Workshops

WPF and Silverlight from the Ground Up

Billy Hollis - Author/Consultant, Next Version Systems

Web applications are in transition to better user interfaces, and one of the most powerful options to achieve better user experience is Microsoft Silverlight. As a subset of Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight allows highly rich UI with client-based state management, while still running in a protective sandbox and offering portability to Windows and Macintosh. This workshop will discuss, compare, and contrast WPF and Silverlight, highlighting use cases,technologies, and strategies for becoming a proficient developer on these platforms.

Making ASP.NET Scale Perform Effectively in a Web 2.0 World

Kent Alstad - Chief Architect, Strangeloop Networks; and
Richard Campbell - Product Evangelist, Strangeloop Networks

The challenge of Web 2.0 applications is sudden, explosive growth in users and transactions. Building ASP.NET applications to tolerate this rapid growth takes specific techniques and an overall strategy of learning how your application behaves under the demands of your rapidly growing user base. This full-day workshop walks you through the entire process of developing your ASP.NET application to handle the loads the success of your business will create. You'll learn:

• Performance and scaling strategies. Start off the day thinking through the strategies to make your ASP.NET application scale and perform. You'll dig into techniques for specialization, where specific tasks your application requires can be isolated from the rest of the application so that they can be tuned independently. Also evaluate how your application can use distribution to split specific workloads across multiple servers,
• Building the application. Once you have an idea of how you'd like to scale your application, explore the specific coding techniques that create the layer isolation needed for specialization. See how caching is the king of performance and scaling, and how you can apply caching techniques to your application,
• Load testing. Don't let the first time your application fails under load to be in production! Effective load testing shows you where the bottlenecks of your ASP.NET application lie so that you can address them effectively. The challenge is developing the right set of metrics so that you can create meaningful benchmarks as your application evolves, and
• Refactoring for scale. Optimization is a cycle, so plan to revisit and refactor your code routinely. With the information gathered from your testing, you are able to develop tactics to implement further improvements in your application. Sometimes these refactorings are minor, sometimes they represent massive restructurings of your application. Learn how to think through a refactoring and decide if the return on your efforts will be worthwhile.

iPhone and Mobile Development Summit

Brian Fling, Director of Strategy, Blue Flavor &
Garrett Murray, Senior Developer, Blue Flavor

Mobile phones have been getting smarter for some time now, but this year's introduction of the Apple iPhone brought the mobile Web into the mainstream—not to mention to the front page of many newspapers.

It's true that the iPhone can display most Web pages exactly as they'd appear on a personal computer. But it's also possible to create Web sites and applications that look and work much like the iPhone's built-in applications. Sites that do are the ones that will win the hearts and fingertips of iPhone users.

In this full-day workshop, conducted by the creators of the wildly popular Leaflets portal for iPhone users (www.getleaflets.com), you'll learn about the kinds of development options and opportunities that the iPhone provides. See how to create an "iPhone-friendly" version of a site, and learn how to create Web applications that match the iPhone's look and feel. Even if you aren't developing for mobile devices just yet, you won't want to miss this workshop. You'll learn solid development practices—with CSS, XHMTL, information architecture, usability, and more—that will improve all your Web design efforts, whether mobile or not. And you'll gain valuable insights into mobile strategy that will prepare you for the next sea change in Web design.