Isn't it about time we lost the keyboard and mouse combo and embraced technology such as Surface and Multi-touch devices to create business process models ?

Companies need infrastructure to integrate services for internal enterprise systems, services running at business partners, and systems accessible on the public Internet. In other words, companies need the strengths of an ESB approach, but they need a simple and easy path to adoption and to scale up, along with full support for Internet-based protocols. These are the core problems that .NET Services address, specifically through the .NET Service Bus and the .NET Access Control Service. 

SQL is not always the best way to store your data. It is great for many situations, but sometimes there are alternatives that can drastically simplify and speed up your systems and development.

Enterprise RIA development can be difficult. There are too many moving pieces to manually stitch together between the client and the server. There are too many things that are un-natural, yet the norm, starting with the forced n-tier (many developers are used to writing 2-tier apps), async (when sync is the norm), dealing with latency (doing so incorrectly has the potential to break end-user experience), figuring out how to be less chatty, dealing with validation, conflicts, disconnected or occasionally connected scenarios, performing authentication and sharing user state across client and server, the list goes on and on... Microsoft .NET RIA Services provides a framework, tools, and services that change RIA development from hard to RAD. In this session I'll introduce .NET RIA Services' key aspects and core features. We'll look at how the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms are brought together to provide a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes, and custom operations. We'll also look at the end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier.

Your Windows 7 application can be aware of it surroundings through the use of the Windows 7 Sensor and Location Platform. Being aware is the first step to having a truly contextual application that adapts to its surroundings and helps your users be more productive with less effort. The platform allows you to add this location based service and sensor technology with a few lines of code allowing you to focus on what makes sense in the context for the user. Should you change your color scheme if it's dark out? What's different in your application if your user is at work verses at home? In this session we take a look at the Sensor API’s and build an example application using a Flexis JM Badge Board and show how you can light up your applications in new ways.

This presentation will demonstrate a complete two week scrum iteration from the planning meeting to development, testing, and bug fixing to deployment utilizing the features found in Team System 2010. New features include gated check-ins for Continuous Integration (CI), Test-Driven Development (TDD), Product Backlog enhancements including hierarchical views and support for multiple teams to work from a single backlog. The presentation also demonstrates the enhancements to the TFS Portal and Web Access to support Agile planning and displaying graphs such as burn-down charts. Each walk through includes a live demonstration of the feature in Visual Studio Team System 2010.

(All Audiences) Everyone can tell a good UI from a bad one, but could you design a good UI from scratch…one that doesn’t require users to open the help manual? In this session we will cover some guidelines for creating an intuitive UI, by putting the theory into practice. We will leave colors, fonts, graphics, and effects for a different talk. Rather we discuss mental models, consistency, affordance, feedback, and more. You will walk away with a set of criteria that will help you evaluate your organization’s applications and web sites in order to increase user productivity.

The flexibility ASP.NET MVC framework makes it very easy for web developers to swap components (in-house, 3rd party or open source) in and out from their applications. In this session we will assemble different open source tools such as NHibernate, MvcContrib, Windsor Container to create a simple blog engine with minimal effort. If you’re currently using any of these open source tools within your Web Form applications or you’re wondering how fully leverage the separation of concerns MVC offers, then you should definitely check out this session.

In this session we'll cover tools (e.g. PostSharp), techniques (e.g. AOP) and frameworks (e.g. CCI) that do advanced manipulation of your code so you end up writing less in the long run.

In the past 2 years developer platforms have evolved very fast making it easy to create applications with a rich user interface used by million of users, leveraging their friends, profile and location information, and accessible from their mobile device. There has never been a better time to be a developer!

The next version of Windows Workflow Foundation comes with an enhanced base library of activities. Learn how to extend the framework by creating your own custom activities. See how to compose those basic activities into more coarse-grained activities and how to build your own control flow activities to extend beyond, sequence or flowchart. You will also learn how to customize the design experience of your activities using the new designer framework and how easy it is to rehost the designer in your own application.

Data objects follow the structure of your business data, right? What more is there to creating them? Lots! Many display and editing tools require that we've followed the various interfaces laid-out in the Sytem.ComponentModel namespace in order to take advantage of "free" functionality like sorting and roll-back editing. In fact, most of the "magic" that WPF data binding provides us require that we know a bit about the way .NET intended us to make objects. If you build data objects, and would like to learn how to maximize the "free" features of things like DataGrids or the WPF toolset, join me for 30 minute pragmatic adventure into the best practices of creating data objects in .NET! In 30 minutes, you will walk out a better .NET developer.

Silverlight 3 introduces a new navigation framework that you can use to partition your views into separate XAML files and navigate to each view as simple as you would previously with a web page. The navigation framework also integrates with the browsers' history journal to provide back/forward capabilities. By enabling this framework you can implement deep linking support in your Silverlight application easily. This will help also with enabling certain SEO enhancements for your Silverlight application. In this session we'll look at how to build navigation applications and what we can do to ensure a consistent user experience within our applications for both in and out of browser scenarios.

(All Audiences) Do your customers or coworkers respond well to lost code or deliverables? I can already hear your answer. In this lightning round talk we will cover some best practices for source control branching as it relates to developing and releasing software or deliverables. Scenarios include multiple development teams working on the same project, releasing hot fixes or service packs to production or customers, and branches to support continuous integration. This session will have take-aways for all roles of the organization.

In large organizations, it's common for an application to start out as small and "temporary" to morph into some large behemoth that is critical to a business function. As code is tacked on to this application it becomes harder and harder to maintain and troubleshoot. Enter Prism, the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight. Using Prism gives you the guidance and foundation assemblies that will produce a functionally modular application that is testable, maintainable and evolvable. This talk will give an overview of Prism, benefits of it's use, and when it makes sense to use it.

Life used to be so simple in the Java world. The only real decisions you had to make was which dozen frameworks to use in your project. Now, dynamic languages have invaded Java land, and you now have lots of choices. But, to the casual observer, JRuby and Groovy look like pretty much the same thing, with slightly different syntax. Nothing could be further from the truth. While they both share lots of commonalities, they are also quite different. This session delves into those differences, providing the attendees with enough concrete facts to make decisions. This session covers differences between type systems, extending the core JDK, closures, and properties. This session also covers meta-programming differences, where the languages diverge the most, including open classes, code synthesis, mixins, interfaces, intercepting method missing calls, shadow meta-classes, and lots more. Code is the focus of this talk, with tons of examples. Attendees leaving this talk will have a clear picture of the real differences of these new kids on the Java block.

Communicating with the web from an iPhone application is a core component to many fantastic apps on the App Store store. Since there is no official framework "web service" framework in the iPhone SDK, there is are a bunch of loosely mentioned methods to accomplish the task. I'll demonstrate a few best of the breed techniques; including rolling your own framework and using a few popular open source alternatives.

Data. It is something we all deal with in our applications. And, it doesn't always come in simple, trivial formats that work well with the stock controls. The WPF framework bring numerous new concepts to developers the enable us to create elaborate user controls that can bring a superior user experience to our business applications. In this code-centric presentation we will learn how the new concepts in WPF can be used to tailor your user experience to the complexities of your environment's data.

The mobile landscape has seen a tremendous growth in the Smartphone market share. This has created a huge demand for applications running on Smartphone platforms like Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm WebOS. Each of these platforms are very different in the technology stack and development tools. There are quite a few challenges for the application developer to understand these platforms and build applications that will port easily. We will discuss the challenges and strategies as well as tools to ease the pain for the developers.

Designing applications for SharePoint 2007 can be tricky at first glance. This session will help lay out a plan on how to setup the development environment for a team or single developer when starting a SharePoint project. We will focus on best practices for creating the dev environment with Virtual PC differencing disks. We will also go over both the tools Microsoft offers as well as many different community-driven tools that we use on our dev projects! Join us for a lively, entertaining and highly interactive session.

So your server is having issues? With memory? Connections? Limited response? Is the first solution to bounce the server? Perhaps change some VM flags or add some logging? In today's Java 6 technology world, with its superior runtime monitoring and management capabilities, the reasons to bounce the server have been greatly reduced. With proper Java Management Extensions instrumentation, the need to bounce the server may be eliminated for all but the rarest of cases. This session, for all Java technology developers and administrators, looks at the Java 6 platform's monitoring and management capabilities, which include the ability to make VM argument changes on the fly. In addition to what is provided in the JDK software, it demonstrates several management tools that are available at no cost. The session dives deeply into: jconsole - for memory monitoring, heap dumping, and thread analysis, JMV tools - jmap, jhat, jinfo, jstack, and BTrace - the open-source option for on-the-fly monitoring of the JVM machine.

The term "rich" has numerous definitions and is highly subjective when the topic is user interface design. In this presentation we'll take a look back through time to reflect on the history of user experience, explore how web developers currently define "rich", and postulate about how users might interact with rich experiences in the near future. Along the way we’ll get a visual demonstration of why experience matters, and take a closer look at its impact on business competition.

Historically, major advances in computing have taken place via disruptive technologies. The move from mainframe to client/server. The move from client/server to the Web. The move from the Web to mobile. Is mobile development an evolution of the Web or a disruptive change? This presentation will begin with an exploration of the mobile and device landscape. From there we’ll take a look at some of the many development options that are available including Android, iPhone, and Flash. Along the way get a brief exploration of the market numbers, and what that means to you in terms of monetization. We will close with a brief discussion of what constitutes a disruptive technology and apply what we have just learned to formulate a cursory answer.

The development process for the iPhone SDK is an ever learning process to an even seasoned Apple developer. After building many applications and frameworks, I am always refining my workflow for designing, building, prototyping and testing iPhone apps. In this session you'll learn ways to enhance your development workflow from someone who has been working on these practices day in and day out. Some topics covered: Improve your productivity in XCode and Interface Builder, Design isn't just graphics, prototyping, performance Tuning, debugging and working with data models.

Evolutionary programming and computation have been used in the past to produce amazing and unexpected designs, yet a lot people don't know how powerful these concepts are. This session will describe these principles and show how you can use them as you develop .NET code.

There are a number of useful capabilities lurking under the hood of the Adobe Flash Player. This session will expose many of these capabilities while taking a look at the core ActionScript 3.0 language. We’ll explore XML/Socket integration, Flash-to-JavaScript communication, webcam access, storing/accessing data on a local machine, bitmap and byte array manipulation, and more. If you are new to ActionScript 3.0, this session is a great way to familiarize yourself with ActionScript syntax, programming techniques (OOP), and useful tips and tricks. If you are already familiar with ActionScript but are looking for some new ways to extend the Flash Player, then this session is perfect for you too.

A little research will show that there are numerous patents for unification of devices. The reality is however is that we’re now interacting with more devices than ever before. From your Wii game console, to your phone, to your television, to the desktop and browser. But how do you adapt your shiny new RIA to work best for the target device and it’s potential limitations? In this session you’ll get an introduction to the architecture changes in the upcoming Flex 4, with an emphasis on adaptability and skinning for multiple device deployment using the same code and infrastructure.

Rich Internet applications have become a new medium for designers to express interesting ideas and to explore new concepts in user interaction. But how do we take these concepts and deliver solid and reusable code that will perform in a real application? This session will explore creating reusable components in Adobe Flex that balance elaborate design and superb functionality.

JQuery aims to redefine the way we write JavaScript, and now with support built into Microsoft Visual Studio, you can more easily write client-side scripts than ever before. In this session, you will learn the basics of jQuery starting with downloading & installing jQuery. We’ll then move onto topics such as unobtrusive JavaScript, using jQuery wrapped sets and selectors, creating animations, and common scripting tasks.

Lightning Round: Getting Started with Behavior Driven Development Behavior Driven Development has been getting a lot of press lately in the community. We'll look at why you should care, how it's different from, and the same as TDD. We'll even look at some code and some tools that will help get you started with BDD.

Open format: Questions answered, demos performed, and straight talk Q&A.

We are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of hacking... We will discuss the philosophy of hackers, with a look into a number of the tools they might use. We'll look at example attacks which include: Client-side exploits, Sql-Injections, Cross Site Scripting (XSS), Man-in-the-middle attacks.

Thinking about giving your first, tenth or 100th talk at your user group, HDC or other venues? You have taken the first step. Now learn what NOT to do next! In this informal talk, I will discuss the seven deadly sins I have seen presenters make over the years and how you can avoid making them yourself.

They say that hindsight is 20:20, but what does that matter if we’re still wearing blinders? It might not be you, but we have to open our eyes and figure out how do we keep history from repeating itself? In this session we step away from the keyboard and take an insider’s look at what kills a project and what you can do to recognize the symptoms before it’s too late.

With the continually decreasing cost of hardware, and the trend towards open source, it is now easier to get started with electronics than ever before. The next obvious step is to connect your electronics project to the Flash Platform – but how? In this session get an overview of two prototyping platforms (Phidgets and Arduino) and instruction on how to leverage them from Adobe AIR and Flash. We’ll explore various components and sensors along the way, ranging from photocells and servos, to weather stations and RFID.

With over 65,000 applications on the app store and over a billion downloads, it seems like everyone is writing apps for the iPhone. If you are new to iPhone/Objective-c development, where do you start? What is "retain" and "release"? What's with the square brackets? You will learn how to create a basic iPhone application that will answer these questions and more. I will show you some hidden gotchas and gems to make your development experience fun and productive.

TBD

A common problem in the industry today is the implementation of an application that is connected to a physical network only part of the time. Think of a service truck out on calls, a real estate agent gathering home preferences from a client, or a conference registration application at a hall without wi-fi. It's still important for these applications to be able to pull down enough data to function, as well as have the ability to synchronize with a main data store when a network connection is re-established. This talk will introduce the Microsoft Sync framework that provides the developer tools to implement a sometimes-connected client application.

Web 2.0 is here to stay. jQuery is a javascript library that abstracts away all of the gory details of working with Javascript for web applicatons. This session will demonstrate how to added Jquery to your ASP.NET applications today. This session will focus on proper uses of Jquery including how to organize your javascript code, how to use selectors in Jquery. How to manipulate your web content dynamically. Along with uses of the standard Jquery library time will also be spent exploring some of the most useful Jquery plugs ins.

Do you need to get a web site setup quickly? Why code all the pages yourself when you can use the ASP.NET Dynamic Data to build the initial pages based on your data schema? This new feature creates the .aspx pages for you based on your data. The pages can be used directly, or you can customize the pages to add your own look and feel. Don't start with nothing when you need to create a new site, take advantage of the ASP.NET Dynamic Data support to have a functional site very quickly and simply customize it to get a great site!

Social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, BrightKite, Facebook & Twitter are growing at an incredible rate. In this Lightning Talk, I'll give a brief overview of the Twitter API and demo building a Twitter client app using VB .NET & WPF.

Want to see how to complete the wiring, hook up the plumbing and make it all work? In this fast paced session we dive in and show you how you can leverage new technologies to create compelling user experience quickly by combining the data access technologies with the presentation layer.

This session will introduce the underlying language concepts of Language INtegrated Query including lambda expressions and extension methods and progress up through LINQ to objects, SQL and XML to show how these core principles support each of these layers.

Sometimes you just need to knock out a quick web service.  This session will discuss how you can use Sinatra (a ruby web framework that is *GASP* not rails!),  to quickly do that.  Sinatra brings with it an amazingly intuitive API to build light, RESTful web services.  We will explore this API by creating a small but functional web application.  Session will also touch on DSLs, REST, and Ruby along the way.

We talk about the SOLID Object Oriented Programming principles, we memorize the acronym, we even memorize the meanings of each of the principles; but how many of us can spot a violation of one of the SOLID principles? Of those, how many know how to easily refactor the offending code so that it adheres to the principles? That's what we're going to talk about. We'll review the principles, what they mean and why they're important. Then we'll look at offending code and refactor it to make it more SOLID.

It seems we are constantly bombarded with websites and ad campaigns hyping the latest augmented reality ‘experience’. In this lightening round session, we’ll learn how these AR applications work, which ones are just part of a passing fad and which have the potential to drastically change the way we interact with the physical world. Get a behind-the-scenes look at how an augmented reality application is created at cutting edge technology shop Phenomblue, discover how you can use your current programming knowledge to create AR applications, and get inspired to invent the next generation of rich interactive software.

The newly introduced ASP.NET MVC framework offers many of extensibility points for web developer that wants to get more out of their web application. In this session, we will explore and create extensibility points such as action filters, model binders, and controller/view factories, and see how they are consumed within the new request pipeline.

“You work with computers right?  Can you make me a website?” It’ll only take a couple of hours, right? It’s easy, but not that easy. Security, permissions, admin, maintenance, content… the list of perpetual headaches goes on.  Learn how to leverage some of Google’s free tools to quickly build a site with great functionality.  Hand a working site over to your “friends” and let them take it over.  Help others efficiently.

This session will provide an overview of the entire Peer to Peer stack that can be found in the Windows platform. It will cover the capabilities of peer name resolution, graphing, grouping, collaboration, and distributed routing tables. Both managed and unmanaged APIs will be discussed (along with p/invoke interop) in addition to the conceptual layout of Windows peer to peer capabilities.

Explore the world of Peer-to-Peer programming. In this session, attendees will be introduced to the powerful peer-to-peer infrastructure that is present in the Windows platform. Starting with an overview of peer-to-peer networks including graphing, grouping, and secure nodes, the talk will move into examples of building peer-to-peer applications. It will include demonstrations on how to use the PeerChannel infrastructure in WCF to build an app, along with how to tap into the power of the full P2P stack.

Project Tuva brings the lectures of reknowned physicist Richard Feynman to a new generation with interactive, annotated, enhanced, and streaming video delivered through Silverlight. This lightning round session will cover Stimulant's experience in working with Microsoft Research in building Project Tuva, covering topics such as fully liquid layouts, time-synchronized annotations and captions, Smooth Streaming technology, and general; best practices around building Silverlight rich internet applications.

Occasionally our clients and employers surprise us with a request for an application comprised of legacy services and leftovers from former employees. And it's your job to make it real. How does one find the pieces? Assemble the beast? Make it live!? We will explore using Adobe Flex to build an application using data from several different server-side technologies, integrating and assembling them easily (and keeping you safe from the villagers' pitchforks).

One of the most overlooked features in many languages is the support for regular expressions. There are many times where they are the perfect solution, yet many if not most programmers fear them. Well, fear not, we will review the basics of regular expressions and where they can be utilized effectively. If you ever knew that regular expressions were the right solution but cowered away, come and face your fears...

The era of the big, heavy, transactionally-oriented client/server topology, as best described by the J2EE Specification and Blueprints document, seems to be over. The era of the lightweight, transactionally-oriented client/server topology seems to be at its zenith. Is this really where we want to be when building enterprise systems? And how did we end up here, anyway? What's the new "enterprise" developer supposed to do?

In this talk we will example how scripting can be used to leverage atypical data sources with SSIS Data Flows. We will look at how to write a script and library for reading metadata from media files as well as creating custom XML data destinations.

This session will focus on using Silverlight to solve a multiple interesting problems using the Sliverlight Plugin, Jquery, JSON and some interesting Javascript programming. This session will be entiirely code focused and will provide you with insights of non visual uses of Silverlight.

Blacksmiths in 1900 and PowerBuilder developers in 1996 have something in common: they thought their job was safe forever. Yet circumstances proved them wrong. One of the nagging concerns for developers is how do you predict the Next Big Thing, preferably before you find yourself dinosaurized. This keynote discusses why people are bad at predicting the future, and why picking the Next Big Thing is hard. Then, it foolishly does just that: tries to predict the future. I also provide some guidelines on how to polish your crystal ball, giving you tools to help ferret out upcoming trends. Don't get caught by the rising tide of the next major coolness: nothing's sadder than an unemployed farrier watching cars drive by.

In this session the audience will be introduced to the Spark view engine. The Spark view engine is an alternative view engine for the ASP.NET MVC and MonoRail frameworks. The idea of Spark is to allow html to dominate your workflow. We will delve into creating an ASP.NET MVC app with Spark; cover some syntax and features of Spark such as partials and layouts. To actively participate in this session an understanding of ASP.NET MVC is advised.

SugarCRM is one of the more popular web-based customer relationship management solutions out there. In addition to being web-based, mysql backed, and php driven, it's also open source. Find out how you can leverage and customize this tool to give the business side of your company the information they need to switch from being reactive to being proactive.

Mocks streamline development by mocking out dependencies inside of our code. Mocks not only allow us to test an objects state but they also allow us to test our object interactions very easily. In this session learn how to start to use mocks in your day to day development. We will cover mock usage in Rhino Mocks as well as some in TypeMock Isolator.  

ECMAScript, better known by its original name, Javascript, remains one of the most popular--and misunderstood--programming languages in use today. While most developers see Javascript as a crippled form of its namesake (Java), it turns out that ECMAScript represents a powerful dynamically-typed language, easily equal to the other popular dynamic languages of the day (Python or Ruby). In this presentation, we'll take a fresh look at the ECMAScript language, examine its basic structure and syntax, and look at how it manages objects internally. Then, with the basics out of the way, we'll start to examine the more interesting parts of the language, and wrap up with some discussion of how ECMAScript can be integrated into more than just a web browser to provide extension capabilities.

With the advent of multi-touch, multi-user, and gestural input methods, the era of the NUI - the natural user interface - is upon us. This promises both revelations and frustrations for designers and developers alike. How does one create appropriate NUI experiences without just porting a GUI application to, say, Microsoft Surface? How are NUIs best designed, prototyped, and deployed? What makes them not just different, but better than, the GUI...and in what contexts are they inferior? How do designers and developers work together on such projects? Nathan Moody, Design Director of Stimulant, talks about what his team has learned about building multi-touch-enabled wall, tabletop (Microsoft Surface), and mobile user experiences, and how you can do the same...with slightly less pain.

Usability and professional-looking design can be the difference maker between a wildly successful application and a complete flop. In this session, you'll learn the most important things you should always keep in mind when developing interfaces for everything from web software to mobile applications. As a developer, many of the decisions you make on a day-to-day basis are inexorably linked to the user interface of your application. Your users will thank you for keeping these tips top-of-mind.

What better way to embrace the social medium than to create a BPM Twitter network that allows semantic short burst feeds into workflow engines for immediate fine tuning.

Get a first look at the upcoming VS 2010 Beta2 release, and walkthrough some of the significant improvements being made around code-focused development.

Not sure which user interface model to use for that next killer application? Need to compare see what the differences are and check out the pitfalls? This session will demonstrate key concepts and features behind the two primary user interface technologies available for ASP.NET – MVC and Web Forms.

I have been really impressed with Windows 7 since the early internal builds I was allowed to use. I am still constantly amazed how a new version of a product (of any product from any company) can have more features, have a larger kernel, support more hardware, and be faster, lighter, and easier to use. I don’t think that has every happened before. I decided, just for fun, that I wanted to learn why this is the case. Did we remove some long forgotten sleep loop in the kernel? Or did we just delete all of the verbose comments and validation checks?

A new platform is emerging, one that promises to reduce costs and speed-up time to market by allowing you to build on shared infrastructure widely accessible through open Web protocols. This platform is commonly referred to as "the cloud" today. In this introductory session, we’ll explore the new paradigm of cloud computing and show you how to get started today with Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform.