NEW Content Added to the Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas Agenda

As 2015 comes to a close, it's been a great year in the Microsoft ecosystem when it comes to tools and technologies. Yet as a development team member, it can feel overwhelming when you have to keep up with all of that. As my fellow Visual Studio Live! conference co-chairs Andrew Brust and Rockford Lhotka and I started planning for the 2016 shows, we worked hard to make sure we had the right mix of cutting-edge tech, best practices, and topics you really need to know. As we did our advance planning, we left some openings in the Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas (March 7 – 11 at Bally's Hotel & Casino) agenda that we could fill later, so we could make sure we were prepared for the latest innovations coming from Microsoft and others in the industry.

This brings us to our first batch of added sessions, now available, where you'll find five of our top speakers, bringing you topics you need to know in 2016. First, there's Miguel Castro and his session, "End-to-End Dependency Injection & Writing Testable Software." Quality continues to be a hot topic in the industry and, while for some, dependency injection is old hat, many developers are still in need of a solid grip on how and when to use it, and understanding the correlation between it and increased testability/quality. Castro is an experienced software craftsman and this session will be filled with his hard-earned best practices.

Another topic that needs more attention from development teams in every organization is security. It seems we hear about security breaches almost daily, many of them rooted in bad programming practices. Naturally, the Web is one of the first lines of defense and Brian Noyes has a new session to help: "Securing Single Page Applications." In this session, Noyes will cover Angular and Aurelia -- two of the hottest JavaScript frameworks out there, while discussing security issues you need to be aware of and what you can do to mitigate them.

Jumping to the other end of most applications, we have Leonard Lobel's "Exploring T-SQL Enhancements: Windowing and More." Persistence in the data tier is the foundation of most applications, and SQL Server continues to be the go-to data store for companies who want the richest feature set on top of a rock-solid engine that's proven over and over in daily use. Lobel is an expert who works daily with SQL Server to find out how to get the most out of it. This session will bring those insights straight to you.

Continuing with the data theme, Walt Ritscher brings us a brand new session to VSLive!: "Pretty, Yet Powerful. How Data Visualization Transforms the Way We Comprehend Information." No area is hotter than data science. A critical part of that is how you present the enormous amounts of data gathered daily -- whether it's product data, customer usage data or even operational data -- to the consumers of the systems you build. Ritscher will provide you with insight on how to choose the right visualization technique for your data, in a clear and understandable fashion.

And, finally, our last session in this batch is from conference co-chair Rockford Lhotka. Lhotka is a pioneer in the Microsoft world having brought his CSLA Framework forward from its roots in Visual Basic and COM to the modern world of cross-platform .NET on the desktop, servers, and mobile devices including iOS and Android. In "Building Cross-Platform Apps Using CSLA .NET," Lhotka will show you best practices for sharing code across all the Microsoft .NET Framework stacks, how Xamarin enables you to use C# and .NET, and get reuse out of nearly 100 percent of your business-layer code.

So there you have it, just in time for the holidays, five great new sessions added to the already huge list at Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas 2016.

All of us at Visual Studio Live! wish you safe and happy holidays, and look forward to seeing you all in 2016!

Posted by Brian Randell on 12/15/2015