Building a Customer-Focused Visual Studio
Prashant Sridharan, Senior Product Manager for Visual Studio, Microsoft
Wednesday, June 29 — 9 a.m.
Visual Studio 2005 is the most customer-focused developer tools release from Microsoft. Come learn about all the new features in the product, from language enhancements, improved designers, and smart client development tools to Visual Studio Team System, a suite of software lifecycle management tools poised to transform how you deliver software.

Prashant Sridharan is the Senior Product Manager for Visual Studio. He is responsible for product planning for future versions of Visual Studio and driving the creation of development tools for enterprise customers. In previous roles at Microsoft he was the Product Manager for Visual J++ 1.1, Visual J++ 6.0, Windows CE Tools, Microsoft TV, and Visual C#. Prior to Microsoft, he was a software engineer at Sun Microsystems in Mountain View, CA and the MITRE Corp. in Washington, DC.

Introducing Indigo — The Unified Programming Model for Building Service-Oriented Applications
Ari Bixhorn, Lead Project Manager, Microsoft
Thursday, June 30 — 9 a.m.
Indigo is Microsoft’s unified programming model for building service-oriented applications. It enables developers to build secure, reliable, transacted solutions that integrate across platforms and interoperate with existing investments. Indigo combines and extends the capabilities of existing distributed systems technologies, including Enterprise Services, System.Messaging, .NET Remoting, ASMX, and WSE to deliver a unified development experience spanning distance, topologies, hosting models, protocols, and security models. Get an overview of Indigo and learn how it will radically simplify the development of distributed applications.

Ari Bixhorn is a Lead Product Manager for Web Services Strategy in the Developer and Platform Evangelism division at Microsoft. In this role, Ari is responsible for product planning and technical evangelism for Microsoft’s Web services product offerings. Prior to joining Microsoft, Ari worked at British Telecom developing and supporting business-to-business electronic commerce solutions.