ASP Live!
Session Outlines

Best Practices for Testing and Debugging Managed Code with VS2005 Team System
Richard Hale Shaw, Richard Hale Shaw Group
Testing and debugging aren’t programming: they’re separate, but complimentary skills that every programmer should grow, but often don’t. Where programming entails actively asserting your will on the software, testing simply specifies what the result of an operation should be, and that without that result, the test fails. Debugging is neither: it focuses us on what is—not on what should be. Knowing how to effectively develop and apply these skills is critical to every software developer’s future. Fortunately, Visual Studio 2005 has a plethora of new debugging features—such as Debug Visualizers—that make Debugging simpler, more straight-forward, and even elegant. And the Team System Edition now offers a built-in Testing system (based on NUnit) that lets you define Unit tests before you start programming, and re-run your tests whenever you wish. In this session, Richard will show you how to leverage the maximum results when testing and debugging Managed Code.

ATLAS: Ajax-Style Development with ASP.NET 2.0
Russ Nemhauser, Nemhauser Media
AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML)-style Web applications are growing in popularity because of the demand for richer user experience in browsers. A number of high profile sites including Google maps and Gmail, as well as sites like A9 and Flickr are based on the AJAX-style. We’ll look at how ASP.NET 2.0 makes it easier to develop AJAX-style Web application using asynchronous callbacks. You’ll learn how asynchronous callbacks are integrated into the ASP.NET HTTP Pipeline. We’ll also include code demos to illustrate how async callbacks can be integrated into a custom ASP.NET control.

Customizing Visual Studio 2005
Deborah Kurata, InStep Technologies
You have your own style, your own coding standards. Visual Studio 2003 provides features to allow you to tailor your development environment to your style — and now with Visual Studio 2005 you have even more features for customization. With improved item templates, snippets, options, and code analysis — you can have it your way. This session demonstrates how to create item templates so every form, class, or other item added to a project follows your conventions. It covers how to build code snippets and how to set up code analysis to check code against your desired standards. And you can share many of these customizations with others to help your entire team build consistent and effective software.

Inside ASP.NET 2.0 Security Features
Keith Brown, Pluralsight
In this talk, we'll drill down into a host of new features in ASP.NET 2.0 that make building secure web applications much easier than in the past. Some examples of what we'll cover include the new HttpOnly feature for cookies, web.config file encryption in single-server and web farm configurations, and the Role provider model for role-based security. By understanding how these features work and the problems they were designed to solve, you'll be much better prepared to use them effectively to secure your own applications!

Five Management Essentials: Estimating, Scheduling, Planning, Tracking, and
Correcting with VSTS
Martin L. Shoemaker, Richard Hale Shaw Group
Does your project use VB.NET or C#? Chances are, your customers don’t know and don’t care. Will your project be on time or late? Now that they care about! How much will it cost? When will it be done? These questions can be more trouble than the technology or languages you use; and they can also be the most important questions for your executives and your customers. This session will show team leads and team members how VSTS helps them in the three key resource management activities: estimating time and costs; planning and scheduling the effort; and tracking, reporting, and correcting as the project runs. Along the way, we’ll discuss some basic estimating, scheduling, and planning techniques.

Using Enterprise Library with ASP.NET
Chris Kinsman, Vergent Software
Enterprise Library is the newest collection of Application Blocks from the Microsoft patterns & practices group. Learn what is available in the collection and how it can help you develop improved ASP.NET applications faster.

Tracking Users with the New Personalization Features in ASP.NET 2.0
Paul Sheriff, PDSA, Inc.
Although ASP.NET has always supported storing information about users in Session state, that information only persisted as long as the session was active. What if you need to save information about users of your site long term? You could create your own data access layer and business layer to handle this common need, but ASP.NET 2.0 makes this simple. Using the Profile class, you have strongly-typed access to information that you define to keep track of users, either authenticated or anonymous. This session drills into using this new ASP.NET 2.0 feature which can save you hours of time for each site you build.

Attack and Defense: Securing ASP.NET 2.0 Applications
Keith Brown, Pluralsight
Building secure ASP.NET applications involves much more than calling security APIs. It takes careful design that considers threats and applies countermeasures that solve real problems instead of just making the application harder to use. It takes a development team that knows how to write bulletproof code, with the foresight and funding to review that code and eradicate security flaws before they can be exploited. Ultimately, it takes education and a good process. This talk will introduce you to many resources you may not have been previously aware of: guidelines for threat modeling ASP.NET applications, howtos for eliminating common security vulnerabilities, and many others. You’ll find that even a small shop can afford to build security into the software development lifecycle.

Implement “Rights-Based,” not “Role-Based” Security in .NET
Benjamin Day, Benjamin Day Consulting
The .NET security principal classes (WindowsPrincipal, Generic
Principal) help you secure your application by checking if a user is a member of a “role”. For example, only members of “HR” role can view employee information. What if the requirements changed and now “HR” users can only view employee information for certain org units? A call to IsInRole() wouldn’t be enough because now you need the context of the org unit. Is this user a member of “HR” in the New York office? The solution is a rights-based security model. Rights-based
security extends the traditional role-based security with the granularity of context-relevant securable actions. In this session, we will discuss the essentials of developing a rights-based security model in .NET, how to develop your own IPrincipal classes, and how to tie a rights-based security framework into the ASP.NET 2.0 membership features using a custom membership provider.

SharePoint (Based upon ASP.NET 2. 0)
Paul Sheriff, PDSA, Inc.
Microsoft SharePoint is a great way to create a portal for your company. If you are new to SharePoint and want to prepare for the full-day workshop on Thursday, then this session is for you. You will learn what you can accomplish when using SharePoint, how to create custom web parts in SharePoint, and how with Service Pack 2 you can build web parts in ASP.NET 2.0. You will also come away with information on several resources that can jumpstart your development with SharePoint.

Implementing .NET Object Mapping with Nhibernate
Benjamin Day, Benjamin Day Consulting
The problem: our applications use objects, but our databases don’t. Why isn’t there an easy way for applications to use objects, but store their contents in a database with a minimum of effort required to transition between them? Enter NHibernate: an open-source, object-relational persistence framework that uses XML to map classes and properties (in your program) to tables and columns (in your database). Once you write the mappings, NHibernate can generate the database code and SQL necessary to save and retrieve your objects. In this session, Ben will discuss the fundamentals of using NHibernate in an ASP.NET Web application, with applicability towards any scenario where objects should be transparently persisted.

Large Scale ASP.NET Rendering and Enterprise Control Development
Mark D'Urso, MIcrosoft
ASP.NET 2.0 has a variety of new features available for quickly creating robust Web sites. Master Pages allows HTML layout and server controls to be factored into a reusable set of components that can be recombined at runtime into device specific presentation modes. The Virtual Path Provider allows developers to hook in to the HTTP response life cycle in ways that were previously only available to ASP.NET itself. Learn how MSDN and TechNet have leveraged these and other technologies to create a scaleable, high performance Web site.

Leveraging .NET 2.0 Security Features
Robert Hurlbut, Hurlbut Consulting
Security is difficult to get right, and it is a good strategy to leverage code provided by the upcoming changes in .NET 2.0. The new security components in .NET 2.0 can help you greatly reduce the amount of code you need to write in order to make your applications secure. .NET 2.0 provides numerous additional types that encapsulate functionality already provided in the base Windows OS, as well as new functionality only available in .NET 2.0. This talk will cover the new improvements including public key cryptography, Windows security, remoting, SecureString, XML Encryption, ASP.NET and Code Access Security.

Thousands of Users, Personalized Service – Portals and Web Parts in ASP.NET 2.0
Josh Holmes, SRT Solutions
If you’ve used http://my.msn.com, you’ve wondered “How’d they do that?” Now you can do that too, through personalization with user controls and custom Web parts. This level of personal service and response has been the realm of a lot of custom code or SharePoint until now. The personalization is managed through a WebPartManager which controls any number of zones on the page. In your controls that reside in these zones, through the proper use of properties and attributes, you can have global settings, role-based settings and user-based settings or some combination of all three. Obviously, this could complicate your testing scenarios greatly so careful design and implementation are a necessity. In this session, we will create several custom Web parts, put them into a portal site and show how easily this site can be customized. In addition, we will look at some of the potential disasters and how you can avoid them.

CSS for the ASP.NET Developer
Paul Sheriff, PDSA, Inc.
Want to make your HTML efficient and easy to maintain? Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS) are the answer. Many developers use an HTML Table structure to layout their data input pages. While this works it is not the most efficient, and not very flexible. Learn how to use CSS to build input pages that can change without modifying every page and every table in your ASPX pages.

Data Binding in ASP.NET 2.0
Andrew Brust, Citigate Hudson
Sitting down? Good, because the data binding model in ASP.NET 2.0 has completely changed from the 1.X model. No longer are typed DataSets sitting in the component tray (along with DataAdapters), your design time data source of choice. Now, a host of DataSource controls is being introduced, including a control that binds to objects. It’s out with the DataGrid and in with the GridView, DetailsView, and FormView. Get the low-down on the new ASP.NET data binding paradigm, including how to handle data access in code with the new and improved ADO.NET 2.0.

WebControl Enhancements in ASP.NET 2.0
Miguel Castro, InfoTek Consulting Group, Inc.
ASP.NET 2.0 brought to the table many great enhancements to increase productivity in the development of web applications. Accompanying these great new features that mainstream web developers are already familiar with, are some incredible improvements to the infrastructure for developing custom server controls. As in ASP.NET 1.1, server controls or webcontrols, as they are also known, are not additions to ASP.NET's infrastructure; they are at the very heart of its architecture and becoming intimate with this technology gets you closer than ever to understanding exactly how ASP.NET really works. The development of custom webcontrols has not been a technology embraced by all ASP.NET developers, but with the great new enhancements you'll learn here; maybe you too will get as hooked I have. Learn about Templates, SmartTags, AutoFormatting, WebResources, and the AJAX-based Callbacks, and how easy it is to integrate all of this into Webcontrols of your own. This presentation expects established knowledge of custom control development.

Declarative Data Sources: The Real Story
Russ Nemhauser, Nemhauser Media
Nearly every demo of ASP.NET shows the compelling example of placing a grid on a form and binding it declaratively to a data source. It doesn’t just display the data, however, it also supports editing, deleting, inserting, sorting, and paging, all without writing a line of code. This talk uncovers the inner workings of declarative data sources so developers will know exactly what is going on when they use them. We will also look at optimizing view state when using declarative data sources, and how to effectively use the object data source to bind to data access layers.

VIRTUAL TRACKS
Black Belt
Visual Studio Team System