Dynamic Keynotes

KEYNOTE, May 5
Building and Deploying Better Applications with ?Whidbey?
Jay Roxe, Microsoft

Visual Studio "Whidbey" radically improves developer productivity while continuing to provide full access to the Microsoft .NET Framework. It, along with the Windows Forms classes, empowers developers with the full power of the Windows client PC. It combines simplified Web data access, rich site layout features, dynamic Web projects, and an array of additional features that enable rapid construction of dynamic Web applications. It leverages existing ADO.NET and XML investments, and enables developers to perform data access tasks in drastically fewer steps and fewer lines of code. And "Whidbey" Visual Basic developers will have access to an even larger set of advanced features within the language and the development environment.

Get an insider?s look at all these advancements, how they apply to wireless device and mobile application development, and how you can benefit today. Join the Microsoft Visual Studio development team on Wednesday May 5 for a dynamic start to a content-packed day.

Jay Roxe is the Product Manager for Visual Basic at Microsoft. In this role, Jay is responsible for product planning, technical evangelism and external communication. Prior to this role, Jay was a developer and development lead on the .NET Framework where he had responsibility for the Base Class Libraries. Jay holds a BSE in Computer Science from Princeton University and an MBA from the Amos Tuck School of Business.

KEYNOTE, May 6
Metropolis: Trends in Information Technology
Pat Helland, Microsoft

This talk will examine the changes that occurred in independent and largely disconnected cities as they were rapidly connected by railroads causing dramatic shifts in standardization, manufacturing, and retail. Parallels are drawn to the current changes in information technology as independent and largely disconnected IT shops have been rapidly connected by the internet causing dramatic shifts in standardization, structured data, and business process. This analogy offers some interesting insight into where we are going in information technology and a framework to understand the current trend towards service oriented architectures and Web services in our enterprise customers.

Pat Helland is an Architect in the .NET Enterprise Architecture Team and is helping to define Microsoft?s strategy for service-oriented architecture. He has spent more than 25 years working in the area of database, transaction processing, application programming models, distributed computing, and fault tolerant computing. Pat started at Microsoft in 1994 and was a cofounder of the team that designed and implemented MTS (Microsoft Transaction Server), which is now called COM+. He has spent a lot of time in recent years working on loosely coupled application models and reliable messaging. Prior to working at Microsoft, Pat spent most of the 1980s at Tandem Computers where he was chief architect and senior implementer of TMF (Transaction Monitoring Facility), which provided the transaction processing functionality for Tandem?s NonStop System.

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