed day you’ll be ready to return to work and get busy with Team System 2008.
WPF and Silverlight: A Pragmatic Introduction, Introductory
Billy Hollis
The industry is beginning a transition to better user interfaces for all kinds of applications. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight are the base technologies for a whole new generation of richer, more intuitive, and more productive interfaces. But you may be confused about their impact. Are they ready for prime time? How do you decide if and when to make the move? How do you go about learning to use these technologies effectively? This workshop can give you the perspective to answer those questions. Created for those who have little or no experience in these technologies, you'll see a structured, pragmatic introduction to WPF core concepts, including XAML, the control set, layout, visual designers, and such interactive technologies as animation and styling. Silverlight will be compared and contrasted with WPF, and examples of both technologies will be presented to help you see how you might use them in your own projects.
Windows Workflow: A Gentle Introduction, Introductory
Ken Getz & Robert Green
Windows Workflow makes it possible to incorporate workflow behaviors into your own applications, without needing to provide your own infrastructure and "plumbing". This workshop introduces the basics of Windows Workflow, and demonstrates how to create, debug, and host workflows within your applications. Using the workflow extensions for Visual Studio 2005, you’ll learn how to take advantage of Windows Workflow, creating new workflow activities, reacting to events, and hosting the workflows. If you’re interested in adopting this powerful new technology, you need to attend this workshop.
LINQ — One Query Syntax to Rule Them All, Introductory
Don Demsak
By now you have probably already heard about LINQ and think it is all about querying SQL Server. Well, yes, with LINQ to SQL you can query SQL Server. But, LINQ is so much more. LINQ extends both C# and Visual Basic with native language syntax for queries, provides class libraries to take advantage of these capabilities, and you can even write your own query provider.
In this workshop will cover the basics of how to use LINQ with in memory collections and the language constructs that make LINQ possible (for both C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0). We will then explore the details of LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities and LINQ to XML, and even how to build your own query provider. Towards the end of the day we will go into best practices on where, when, how to use and take advantage of LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities. This workshop will use both C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0
Post-Conference Workshops:
Order from Chaos: Leveraging .NET 2.0 to 3.5, Intermediate
Rockford Lhotka
At a time when many people are just moving to .NET 2.0, Microsoft has released .NET 3.0 and 3.5. The rate of technology change is outstripping our ability to keep up. How do you find order in all this chaos?
Join author and .NET expert Rockford Lhotka for answers. In this workshop you will learn how all the parts fit together, and how you can leverage them as you are ready over time. Whether you are using .NET 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5 today, this workshop will help you be more productive and create better applications in .NET.
Learn how to achieve high levels of reuse and maintainability for Windows Forms, Web Forms, WPF and Silverlight applications. Find out how to leverage SOA and Workflow, without abandoning the performance and simplicity of n-tier or client/server concepts. This workshop will give you an architecture and design model, along with programming techniques, that will make order out of chaos.
Building Applications with Windows Workflow Foundation, Introductory
Michael Stiefel
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.
Getting the Most Mileage out of Team System: A Developer’s Perspective, Advanced
Benjamin Day
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 and it’s got a ton of features. It’s 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 you 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 explore how Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server help you to write quality code. We’ll start with unit testing: What is unit testing? What is Test-Driven Development? What are all different test types? How do you design for testability? What are good tests vs. poorly designed tests? What’s a “mock” object? How do you test user interface functionality? What’s code coverage? Why would you want to use code profiling on your unit tests? What’s the best way to unit test your stored procedures?
Next, we’ll talk about managing your code with Team Foundation Server source control: How do you ensure that your code base is clean? How do you keep people from breaking the build? What’s “continuous integration”? How to use check-in policies to avoid source control anarchy? Why use Static Code Analysis? How do you use branching and merging to manage multiple versions of an application? What’s a shelveset – and why does it take care of the “hit-bya-bus factor”?
Then we’ll cover how Visual Studio Team System helps you manage your database code: How can you manage databases with Team Foundation Server source control? How do you manage new versions of the database schema? What’s the best way to get test data? Why is “Rename Refactoring” better than CTRL-H (Find & Replace)? Finally, we’ll discuss the Team Foundation Server build system: What’s a Team Build? What’s MSBuild? What’s a build script? How do “desktop builds” fit in?
When we’re done, you’ll have learned the Developer-centric features in Team System that leverage unit testing, source control, and Team Builds to be highly productive and develop high-quality software.
SQL Server 2008 for Developers
Andrew Brust & Leonard Lobel
This full-day workshop will get you ready for SQL Server 2008, whether you’ve already been using SQL Server 2005 or you’re still on SQL Server 2000. We’ll pull no punches as we rip through the most important features in SQL Server for developers, including the newest capabilities on the horizon for SQL Server 2008. We’ll cover enhancements to the core database engine including new features such as table-valued parameters, new date and time data types, and grouping sets. We’ll learn how to leverage new features for going “beyond relational”, with the hierarchyid, FILESTREAM and spatial data types. We’ll also study the latest data access and modeling strategies provided by the new ADO.NET Entity Framework, Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and the new data binding model for WPF. We’ll finish with an overview of SQL Server 2008’s new BI, data warehousing and reporting features. You’ll learn a ton of new SQL Server features in this information-packed day!
