ASP Live!   

Session Descriptions

SmartClient Live! delivers two days of intensive, black-belt programming for advanced .NET programmers using the C# language.

Thursday, April 14

Visual Studio 2005: Building Robust and Reliable Software
Adam Gallant, Microsoft Canada
10:30 a.m.
Visual Studio 2005 will provide Microsoft best practices and development tools that used to be available only internally, including: the profiler used by the Windows and SQL teams; the integration of the Application Verifier into Visual Studio; and the source code analyzers used to check the reliability of Windows source code. Learn how these tools, together with unit testing and other enterprise tools, will empower development teams to write reliable and performant code in Visual Studio 2005.

Smart Client: Real-World Lessons Learned
Billy Hollis, DotNetMasters
10:30 a.m.
After developing a number of smart client systems in .NET, Billy Hollis presents his most valuable lessons for real world smart client development. He will present several useful components for typical smart client tasks, and discuss creation of an “application portal” as a single entry point for a smart client system. He’ll show some helpful extensions to standard Windows Forms controls, and give recommendations on security and deployment of smart client apps.

Building Composite Smart Client Applications
Billy Hollis, DotNet Masters
11:45 a.m.
Large-scale smart client applications cannot be built as one giant executable. Composite smart clients offer a solution. Many independent modules can be seamlessly integrated into a complete user experience by using an application shell or portal that serves as the single entry point of the application and dynamically loads modules on demand. We'll discuss the general architecture of these composite applications, and present a simple example that is designed to centralize application functionality such as security and user cosmetics.

Maximize the Performance of Your .NET Applications
Brian Randell, MCW Technologies
11:45 a.m.
Make it go faster! We'll show you how you can. Understanding there is no magic bullet is the first step to maximizing the performance of your applications. After that, it's all about incremental improvements that you make to your application design and code. Learn how to refactor your code for better performance. Topics covered will include Visual Basic .NET, C#, SQL, Windows Forms, and ASP.NET.

The "My" Namespace in VB.NET 2005
Paul Sheriff, PDSA, Inc
2 p.m.
A whole new namespace is introduced in VB.NET 2005 called My. This namespace contains classes that make it much easier to do common programming tasks that were easy in Visual Basic 6.0, but were a little harder to find in VB.NET. You will learn how to gather machine information, access the Forms collection, how to work with the file system, getting resources and application settings, and many other topics.

Customizing a Methodology Template in Visual Studio Team System
Barry Gervin, ObjectSharp
2 p.m.
Organizations rarely adopt a methodology verbatim, as it was envision by its creators. Organizations often prefer to adapt methodologies to their culture and requirements, often choosing elements from several methodologies a la carte. Furthermore, organizations evolve their methodologies over time as they improve their discipline. In this session we’ll discuss the options for customizing the off-the-shelf templates provided in Visual Studio Team System. We’ll examine techniques for authoring process guidance, customizing check in policy, and creating or modifying work item types.

VB Application Framework
Keith Pleas, Guided Design
3:15 p.m.
Come learn about the new application logging and deployment features available through the My Object, and how to write custom extensions for My.

Keeping Secrets in .NET Applications
Paul Sheriff, PDSA, Inc
3:15 p.m.
Cryptography is one of those areas most developers think of as a "dark art." In this seminar, you will see how easy it is to use cryptography to secure data such as credit card numbers, passwords and connection strings. You will learn how to hash passwords using a Salt value to make it hard for hackers to crack. You will also learn how to use the Symmetric algorithms to encrypt and decrypt connection strings. You will also learn how to use the Data Protection API, which simplifies key management.

Generics, Operators, Overload, and More
Ken Getz, MCW Technologies
4:30 p.m.
Visual Basic 2005 adds a number of new language features, and we’ll explain the how's and why's of many of them. Not sure what a generic is, or why you'd want to use one? Never considered overloading an operator, and aren't sure why you should care? Tried to create asynchronous behavior in Windows form, but never quite got it to work? We’ll discuss all these features and more, showing off many of the new language features in VB.NET 2005.

Using Enterprise Library with Smart Clients
Ron Jacobs, Microsoft and Keith Pleas, Guided Design
4:30 p.m.

Data Access Strategies and Tactics
Jackie Goldstein, Renaissance Computer Systems
5:45 p.m.
Listen to alternatives and considerations for developing the data access portions of your applications, including numerous techniques for passing data through the tiers of your application. The pros and cons of such common approaches such as Datasets, XML, custom classes, and scalar values will be demoed and evaluated. The techniques described are based on the best practices defined by Microsoft. The principles discussed here apply to VS 2003 as well as VS 2005 (and even other platforms!)

Secure Coding Practices for Everyday .NET Developers
Derek Hatchard, Ardent Development
5:45 p.m.
Developers are increasingly being expected to possess secure coding practices as part of their skill set but many professionals have not had the time or opportunities to acquire a working knowledge of basic secure coding practices. This session demonstrates some basic secure coding practices for day-to-day use by professional developers writing managed code for the .NET Framework. This session is especially pertinent to developers working on projects that cannot pursue more complete security practices (threat modeling, security reviews, hiring security experts, etc.) because of practical constraints such as time and budget.

Friday, April 15

RAD Data, Common and Advanced Features
Jackie Goldstein, Renaissance Computer Systems, Ltd.
10:30 a.m.
How does Visual Studio 2005 scale from RAD Data to more advanced scenarios? We’ll discuss how the new Data Features build upon, not change, the features we shipped in Visual Studio .NET 2003. We’ll demonstrate how you can leverage the designer to scale your initial prototypes to full-scale applications. We’ll drill into the new typed DataAdapter features of the Data Set Designer and some common ways to extend these classes with partial classes for advanced scenarios such as transactional updates.

Smart Client: Architecture
Billy Hollis, DotNetMasters
10:30 a.m.
Find out how to design the layers within the client. Learn how to control how clients get, use, validate, and send back data. We'll also cover designing for offline operations, componentizing functionality, and how to take advantage of the stateful nature of smart clients.

DataBinding with Objects in Visual Studio 2005
Jackie Goldstein, Renaissance Computer Systems
11:45 a.m.
Visual Studio 2005 now provides rich DataBinding support with your own custom business objects. We'll drill down into the new, lower bar to participate design time object DataBinding. Another important aspect of DataBinding is the support for data that just happens to be null. We'll cover new support for DBNull within DataBinding as well as support for Nullable (Of T), which enables developers to express a DateTime datatype without a known value. Finally, we'll cover creating custom controls that can leverage the new Drag Once DataBinding features of Visual Studio 2005.

Team-Based Development
Rocky Lhotka, Magenic Technologies
11:45 a.m.
Team-based development is more than just application design and coding. We need to deal with issues such as team communication, issue tracking, configuration management, unit testing, run-time logging, exception handling, security integration and many others. 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.

Application & User Configuration
Rocky Lhotka, Magenic Technologies
4:30 p.m.
Learn how to use the Microsoft Configuration Application Block to help manage application configuration settings in both Windows and Web applications. This block includes support for encryption of data, as well as writing data back into your Web.config or App.config files. Then learn how to use similar concepts to manage user-specific settings for your Windows Forms applications. The App.config file stores global settings, but not per-user settings. You’ll learn techniques to conveniently manage and store per-user settings using XML, Isolated Storage, or the Windows Registry. These are concepts you can immediately apply to your Windows development.

Smart Clients 2.0: What's new in Visual Studio 2005 Forms?
Walt Ritscher, Scandiasoft
2 p.m.
Arguably the most visible set of new features to be added to .NET Framework 2.0 will be the enhanced support for Rich Client applications. As enhancements to the Base Class Libraries (BCL) in the WinForms namespace, dozens of new controls and features have been added to support dynamic layout, more powerful data binding, richer editing and formatting, and more support for enhancing the overall user experience in your own applications. See why rich client applications will be even more powerful with the Framework 2.0 release.

Advanced ADO.NET/ADO.NET 2.0
Andrew Brust, Citigate Hudson
3:15 p.m.
Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework have been out for more than two years now, but there are still advanced features in ADO.NET (such as parameter binding, table mapping, transactional DataAdapters, auto-refreshed Datasets, and rich XML functionality) that many developers are not aware of. Additionally, through early pre-releases of Visual Studio 2005, we now have a chance to see what ADO.NET 2.0 will look like and what new features it will bring, including server-side data access programming for SQL Server 205 (codename “Yukon“).This session examines these advanced ADO.NET 1.X and 2.0 features so you can start using them in your own applications.

Fit & Finish for Professional Applications
Brian Randell, MCW Technologies
3:15 p.m.
Often it's the little things that get overlooked when finishing your rich Windows applications. Learn how you can build client applications that are both smart looking and behave intelligently. Acquire tips and tricks for storing user and application settings, learn how to gather system information to make your client smart in the connected/disconnected world, discover how data caching can improve application performance, and see how using multi-threading correctly can make your application stand out from the rest. Plus, we'll look to the future and see what new features in Visual Studio .NET 2005 make it even easier!

Getting Ready for ADO.NET 2.0
Kevin McNeish, Oakleaf Enterprises
4:30 p.m.
This session helps you get ready for ADO.NET 2.0 by introducing and explaining many new features including asynchronous data fetching, data paging, bulk import, monitoring of connection-specific statistics, and connection pooling enhancements. You will also learn about new SQL Server 2005-specific capabilities in ADO.NET 2.0 such as multiple-active result sets, password changing, promotable transactions, client-failover, and support for user-defined types and other new data types. Practical examples and tips are provided demonstrating how to get the most out of these new features.

Smart Windows Services: Headless Smart Clients
Derek Hatchard, Ardent Development
4:30 p.m.
Smart clients are the evolution of desktop applications with compelling features such as simple deployment and the ability to intelligently connect to remote services / data sources. Some of the features and techniques of smart client development can also be applied to Windows services to create “headless smart clients” that can be easily deployed / updated (for example, as part of a SOA-based solution). This session explains how smart client concepts can be applied to Windows services and demonstrates how to dynamically download / load / unload functionality without restarting an application and how “smart services” can be deployed.