Silverlight / WPF
Programming Practices
Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
Cloud Computing
Data Management
Web / HTML 5
Simplification Tools
Mobile Development
Parallel Computing
Track Descriptions:
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight are rapidly becoming the dominant UI technologies for Windows clients and Windows Phone devices. This track has sessions to get you up to speed on these technologies and help you transition from previous UI technologies. If you are already familiar with the technologies, we have sessions that’ll build your skills and help you reach the next level of productivity.
While individual technologies are important, project success is as much about the intangibles as the technology. This track focuses on the things we all know we need to do for success. These include building and maintaining healthy teams; supporting those teams by leveraging methodologies such as SCRUM and Kanban; and tools such as Visual Studio testing and Team Foundation Server (TFS). This track includes coverage of:
- Scrum
- Kanban
- Visual Studio Test Tools
- Visual Studio and TFS Integration
Everything rests on .NET, and .NET 4 has exciting new capabilities that apply to any type of .NET application. Of course your gateway to all .NET development is Visual Studio 2010, which enhances many existing Visual Studio features and adds others. Perhaps most exciting are the new features around debugging, architecture and application lifecycle management (ALM). We’ll give you the information you need to understand and leverage the power of .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010.
The Internet is shifting from a provider of HTML content to a provider of data and behavior through services. Microsoft’s Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) technology is the basis for building and consuming services on the Microsoft platform. With support for REST, SOAP and OData, along with more focused technologies such as WCF RIA Services, you can build services to meet nearly any requirement. This track covers the following technologies:
- Windows Communication Foundation
- WCF Data Services (a.k.a. Astoria)
- OData and RESTful programming
- WCF RIA Services
Many people believe the future of application development is in the cloud. Cloud computing offers flexible scalability and may provide a less expensive way to host many applications. Microsoft has introduced Azure as its platform for cloud computing, and has many other technologies that also work well in a cloud computing environment. Even if you aren’t ready for Azure today, you owe it to yourself to become familiar with cloud computing! This track includes coverage of the following:
- Windows Azure
- SQL Azure
- Azure DataMarket
The Microsoft platform is rich with data related technologies. This track focuses on some of the most important data related technologies. The information in these sessions will enable you to manage your data for Windows, Web and Cloud computing applications. This track covers the following technologies:
- ADO.NET Entity Framework
- LINQ and a universe of LINQ providers
- OData and WCF Data Services
- WCF RIA Services
The Web is undergoing a transitional shift as more parts of HTML 5 emerge in various browsers. At the same time, Microsoft’s embrace of jQuery as a tool for enabling rich behaviors and interactivity in the browser impacts how every ASP.NET developer thinks about building web applications, whether with Web Forms or MVC. This track covers:
- HTML 5 (including CSS 3)
- jQuery and JavaScript development
- ASP.NET Web Forms
- ASP.NET MVC 2 and MVC 3
Through the 1990’s Microsoft built its success by providing tools that enabled rapid software development. Redmond has renewed its focus on such tooling with Web tools and technologies like WebMatrix and Razor, and smart client technologies like LightSwitch. This track focuses on these development simplification tools, covering:
- WebMatrix
- Web Platform Installer (Web PI)
- ASP.NET Web Pages (a.k.a. Razor)
- Visual Studio LightSwitch
The rapid adoption of portable computing devices, both phones and pads/slates/tablets) is having an amazing impact on how people think about interacting with computers and applications. The portability, multi-touch, high-resolution screens, voice recognition and other features that are the hallmarks of these devices define a new way of thinking about application interface design. This track will familiarize you with technologies you can use to build applications for Windows Phone 7 (WP7), Android and iOS (iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch) devices.
The rise of multi-core and many-core computers, combined with the reality that single core speed has plateaued, means that your applications need to start leveraging multi-threading, concurrency and parallel computing to achieve increased performance, or to maintain performance as you add new features. This track is focused on the parallel and concurrent computing features available to you today with .NET 4, with a glimpse at the future capabilities Microsoft has planned for .NET.