Pre-Conference Sessions

Microsoft .NET Framework Da ta Access from A to Z

Microsoft® has recently introduced several industry-leading innovations to ADO.NET. These innovations include LINQ to SQL, LINQ to DataSet, and the ADO.NET Entity framework with LINQ to Entities. These technologies are complementary to the existing, familiar ways for accessing data with the ADO.NET foundation such as DataSets and ADO.NET Data Providers. During this A to Z session, Michael Pizzo and Jose Blakeley, architects in the data programmability team at Microsoft, will discuss the motivation and strengths of each technology. After Jose and Michael share their insights and compare and contrast the strengths and goals of these technologies, you will leave this session knowing which data access technology best fits your need; you will also get advice on how, when, and if you should migrate from existing technologies to these new ones.

About the presenter(s):

Michael Pizzo has worked for over 17 years in the design and delivery of data access solutions and APIs at Microsoft. Michael first got involved in data access as a Program Manager for Microsoft Excel in 1987, integrating Microsoft’s flagship spreadsheet product with relational data. This led to his involvement in the design and delivery of ODBC, along with the ODBC-based Microsoft Query Tool shipped with Microsoft Office. Following ODBC, Michael was a key designer and driver of Microsoft’s OLE DB API for componentized data access within a COM environment, and later owned the design and delivery of ADO.NET version 1.0. He is currently a Principal Architect in the Data Programmability Team at Microsoft, contributing to the architecture and design of the next version of ADO.NET and core building block for Microsoft’s exciting new Data Platform; The ADO.NET Entity Framework. A frequent presenter at Microsoft TechEd, PDC, and other Microsoft events, Michael has also contributed articles to the Microsoft Architectural Journal, CoDe Magazine, MSDN Magazine, and Redmond Developer News.

José Blakeley is lead architect in the SQL Server Engine working on server-side programmability, scale-out query processing, and object-relational technologies. He joined Microsoft in 1994 and since then has been an architect of several Microsoft’s data access technologies. José was the lead architect for the ADO.NET Entity Framework, which works with LINQ to raise the level of abstraction and simplify data programming. Before joining Microsoft, José was a member of the technical staff with Texas Instruments, where he developed the Open-OODB object database management system for DARPA. José received a Ph.D. a Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Advanced Windows Debugging

Few tasks are more challenging, time consuming or crucial than debugging. Learn how to master the art of Windows debugging using the Debugging Tools for Windows, the same tools used by developers at Microsoft. Business critical and often extremely time consuming bugs, such as heap corruptions and resource leaks, can easily be tracked down using tools available for free. This session provides you with the tools and information required to progress beyond simple code tracing and gives you the ability to use these tools at their full potential. Learn how to increase the reliability of your products, increase customer satisfaction and reduce the cost of bugs by integrating available tools into the development process.

About the presenter(s):

Mario Hewardt is the author of Advanced Windows Debugging and a Senior Development Lead with Microsoft. He has worked extensively in the Windows system level development arena as well as online services development. Prior projects include working in the Windows team (Windows 98 up to Windows Vista®) delivering management infrastructures such as WMI and WS-Management. Most recently, he helped ship the Asset Inventory Service which is an online asset management solution for enterprise customers. His current charter involves delivering reliable and highly scalable online services for System Center

Daniel Pravat is a Senior Design Engineer with Microsoft Corporation and has worked in the Windows division, primarily within the Windows Management Instrumentation infrastructure. Currently, he is working on the second version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Daniel joined Microsoft Corporation in 2000. Prior to joining Microsoft he developed telecommunication software for computer based telephony systems. Daniel Pravat is the co-author of "Advanced Windows Debugging” (published by Addison Wesley).

Agile Perspectives, Industry and Microsoft

Agile development is here! During this all-day agile session Mary Poppendieck, author of “Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit” will share profound insights that will optimize your agile processes. The session will focus on best practices and advice to avoid the most common pitfalls for teams practicing or moving towards agile. During the second half of the session, Grigori Melnik, Technical Program Manager in Microsoft Patterns & Practices team, will share the best practices his team has acquired over many, many agile projects. The session will close with a panel—including Mary, Grigori, and a few guest speakers—for you to ask your tough questions around agile development.

About the presenter(s):

Mary Poppendieck started her career as a process control programmer, moved on to manage the IT department of a manufacturing plant, and then ended up in product development, where she was both product manager and department manager. After Mary left the corporate world in 1998, she found herself managing a government software project where she first encountered the word "waterfall.” When Mary compared her experience in successful software and product development to the prevailing opinions about how to manage software projects, she decided the time had come for a new paradigm. She wrote the award-winning book "Lean Software Development” to explain how the lean principles from manufacturing offer a better approach to software development. Over the past six years, Mary has found retirement elusive as she lectures and teaches classes with her husband Tom. Based on their on-going learning, they wrote a second book, "Implementing Lean Software Development.” A popular writer and speaker, Mary continues to bring fresh perspectives to the world of software development.

Grigori Melnik is a Senior Product Planner in the patterns & practices group at Microsoft, leading the Process & Engineering focus area. Prior to that, Grigori was a researcher, software engineer, coach and educator with 15+ years of meaningful industrial and research experience. His areas of expertise include agile methods, empirical software engineering, software testing and test automation, and software economics. Prior industrial engagements include Microsoft Canada Money and SmallBiz portals, Pan-Canadian Online Learning Portal, and The Canadian Agile Network - Le Réseau Agile Canadien. Grigori is an agile enthusiast who has been involved with the agile community since 2000. He is a regular contributor and speaker to software engineering conferences and workshops around the world. Grigori is the Program Chair of the Agile 2008 conference and a member of the IEEE Software Advisory board.

Concurrent, Multi-core Programming on Windows and .NET

The leap from single-core to multi-core technology is altering computing as we know it, enabling increased productivity, powerful energy-efficient performance, and leading-edge advanced computing experiences. The good news is that Windows and .NET offer rich support for threading and synchronization to take advantage of these new platforms. This session, presented by David Callahan, Microsoft distinguished engineer, Joe Duffy, author of "Concurrent Programming on Windows” (Addison-Wesley), and Stephen Toub, program manager lead for the Concurrency Development Platform team at Microsoft, will cover a broad range of topics, including mechanisms to create, coordinate, and synchronize among threads; best practices for concurrent libraries and apps; and techniques for improving scalability, including lock-free algorithms. Focus will be on .NET programming, including the next generation of parallel programming support within the Framework, but Windows internals and C++ nuggets will be discussed too.

About the presenter(s):

David Callahan joined Microsoft in 2005. He is a Distinguished Engineer leading the Parallel Computing Platform Team within Visual Studio® focused on incubating technology for the coming manycore processors. This team is producing exciting new technologies as part of Visual Studio and also driving the Parallel Computing Initiative, a company wide effort to deliver customer value from the power of future high-performance processors. David’s background is in programming languages, parallel programming techniques, and compilation techniques focused on expressing and exploiting concurrency.

Stephen Toub is a Senior Program Manager Lead on the Parallel Computing Platform team at Microsoft, where he spends his days focusing on the next generation of programming models for concurrency. Stephen is also a Contributing Editor for MSDN® Magazine, for which he writes the .NET Matters column, and he’s an avid speaker at conferences like TechEd and DevConnections. Prior to working on the Parallel Computing Platform, Stephen designed and built enterprise applications for companies such as GE, McGraw-Hill, BankOne, and JetBlue. He was a developer for Microsoft Outlook as well as for the Microsoft Office Solution Accelerators. In his spare time, Stephen loves to sing, and he spends as much time as possible with his beautiful wife Tamara.

Joe Duffy leads development for Microsoft's Parallel Extensions to .NET technology, a set of library and runtime technologies for concurrent and parallel computing. He founded the project in 2006 with Parallel Language Integrated Query (aka PLINQ), an innovative declarative parallel query analysis and execution engine. Prior to Parallel Extensions, Joe worked on transactional memory, library and VM support for concurrency in the Common Language Runtime (CLR) team, and has written 3 functional language compilers (Scheme, Common LISP, and Haskell). He has written two books, including Concurrent Programming on Windows (Addison-Wesley, 2008), and in his spare time reads and writes (code and text), plays guitar, and studies music theory.

Creating Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight™

Silverlight is Microsoft’s solution for building rich Internet applications (RIAs) and presenting immersive media experiences on the web. Using Silverlight 2, developers can create web applications that run cross-platform .NET code within the browser. Silverlight integrates animation, a rich control set, high quality video with content protection, and Deep Zoom imaging into a cohesive, mark-up based presentation framework that is toolable for developers and designers. Silverlight frees web developers to do things they could not do with HTML. Sounds too good to be true? Don’t take our word for it! Join the fun as Jeff takes a deep dive into Silverlight and provides the knowledge and insight developers need to begin leveraging Silverlight today.

About the presenter(s):

Jeff Prosise is cofounder of Wintellect (www.wintellect.com), a developer consulting and education firm that provides services to companies all over the world. His most recent book, Programming Microsoft .NET, was published by Microsoft Press in 2002, and his writings appear regularly in MSDN Magazine and other trade magazines. A reformed engineer who discovered after college that there's more to life than computing loads on mounting brackets, today Jeff's professional life revolves around ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, and Silverlight. In his leisure time, Jeff is known to go out of his way to get wet in some of the world's best dive spots and to spend way too much time building and flying R/C aircraft.

Get More Out of Visual Studio Team System 2008

This preconference will focus both on implementing best practices and avoiding worst practices when working with Team Foundation Server and the suite of client tools. Throughout the day you will cover end-to-end life cycle management. Begin with guidance on defining your team project, source code control, and project classifications system, tips for customizing your process templates and using work items to drive your teams progress. From there you will learn effective techniques for getting your builds set up and running, using quality practices and tools including unit testing, web testing, test publication, profiling and load testing. We close by covering how to move forward once a major milestone is complete. This session assumes familiarity with Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Client Tools; each section of the session will provide practical guidance so that you are getting the most of VSTS and you leave prepared for changes coming in future releases of Team System. Click here for more information.

About the presenter(s):

Brian A. Randell is a senior consultant with MCW Technologies, LLC. For over 20 years, Brian has been building software solutions and educating his fellow developers. Brian spends his time teaching Microsoft technologies to developers, working with new and emerging technologies like Visual Studio Team System 2008, and consulting worldwide for Fortune 500 companies like Microsoft, state and local governments, and small businesses. Brian enjoys helping people get the most out of their software. He does this through training for Pluralsight, and speaking at events such as VSLive!, Tech•Ed, and the PDC. In addition, Brian shares through the written word. Brian currently writes the Team System column for MSDN Magazine. He is the author and lead instructor of Pluralsight’s Applied Team System and Applied Windows SharePoint Services courses. You can reach Brian via his blog at http://www.mcwtech.com/cs/blogs/brianr.

Performance by design using the .NET Framework

The.NET Framework offers developers a dizzying array of design choices for building applications, whether they are client or server-side applications. These choices can greatly impact the performance and scalability of your application. This session highlights best practices in application architecture, testing, tools, and techniques for building responsive and highly scalable applications using the .NET Framework. More than just practical advice, this session focuses on proven techniques for building high quality applications. You will also learn what measurement data is available from the CLR and the OS and will understand how to leverage this data to optimize your application’s performance.

About the presenter(s):

Mark Friedman is the Architect Lead on the Developer Division Performance Engineering team. He is the author of numerous articles on performance topics and two books on Windows performance, including the Performance Guide published as part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit in 2005. His background includes design and development of professional grade performance monitoring tools for both Windows and IBM mainframes. He received the A. A. Michelson lifetime achievement award from the Computer Measurement Group in 2005. He joined Microsoft in 2006.

Joe Hellerstein is an architect in the Developer Division Performance Engineering Team. Since joining Microsoft 1.5 years ago, he has been working on the .NET thread pool and garbage collection, especially as these areas relate to manycore. Joe has also developed various techniques and tools for reducing noise in performance testing. Prior to joining Microsoft, Joe was a senior manager at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY where he founded the Adaptive Systems Department and had a leadership role in the Research Division strategy for systems management. Joe has a Ph.D. in computer science from UCLA, and has published over 100 articles and two books. He has been an adjunct professor at Columbia University in New York and the University of Washington in Seattle.

Rico Mariani began his career at Microsoft in 1988, working on language products beginning with Microsoft® C version 6.0, and contributed there until the release of the Microsoft Visual C++® version 5.0 development system. In 1995, Rico became development manager for what was to become the "Sidewalk" project, which started his 7 years of platform work on various MSN technologies. In the summer of 2002, Rico returned to the Developer Division to as a Performance Architect on the CLR team. His performance work led to his most recent assignment as Chief Architect of Visual Studio. Rico's interests include compilers and language theory, databases, 3-D art, and good fiction.

Vance Morrison is the performance architect for the .NET runtime at Microsoft. He has been involved in the design of the .NET runtime since its inception. He drove the design for the .NET Intermediate Language (IL) and was lead for the just-in-time (JIT) compiler team for some years. He is currently working improving the cold startup performance of .NET applications. He is the author of numerous MSDN articles on .NET CLR internals and performance.

Windows Mobile® Development In-Depth

Mobile devices are a booming market with new devices coming out every day; each new device represents a new opportunity for Windows developers to take their skills to the mobile space. This full-day preconference will cover the entire lifecycle of a Windows Mobile application including defining an appropriate architecture, tools selection, developing, testing, and debugging. Specific tips on how to optimize your application for the small screens, lower CPU speeds, intermittent connectivity, and power management issues related to mobile development will be provided. The session will also include data centric topics such as SQL Server Compact, Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and data synchronization techniques. Come learn how to write cool applications for Windows Mobile devices in this intensive, example filled session for developers and architects.

About the presenter(s):

Jim Wilson is president of JW Hedgehog, Inc. (http://jwhh.com) a New Hampshire–based consulting firm specializing in Windows Mobile solutions, content creation, and mentoring. Jim has worked extensively with the .NET Framework and .NET Compact Framework since the beta release of each; he also has over 16 years relational database experience. Jim writes frequently for MSDN and has developed mobility curriculums for two of the industry’s leading technology training organizations, DevelopMentor and PluralSight. Jim is an MVP and speaks regularly at a variety of conferences including PDC, Tech Ed, and MEDC. Jim is online at http://pluralsight.com/blogs/jimw

Doug Boling is an author, trainer, and consultant specializing on Windows Mobile devices and the Windows Embedded CE operating system. He is the author of the highly acclaimed "Programming Microsoft Embedded Windows CE” from Microsoft Press. Doug has taught the developers of a number of the leading companies in the Windows Mobile and Windows CE market. When not teaching, he spends his time assisting companies developing their Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded CE products. Doug consults and teaches his classes through his company Boling Consulting Inc. (www.bolingconsulting.com) and can be reached at dboling@bolingconsulting.com

WomenBuild... inspiring career paths in technology

In this workshop, attendees will participate in an environment of rich, interactive experiences by modeling real-life business challenges and solutions with LEGO® Bricks as part of the LEGO® Serious Play Program (LSP). WomenBuild will open your minds to exciting and inspirational ideas on how to be a thought leader in the technical field. We will work together in small groups to brainstorm and problem solve in a collaborative and productive way. You will work with people in various responsibility areas in teams. This way each role can impart their own unique perspective to the group, while collectively creating shared understandings that direct future activity effectively.

The WomenBuild program incorporates a hands-on process that draws on the power of creative thinking to shift group conversation from talking heads to focused minds. Each team will be run as a facilitated conversation with physical Lego brick constructions that will powerfully shift a group to more productive outcomes by accomplishing a deeper mining of the diverse wisdom within the group and a clearer shared conclusion on inspirational career paths for women in the technical field.

Through this workshop, attendees will share real life experiences, discuss challenges, network & build on-going relationships with other women who are attending the conference. Ultimately, attendees of this workshop will find ways to unleash their creative thinking and transform ideas into concrete concepts.

Working with WCF – Demonstration and Perspectives

From its initial release with Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) offered much more than just the next generation platform for building connected systems. In many respects, WCF is the next development platform for Windows applications, providing system features that were previously hand-crafted on top of .NET and Windows. At its core, the WCF programming model is simple and straightforward, requiring very little work on behalf of the developer. This day-long immersion in WCF starts by briefly describing the essential WCF programming concepts, and discussing the WCF interception-based architecture and its affect on the programming model, both for clients and services. The session then proceeds to share the power and productivity of WCF, demonstrating its key features, the rationale behind them and the best ways of employing them. You will see the well established aspects of data contract tolerance, instance management, transaction propagation, automatic synchronization, queued calls, security, as well as the emerging aspects ofREST/POX web programming and the integration with Workflow Foundation. Don’t miss on this unique opportunity to understand SOA and WCF, learning from Juval Lowy and Ron Jacobs, who offer a profound insight on the methodology, the technology and its application.

About the presenter(s): Juval Lowy is a software architect and the principal of IDesign (www.idesign.net), specializing in .NET 3.0 architecture consulting and advanced .NET 3.0 training. Juval is Microsoft’s Regional Director for the Silicon Valley, working with Microsoft on helping the industry adopt .NET 3.0. His latest book is Programming WCF Services (O'Reilly 2007). Juval participates in the Microsoft internal design reviews for future versions of .NET and related technologies. Juval published numerous articles, regarding almost every aspect of .NET development, and is a frequent presenter at development conferences. Microsoft recognized Juval as a Software Legend as one of the world's top .NET experts and industry leaders.

Ron Jacobs is a Sr. Technical Evangelist in the Microsoft Platform Evangelism group based at the company headquarters in Redmond Washington. Ron's evangelism is focused on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Since 1999 Ron has been a product and program manager on various Microsoft products including the .Net Framework, Windows Communication Foundation and COM+. A top-rated conference speaker, author and podcaster, Ron brings over 20 years of industry experience to his role of helping Microsoft customers and partners to build architecturally sound and secure applications

WPF Code and Concepts

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a revolutionary client programming framework where media (video, audio, images), controls, documents, and graphics (2D and 3D) converge to let you develop immersive Windows applications using a powerful markup language (XAML). This session will go deep into WPF and explain the infrastructure and services that WPF introduces. Begin with a solid foundation in dependency properties. Advance to the retained-mode graphics system and visuals. Explore the layout model, routed input events, and data binding. Discover control customization with styling and templates. Finish the day with an array of powerful graphics facilities, including animation and 3D. After attending this code-heavy, few-slides session you will have all the great insights needed to develop responsive and dynamic WPF applications that are easy to build and maintain.

About the presenter(s):

Charles Petzold has been programming for Microsoft Windows since 1985 and writing about it nearly as long. His first book, Programming Windows -- originally published by Microsoft Press in 1988 and now in its fifth edition -- taught a generation of programmers about the Win16 and Win32 APIs. Petzold's most recent books are 3D Programming for Windows (Microsoft Press, 2007) and The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine (Wiley, 2008). His web site is www.charlespetzold.com.