September 11
Microsoft-Sponsored Breakfast Session: Development Opportunities with the New Microsoft Office System
KEYNOTE: Microsoft.com Application Framework
OOP with VB .NET
Migrate from ADO to ADO .NET
Exception Handling in .NET
Advanced Development with Objects
Advanced ADO .NET Techniques
Threading with Visual Basic .NET
Lunch Session: Patterns Workshop
Create Rich Clients with Windows Forms
In-Depth Transaction Design
Save Yourself with .NET Serialization
Create Windows Forms Controls
ADO .NET Tips and Tricks
Fill the .NET Gaps with WMI
Optimizing Windows Application Performance
ADO .NET Best Practices
Leverage COM from .NET
Windows Forms Tips and Tricks
Disconnected Datasets and Synchronization
.NET Security Techniques
September 12
KEYNOTE: Data Access with Visual Studio .NET
Validating Data on the Client
Application Design Patterns
Production Debugging for .NET
Zero-Touch Deployment
Enterprise Development in the Real World
Remoting Strategies
Everything You Must Know About Web Services
Design Highly Scalable Distributed Apps with .NET, Part I
Building in Performance and Scalability
Asynchronous Web Services
Design Highly Scalable Distributed Apps with .NET, Part II
Build Mobile Apps Quickly with the .NET Compact Framework
Enhanced Web Services
Strategies for Passing and Caching Data
Best Practices for Deployment
VBITS Sessions — September 11
Microsoft-Sponsored Breakfast Session: Development Opportunities with the New Microsoft Office System
Robert Green, Microsoft
Heavy investments in standards-based XML and .NET technologies provide developers with a host of new development opportunities around the Microsoft Office System. Come see how XML leads to better solutions for end users and enables information to be more easily captured, used and repurposed throughout organizations. New tools and interfaces in the Microsoft Office System give developers greater control over the use and flow of XML data and allow Visual Studio .NET developers to extend their skills to Office applications using everything from ASP.NET to Web services to network deployment.
8 a.m.
KEYNOTE: Microsoft.com Application Framework
Larry Jordan ,Microsoft.com Development Manager, Microsoft
This presentation will take a deep look at the .NET adoption on Microsoft.com that provides a centralized framework for content aggregation ,presentation and programmability. The presentation will focus on the use of various XML capabilities in .NET and net- work distribution model of Web Services that make up the architecture of Microsoft.com.
9 a.m.
Access and Integrate Host-Based Application Data
Rod Hoffman & Bryon Fevens
The .Net Framework and Windows Server 2003 provide the ideal platform for building new mid-tier applications especially for the web. One of the challenges is to leverage existing legacy host data in these new applications. This presentation discusses how Visual Studio.NET can be used to create host transactions, access host-based data, and easily integrate the information with applications using Web Services or .Net Assemblies.
10:30 a.m.
Migrate from ADO to ADO .NET
Jackie Goldstein, Renaissance Computer Systems, LTD.
This session helps you quickly make the transition from ADO 2.X to ADO.Net. We will look at leveraging existing knowledge and experience, while also learning the new features (eg XML, XSL/T support) and how to take advantage of them. Lots of demo code!
10:30 a.m. Data Access
Exception Handling in .NET
Ken Getz, MCW Technologies, LLC
One of the biggest improvements in VB .NET is managed exceptions. Exceptions allow you to write integrated error handling routines and handle errors from third party code. You'll see how to throw exceptions and how to write exception handling code, as well as good practices of when and how to use exceptions. You'll learn how exceptions are used in distributed applications, with multi-threaded and multi-application domain processes and how they are handled in GUI applications. Finally, we will show how to write code to handle uncaught exceptions in console and GUI applications.
10:30 a.m. .NET Framework
Advanced Development with Objects
Billy Hollis, Guided Design
Going beyond the fundamentals, this session demonstrates advanced object techniques from real-world projects. We’ll cover loading classes on the fly, dynamic user interfaces, and implementing object interfaces. If you have been developing objects in Visual Studio .NET for the last year, and have a background in CLR and OOP, this is an hour you won’t want to miss.
11:45 a.m. Object Development
Advanced ADO .NET Techniques
Jackie Goldstein, Renaissance Computer Systems, LTD.
This session starts off where "Moving from ADO 2.X to ADO .NET" leaves off. We will take an in-depth look and demo more advanced features and programming techniques in ADO.NET, including strongly-typed Datasets, multi-table operations, concurrency conflict resolution, and mapping relational views to XML schemas.
11:45 a.m. Data Access
Threading with Visual Basic .NET
Jon Rauschenberger, Clarity Consulting
The ability to write multi-threaded code can often make the difference between an application that performs and scales well and one that can only handle a few users. Using multiple threads, however, can also result in applications that are unstable — or worse, provide inaccurate data. We will present you with best practices for writing .NET applications that use multiple threads. We’ll cover topics including: using thread pools, implementing synchronization, callback delegates and design patterns for multi-threaded applications.
11:45 a.m. .NET Framework
Lunch Session: Patterns Workshop
Lars Laakes, Microsoft
In July, Microsoft released version 2 of its patterns catalog “Enterprise Solution Patterns” and “Data Patterns”
Links: http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/type/Patterns/Enterprise/default.asp and http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/type/Patterns/Data/default.asp
In the first third of this session Lars will present an overview of the existing program and content, how we expect the material to be used, and our future plans for further pattern releases. The remainder of the presentation will be an open floor discussion. We would like to discuss your feedback regarding the existing content and ways we can make it more relevant to the real world problems you encounter everyday. We would also like to discuss ways you would like to be involved in the Microsoft pattern’s community. If you have not read through the material, please read (see links) before attending if possible.
12:45 p.m.
Create Rich Clients with Windows Forms
Brian Randell, MCW Technologies, LLC
Rich Windows apps remain critical to the success of today’s businesses. We will show you how to take advantage of Visual Studio’s new features and enhancements to build richer, better Windows apps — and even connect them to Web Services. We will explore the world of Windows Forms and learn how to use the power of .NET Framework and the Win32 API to create Windows applications for the next generation, too.
2 p.m. Smart Client
In-Depth Transaction Design
Jimmy Nilsson
No matter which programming model you use for transactions (ADO .NET, T-SQL or COM+), it's crucial that you master transaction design. This presentation goes into detail about how to choose transaction isolation level, how to reduce the risk of deadlocks, how to shorten transactions and more. The focus of the presentation is the creation of correct programs and maintaining good performance.
2 p.m. Data Access
Save Yourself with .NET Serialization
Ken Getz, MCW Technologies, LLC
Almost every application needs to save data for later use, or for transport to another application. Every developer has crafted a one-off solution to the problem, and no one will argue that this is a waste of time. Shouldn't the operating system provide some standard technique for serializing data for persistent storage and transport? Of course, the .NET Framework does. And, in typical .NET Framework style, you have lots of choices to make when deciding on a serialization. In this session, you'll learn about both formatters provided by the .NET Framework, and see how to decide which works best for you.
2 p.m. .NET Framework
Create Windows Forms Controls
Brian Randell, MCW Technologies, LLC
Every developer working with Windows Forms will sooner or later need to create their own controls. Even if you're not a control vendor, the techniques involved in creating your own controls are vital in most Windows applications. The .NET Windows Forms package allows you to create your own controls in several different ways. Depending on the class you inherit from, you get different behaviors, and different features. This session introduces you to three different ways in which to create your own controls for Windows Forms and demonstrates why you might want to take on this important task.
3:15 p.m. Smart Client
ADO .NET Tips and Tricks
Shawn Wildermuth
Don't believe the rumors. ADO .NET does not have to be that difficult. Shawn Wildermuth will be teaching you the secrets for getting the most out of ADO .NET in the fewest keystrokes possible. You’ll learn everything from how to correctly use connection pooling to the magic tricks of the Data Designers, and much more.
3:15 p.m. Data Access
Fill the .NET Gaps with WMI
Ken Getz, MCW Technologies, LLC
WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) makes it possible for the .NET Framework to expose details of your operating system, hardware, and devices without needing to write specific-case code. In addition, WMI provides an open door for you to investigate and manipulate hardware and operating system details that aren't otherwise available to you through the .NET Framework. Want to rid yourself of unwanted API calls? WMI can often supply the answer, using a managed wrapper around the Windows infrastructure. In this session, you'll learn how to take advantage of WMI to solve many common problems facing .NET developers.
3:15 p.m. .NET Framework
Optimizing Windows Application Performance
Billy Hollis, Guided Design
Windows Forms applications will typically be more distributed than VB 6 forms apps. This introduces new challenges for making Windows Forms applications fast and scalable. Attend this session for a look at techniques for making Windows Forms fit into a distributed application environment while marinating the crisp performance users desire.
4:30 p.m. Smart Client
ADO .NET Best Practices
Shawn Wildermuth
As the newness of .NET wears off, application developers must move past the “how to” of data access development and start considering the best ways to get things done. In this session, we’ll do just that, starting with an intelligent approach to the DataSet vs. DataReader question followed by discussion of more specialized issues like connection pooling, transactions, handling multiple result sets, and the finer points of typed datasets.
4:30 p.m. Data Access
Leverage COM from .NET
Brian Randell, MCW Technologies, LLC
For VB developers, productivity has come through wiring client/server COM components. Using services such as MTS and COM+ has made for better, more robust systems. And the new Common Language Runtime (CLR) promises to make this even better — or does it? We will show you how to make migration from COM programming simple, using the ’s GUID-less model.
4:30 p.m. .NET Framework
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Windows Forms Tips and Tricks
Keith Pleas and Billy Hollis, Guided Design
With end users continuing to demand the rich interface of Windows, thin clients haven’t yet pushed fat clients off the desktop. Get an hour of tips and tricks on implementing Windows Forms, including control creation, custom painting, application updating, control emitting and embedding, and building a complete control collection. You’ll also learn tips for visual inheritance, handling resources for globalization, and the top 10 obscure yet useful properties.
5:45 p.m. Smart Client
Disconnected Datasets and Synchronization
Josef Finsel
With ADO .NET, disconnected datasets have come of age. No longer do database administrators need to open up rights on tables to allow unrestricted inserts, updates and deletes. Instead, you can specify stored procedures that handle all of those changes but that opens up a whole new can of worms related to transactional updates and handling synchronization issues. Correctly handling these issues requires work in both ADO .NET and SQL Server. Attend this session and you’ll learn how to put the two together to make disconnected datasets work effectively with your data.
5:45 p.m. Data Access
.NET Security Techniques
Juval Lowy, Idesign
.NET allows you to configure permissions for components, and provide an evidence to prove that it has the right credentials to access a resource or perform some sensitive work. We'll show you how to manage application security using the .NET admin tool and how to do so programmatically. We'll also discuss .NET's way of dealing with what users are allowed to do using .NET role-based security.
5:45 p.m. .NET Framework
VBITS Sessions — September 12
KEYNOTE: Data Access with Visual Studio .NET
Most mission-critical applications created with Visual Studio start with data access - from Oracle SQL Server,DB2,legacy data stores, From the impact of XML to the move from ADO to ADO how Visual Studio developers approach data access is being redefined. With native CLR-support promised in the Yukon release of SQL Server, more changes are afoot. Get a new perspective on where data access is today and how to architect your applications so they won ’t be made obsolete by the substantial changes on the horizon.
9 a.m.
Validating Data on the Client
Billy Hollis, Guided Design
Reducing data transfer by doing client-side data validation makes your application’s perceived performance crisper, and reducing the load on the server. It also saves time and coding effort and improves encapsulation. Learn some smart techniques for how to do client-side validation, and their trade-offs to help you judge when to do it. This session will detail a set of Windows Forms validation controls that replicate and extend the capabilities of the popular ASP.NET validator controls.
10:30 a.m. Smart Client
Application Design Patterns
Keith Pleas, Guided Design
Maintainability and cost controls dictate IT standards. A key tool for implementing standards and enabling reusability of code are design patterns — reusable solutions that solve specific design problems. Join us this hour and learn how to create design patterns, and how to use them most effectively. You’ll see how proven patterns can be put to use when designing .NET applications and how to harvest patterns from your own codebase.
10:30 a.m. Architecture & Design
Production Debugging for .NET
Ron Jacobs, Microsoft
Learn how to troubleshoot those pesky problems that occur on production systems every now and then. Learn the tips and tricks for narrowing the problem scope, isolating the bug and squashing it with minimal impact on the production system.
10:30 a.m. .NET Framework
Zero-Touch Deployment
Andrew Brust, Progressive Systems Consulting
The trend toward browser-based applications has been, in large part, driven by their ease of deployment. But now, .NET's Zero-Touch Deployment (ZTD) model allows Windows Forms applications to deploy gracefully over the Internet/intranet and Code Access Security (CAS) makes it safe. We'll cover the nooks and crannies of ZTD and CAS so you can make these technologies work for you.
11:45 a.m. Smart Client
Enterprise Development in the Real World
Rockford Lhotka, Magenic Technologies
Enterprise development is more than just application design and coding. We need to deal with issues such as configuration management, unit testing, run-time logging, exception handling, security integration and many other issues. In this session we'll see how we can use various Microsoft Application Blocks, open-source software and other tools and processes to help address many of these key issues
11:45 a.m. Architecture & Design
Remoting Strategies
Juval Lowy, Idesign
Distributed application gives you scalability, fault tolerance, security, throughput and better performance if proximity to resources is crucial. .NET remoting is the general term refering to when making cross context, app domain (process) or machine calls. .NET has native support for invoking calls on remote objects, but it has much more to it than just remote calls. This talk describes the .NET remoting architecture, remote objects types, programmatic and administrative configuration of remote objects, and the steps required to build and deploy a distributed .NET application.
11:45 a.m. .NET Framework
Everything You Must Know About Web Services
Bill Evjen
This session will take an in-depth look at the XML Web services model and what it means for connecting disparate systems. In addition, this session will go beyond the "Hello World" introduction and will also show you how to construct your own SOAP headers, apply caching and test your XML Web services before they go into production. We will take a look at some of the tips-and-tricks of the .NET Web services world, too.
2 p.m. Internet
Design Highly Scalable Distributed Apps with .NET, Part I & II
Rockford Lhotka, Magenic Technologies
The Microsoft .NET Framework provides extensive support for creating highly scaleable distributed applications. You will learn how to design Windows and Web-based applications based on distributed business objects, achieving high levels of reuse, scalability, long-term maintainability and other benefits. You will also learn how Web Services, Remoting, object serialization, Enterprise Services, autodeployment and other .NET technologies come together to create these applications.
2 p.m. & 3:15 p.m. Architecture & Design
Building in Performance and Scalability
Ron Jacobs, Microsoft
Learn how to define performance targets, measure to insure that you are meeting them and the tips to create high performance, highly scalable distributed applications with .NET.
2 p.m. .NET Framework
Asynchronous Web Services
Ron Jacobs, Microsoft
Building loosely coupled systems isn't easy but with Web services loose coupling is critical to building highly scalable and available systems. In this session you will lean how you can take advantage of three reference building blocks from Microsoft to support asynchronous invocation, aggregation and caching with web services.
3:15 p.m. Internet
Build Mobile Apps Quickly with the .NET Compact Framework
Andrew Wigley
The next version of Visual Studio .NET includes what was formerly known as Smart Device Extensions, which allows you to build applications for Mobile Devices using the .NET Compact Framework. Now you can build applications for Pocket PCs using the same programming model and the same developer tools you use to develop desktop applications! We'll use Visual Studio .NET 2003 to build a mobile application live, end-to-end, using the .NET Compact Framework implementations of Windows Forms, XML Web Services and ADO .NET.
3:15 p.m. .NET Framework
Enhanced Web Services
Bill Evjen
Microsoft has provided developers news ways to build secure Web service with the release of the Web Services Enhancements. This session will cover how to use the WSE to sign and encrypt SOAP messages, how to route messages over multiple intermediaries, how to send attachments with SOAP messages, as finally explain the underlying WSE architecture and how you can benefit from it.
4:30 p.m. Internet
Strategies for Passing and Caching Data
Ron Jacobs
Squeeze the utmost performance out of your data access applications through smart caching and data passing strategies. Check out this session from one of our top data access speakers.
4:30 p.m. Architecture & Design
Best Practices for Deployment
Keith Pleas, Guided Design
“ It runs on my machine!” is never a valid excuse. This session shows you how to design and build applications that will not roll over and die when deployed. You’ll learn how to componentized, minimize dependencies, and package for smooth deployments.
4:30 p.m. .NET Framework
