Full-Day Workshops

Build Object-Oriented Apps with .NET 2.0
Rocky Lhotka, Magenic Technologies
Sunday, October 9, 9 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Get an in-depth look at the concepts and techniques from Lhotka's Expert VB.NET and C# Business Objects books on distributed business object programming. You'll learn how to design Windows and Web-based applications based on distributed business objects, achieving high levels of reuse, scalability, long-term maintainability, and other benefits. You will also learn how Web Services, remoting, object serialization, Enterprise Services, no-touch deployment, and other .NET technologies come together to create these applications.

Rocky Lhotka is the author of Expert One-on-One Visual Basic .NET Business Objects from Apress. He is a contributing author for Visual Studio Magazine and he speaks at major conferences around the world. Rockford is the Principal Technology Evangelist for Magenic Technologies, one of the nation's premiere Microsoft Gold Certified Partners.

.NET to the Core: Designing and Implementing High-Performance ASP.NET Solutions
Russ Nemhauser, Nemhauser Media
Sunday, October 9, 9 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Cut to the core of proper design techniques, caching, and stress testing to create reliable, scalable, high-performance Web sites. We'll start by investigating application design considerations and alternatives, such as XML Web Services vs. DataSets, or two-tier vs. n-tier architecture. With our findings in mind, you'll look at some basic and advanced caching techniques in ASP.NET (both v.1.x and v.2.0), including per-request, database cache invalidation, and custom cache dependencies. Additionally, with the aid of Microsoft Web Application Center Test, Microsoft Web Application Stress Tool, and the new testing functionality offered in Visual Studio Team System, you'll be able to measure the improvement in performance and calculate the potential savings in hardware. If you develop Web applications, you need to be here.

Russ Nemhauser is a Microsoft ASP.NET MVP and a Microsoft Certified Professional, and has served as an Architect, Developer, Team Leader, and Project Manager over the past several years. His recent projects include enterprise applications, online commerce sites, and corporate intranets for Wall Street, Universal Studios, Microsoft, Seagram, and others. Russ speaks at several industry conferences each year write for several magazines and online software community sites.

Introduction to ASP.NET 2.0
Fritz Onion, Pluralsight
Sunday, October 9, 9 a.m. - 6 p.m.
With more than 40 new server-side controls and many new pieces of Web infrastructure, ASP.NET 2.0 brings more new features than any Web development technology in recent memory. We'll offer an introduction to the new features of ASP.NET 2.0. Leave with a solid understanding of the new features in 2.0 and the preparation to make the right design and implementation choices when the switch to 2.0 is made.

Fritz Onion is a founding partner of Pluralsight, a think-tank organization delivering in-depth technical content and training, where he focuses on Web development with ASP.NET. He is the author of the book Essential ASP.NET (Addison Wesley), and is currently working on a second edition that will cover ASP.NET 2.0. He frequently publishes articles on .NET in journals such as MSDN Magazine, DOTNETPRO, MSDN Online, and InformIT. He is also a regular speaker at industry conferences and is the track chair for ASP.NET at Win-Dev in Boston.

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Advanced Windows Forms
Billy Hollis, DotNetMasters
Thursday, October 13, 9 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Ready to move beyond the basics of forms-based applications? Learn advanced techniques with real-world examples in this Black Belt session on Windows Forms. You'll discover capabilities you never knew existed, learn to use advanced OO capabilities in Windows Forms, find out how to build large, complex Windows Forms applications, and get an advanced look at the changes in Windows Forms 2.0 for Visual Studio 2005. The workshop will include several production-ready components and examples for you to use in your own projects.

Billy Hollis is an author and software developer from Nashville, Tennessee. Billy is co-author of the first book ever published on Visual Basic .NET, VB .NET Programming on the Public Beta. He has written many articles, and is a frequent speaker at conferences. He is the Regional Director of Developer Relations in Nashville for Microsoft, and runs a consulting company focusing on Microsoft .NET.

Hands-On Whidbey: C# 2.0 Generics, Iterators, and Framework 2.0 Features
Richard Hale Shaw, Richard Hale Shaw Group
Thursday, October 13, 9 a.m. - 6 p.m.
C# 2.0 is coming out in November: are you ready for it? Come to this tutorial and we’ll spend a day digging into the how-to’s and internals of Generics, Iterators, Nullable Types and other new features of .NET Framework 2.0, all while using VS ‘05 to build live code examples (which you’ll get a copy of afterwards). We’ll start with generics: a way to build parameterized types and methods like C++ templates; you’ll learn how generics work, how you can use them, the kind of IL and MetaData they generate, how the type class has been extended to detect and consume them at runtime, and more. Next, we’ll investigate Iterators: a means of creating powerful customized IEnumerator implementations without having to write an entire class (hint: the compiler generates the class for you). After that, we’ll work with Nullable Types: types that can be null, using a Generic wrapper which contains an instance of the actual type. We’ll follow this with a review of other C# 2.0 features, such as anonymous methods, delegate inference, and partial types, followed by static classes, global namespaces, and reference aliases. By the time we're through, you'll be ready to start adding C# 2.0 features to existing applications compiled with the current beta, to be ready when Framework 2.0 comes out later this year.

Pre-requisites: you must already have 1 year of C# development experience (no hand-holding if you don't); while not required, you may find it useful to bring a laptop with VS2005 Beta 2 or later pre-installed.

Richard Hale Shaw is the founder of the Richard Hale Shaw Group, which has consulted and trained software developers since 1993. He's created and chaired numerous technical conferences, including C# Live!, part of the VSLive! conference series. An articulate writer and speaker on topics dear to the hearts of software developers and an outspoken critic of broken devtools, Richard specializes in consulting and training on .NET programming in C# and COM/+ programming in C++.

Increase Your Predictability of Success with Team System
Brian Randell, MCW Technologies
Thursday, October 13, 9 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Creating good software solutions is hard. From design, to code cutting, testing, deployment and project management, a software project's success requires effective team communication and tools the help, not hinder your process. In this workshop, you'll learn how Visual Studio Team System can help you increase the predictability of success of your software projects. In this workshop you'll quickly learn what Team System is all about — what you need to run it and what's included "in-the-box". Moving forward, you'll dive deep and learn how to use the various components — SOA designers, Unit Testing, Work Item Tracking, enterprise source code control and Office integration--to build a software solution. You'll also learn about security, process methodology templates, reporting and very important to most shops — how to customize Team System to work the way you work. At the end of the workshop, you'll be ready to start your own projects with Team System.

ADO.NET 2.0 Coding and Best Practices for SQL Server 2005
Bill Vaughn, Beta V Corp
Thursday, October 13, 9 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005 along with the 2.0 version of the .NET Framework has introduced a number of new solutions and features for .NET data access developers. This workshop addresses what’s new and what’s changed along with what’s been removed from the Visual Studio IDE (and how to put it back). It shows how to best use all of the new features to solve everyday application problems and some not-so-ordinary. Included are discussions of connection and connection pool management, asynchronous operations (with and without ADO.NET 2.0’s help), data binding, Windows Forms, ASP.NET and XML Web Services data access guidelines, importing and exporting data as well as a wealth of tips that will help your and your application’s productivity and performance. It also covers how to work with the new SQL Server Express Edition and T-SQL debugging. . If you’ve been working with ADO.NET for a while, this talk will bring you up to speed quickly on the new 2.0 features.