Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Making Attributes and Reflection work for you, Intermediate
Ken Getz
10:30 a.m.
You've seen .NET attributes, and you've probably even used them. Did you know that you can create your own, and can mark up your own code using your attributes? Once you've added attributes to your code, how can you programmatically retrieve information about them? Reflection makes this possible, and much, much more. If you've ever needed to investigate the contents of an assembly programmatically, you have needed Reflection. If you need to add late binding to your applications in which you determine the available classes and methods at runtime, you need Reflection. This session starts by introducing the concepts of using and creating attributes, and moves on to harnessing the immense power of reflection.

How to do a Code Review, Intermediate
Billy Hollis
11:45 a.m.
Code reviews are one of the most important tools for ensuring that our modern, complex software systems have consistency and quality. Done properly, they can increase the value of a system while providing professional development for team members.

This session will cover techniques for performing code reviews, and offer a checklist of aspects of the code to examine. We’ll briefly discuss coding standards as a pre-requisite for code reviews. Then, we’ll look at ways to make code reviews collaborative instead of antagonistic; how to vary code reviews to suit experience levels of the developer; and list a few of the ways code reviews can go badly and how you can avoid those problems.

Understanding Delegates and Events, Intermediate
Ken Getz
2:00 p.m.
You can use events in .NET just as you did in Visual Basic 6, but if you do, you won’t be taking full advantage of the power of the .NET Framework. Do you really know what’s going on under the covers when you raise or sink an event? In this session, you’ll learn how events work in the .NET framework, how they relate to the Delegate type in .NET, and how to take advantage of delegates to improve the maintainability of your code. You can get by without investigating delegates in .NET, but you’ll be avoiding one of the most powerful features in .NET. When you leave this session, you’ll be an expert on creating and using delegates and events.

More Best Kept Secrets in .NET, Intermediate
Deborah Kurata
3:15 p.m.
Deborah Kurata has been sharing her Visual Studio and .NET Framework secrets with developers for the past several years. In this new installment, she covers more lesser-known features to help you become more productive with your development tools.

This session covers how to improve your productivity by building your own project and project item templates. It covers lesser known code navigation features and keywords such as Using and IsNullOrEmpty. It provides details on using nullable types, and on building queries from within Visual Studio. Finally, it covers how to perform unit testing directly from within Visual Studio.

Best Practice Architecture: Layering Your Applications, Intermediate
Rocky Lhotka
4:30 p.m.
Perhaps the most common failing when building software is to allow the lines between UI and business logic, and between business logic and data access. It can be difficult to maintain these lines of separation, but a formal layered architecture can help. Learn how to organize your code into effective layers, and how frameworks and code-generation can help ensure both productivity and compliance with the architecture. The end result will be an application that is maintainable today and into the future!