Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Introduction to Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation, Introductory
Michael Stiefel
10:30 a.m.
What do email, meeting planning, document approval, budgeting, manufacturing processes, resource planning, and product lifecycle management have in common? Work flow: long running, complex business processes that interact with human decision making. But traditional, conventional programming techniques require you to spend an enormous amount of time building your workflow infrastructure before you write a line of application code. Fortunately, there’s a solution: Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) arrived with .NET Framework 3.0, and offers a programming solution that lets you focus on writing business workflows immediately, without having to solve the difficult problems of workflow plumbing. In this session, I will introduce the fundamentals of building workflow applications. Using an example of a simple business process, I will show you how to build a simple workflow application. I will also explain the fundamental parts of WF such as hosts, workflow, the activities and the basic workflow patterns.

Styles and Data Templates in WPF and Silverlight, Advanced
Billy Hollis
11:45 a.m.
Much of the power and flexibility in WPF-based user interfaces comes from advanced styling and templating options. Styling is a first-class citizen, and provides more flexibility and a clearer model than styling technologies, such as CSS. Data templates yield innovative user interface designs, and separation of data from presentation allows changing of templates on the fly for more flexible UI. Come and see how common user interface elements such as list boxes are far more powerful and intuitive in WPF and Silverlight and learn the basics of creating and managing styles and templates. This session is intended for those with some exposure to basic WPF concepts.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) for .ASMX and Remoting Developers, Intermediate
Richard Hale Shaw
2:00 p.m.
NET Web Services (.ASMX) are great -- so long as you don't mind that they lack high fidelity to .NET data types, have no built-in support for security or transactions, and only offer HTTP/SOAP endpoints. Oh, yeah, they can be kind of slow. .NET Remoting, on the other hand, can service binary protocols, offers greater fidelity to .NET data types, and is relatively performant. But Remoting isn't cross-platform where .ASMX services are, and still doesn't directly address security or transactions. And neither .ASMX services nor Remoting objects are compatible: each has its own, distinct programming model.

Enter WCF: while "packaged" into Windows Vista, WCF is a .NET 3.0 technology that runs on Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. And what .ASMX and Remoting lack, WCF delivers: it directly addresses security and transaction issues, and offers a single programming model while supporting both binary and SOAP endpoints. In this session, Richard will introduce key WCF concepts geared to .ASMX and Remoting programmers who're ready to begin migrating to .NET 3.0.

A Programmer’s Introduction to Expression Blend, Introductory
Billy Hollis
3:15 p.m.
While Microsoft Expression Blend is aimed primarily at designers, many  developers will also need to use it to create WPF and Silverlight user interfaces. Going well beyond the limitations of the Visual Studio WPF designer ("Cider"), Blend allows designer-driven creation of styles, templates, animations, and other constructs that most WPF applications will need. This session introduces the Blend user interface, and demonstrates how to do common functions such as creating data templates, animations, and styles. We'll also discuss usage of Blend simultaneously with Visual Studio, which will be the default development scenario for many WPF developers. If you expect to do WPF applications without a designer on your team, this session can introduce you to one of the tools you are likely to need.  

Creating Custom Workflow Activities, Intermediate 
Ken Getz
4:30 p.m.
Windows Workflow Foundation provides a rich model and infrastructure for building workflow applications, but real use of the foundation requires you to create your own activities. Creating custom activities requires a bit of expertise, and this session introduces the concepts you’ll need to get started creating your own custom Workflow activities. You’ll learn how to create simple and composite activities, how to set the display name, how to set the custom icon, how to create a custom designer, and more.Best Practices for Designing and Building SOA

Wednesday, November 14

Contracts with WCF, Intermediate
Mark Michaelis
10:30 a.m.
In this session, we dive deep into WCF contract programming.  We look at both the service contracts and the data contracts they reference and discuss not only the details of the contract based attributes, but also how to implement standard interface programming concepts like inheritance, which are not supported as cleanly as expected.  We end with a detailed look at WCF serialization support through both .NET serialization and WCF data contracts. Walk in as a WCF contract novice and out as an expert.

Using Visual Studio and the Expression Suite to Build Great User Experiences, Introductory
Denny Boynton
11:45 a.m.
Building great user experiences with software has been difficult and expensive in the past because—from a tooling perspective—developers and designers were mostly on different islands. Designers mocked the UI based on customer input, handed the mock to the development team who were then expected to implement it. This was often difficult and, in some cases, impossible to do. The result was that designers and customers were forced to compromise on what they really wanted.

Now things have changed: using XAML and Windows Presentation Foundation, designers don't just "mock-up" the UI, they BUILD it. When they are done, developers can open the UI source code (XAML) in Visual Studio and write code in C# or VB.NET that makes the application work.

This session will provide a summary of why user experience should matter to developers and then demonstrate the way designers and developers can collaborate on building applications using Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2005. Denny will also show what Visual Studio "Orcas" will add to this workflow when it is released later this year.

Building State Machine Workflows
Michael Stiefel
2:00 p.m.
When developing automated workflows, programming language logic is often sufficient. When modeling workflows involve human interaction, there are often long periods of time before a response is made to a request. In this environment, modeling the workflow as a series of states and transitions is often the best model. This session will demonstrate how to incorporate a state transition model into a workflow.

Best Practices for WCF, Intermediate
Richard Hale Shaw
3:15 p.m.
If you've got the WCF religion, you already know that it's easily many times better than Remoting or .ASMX Web Services, and that the *Best* Practice—assuming you're allowed to do so—would be to just rip your Remoting or Web Services implementation out, and replace your services with WCF implementations. Wait a second! The toolset for WCF stinks (ok, perhaps it'll get better in VS2008): are there alternatives? And, just replacing your old service interfaces with WCF contracts isn't enough: there are WCF-specific features that you'll want to take advantage of. Not to mention: you can use the Service Interface Design Pattern to create flexible, versionable interfaces. In this session, Richard will address the topics and more. We'll look at the shoulds and shouldn'ts, dos and don'ts for WCF development, and how you can start leveraging this powerful new technology to service-enable your distributed application development.

 
Putting It All Together with .NET 3.0: Presentation, Services, and Workflows, Advanced
David Walker
4:30 p.m.
Come see several awesome open-source and trial versions of several Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications. Then, see how you can get started building your own applications today utilizing all three of the major .NET 3.0 Frameworks. See samples of using Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) as a service with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)-specific code samples, including performance comparisions. Finally, dive deeper into WCF than your typical presentation, with topics such as WCF service versioning, serialization, reliable messaging, security, message cancelling, Web Service Software Factory for Windows Communication Foundation, federation security options, and performance guidance and options.