Keynote Presentations

Windows Vista, the 2007 Office system, and ASP.NET AJAX  
Prashant Sridharan
Day 1 - March 26th - 9:00 a.m.
Windows Vista and the 2007 Office system provide a wealth of new capabilities that enable you to build dynamic solutions more productively. ASP.NET AJAX helps you create compelling Web sites with a richer and more interactive user experience. Accompanying these updates to the Microsoft application platform are a number of developer tools for building a breadth of Windows, Web, and business solutions on a secure and dependable environment. This keynote will provide you with an overview of these latest advances for building these applications, and the tools for helping you become more productive and achieve better results faster. In addition, you’ll learn about the next release of Visual Studio, code-named “Orcas”, and how it will further improve the development experience.

Data Explosion: The Last and Next Decade in Data Management with the Microsoft Data Platform 
Britt Johnston
Day 2 - March 27th - 9:00 a.m.
The world of data storage and data access is growing in scale, direction and application at a rapid rate. Businesses are harnessing their internal and shared data in new ways every day in an attempt to increase productivity and competitive advantage. The emergence of the web as a way to collaborate and share data continues to open new scenarios for data sharing and aggregation. Developers need to provision solutions for these new and existing data scenarios.

Microsoft's vision of the data platform describes the services and infrastructure that empowers developers to deliver on the asks of today as well as the promises of tomorrow. Within the data platform vision we see how Microsoft is raising the abstraction layer from the logical representation to the conceptual representation while providing first class data programming experiences for developers across form factors and deployment models. We will also see how the conceptual representation becomes the basis for convergence of many of Microsoft’s existing data storage and interaction assets from basic data programming, reporting and analytics through replication, synchronization and workflow.

Visual Studio Everywhere: Tools for Office, Office Business Applications, and Custom Application Extensibility 
KD Hallman
Day 2 - March 27th - 2:00 p.m.
This session shows how developers can use the 2007 Microsoft® Office system and Visual Studio® Tools for Office (VSTO) to build and deploy custom Office Business Applications (OBAs), an emerging class of applications that address critical business problems. VSTO provides the tools developers need to customize Microsoft Office applications. In addition, this session introduces Visual Studio® Tools for Applications (VSTA), the next-generation toolset for extensible applications. VSTA provides a development toolset similar to VSTO that ISVs can embed into a their applications to accelerate the development of custom solutions for specific customers or vertical markets.

Love Your Software: Real World Development Using WPF
Robby Ingebretsen
Day 3 - March 28th - 9:00 a.m
Modern software has made a long journey from its utilitarian roots in punchcards and command lines. Microsoft's newest UI technology, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), is an acknowledgement that today's software users have sophisticated demands. Join us for an inspirational hour as we explore the capabilities of WPF. We'll look at the technical aspects of the platform as well as explore some real world projects that have really benefited from this powerful technology. Finally, we'll put WPF in a broader context as we explore how it truly makes it possible to create software that your customers will use and love!