Full-Day Workshops

Pre-Conference — June 21

Build Object Oriented Applications with .NET
Rockford Lhotka, Magenic Technologies
Be among the first to get an in-depth look at the concepts and techniques from Rockford Lhotka's Expert VB 2005 and C# 2005 Business Objects books on distributed business object programming updated for .NET 2.0. 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. Learn how to apply System.Transactions, generics, new ADO.NET features, data binding and WinFX when building distributed applications on .NET 2.0.

SharePoint for Developers
Paul Sheriff, PDSA, Inc.
Microsoft SharePoint is a great tool for creating team web sites for document storage, lists, news, meetings, announcements and anything related to company business. There are a lot of pieces to SharePoint and most books try to cover everything and as a result, don't really show you how to build anything that works for a business. This seminar will show you step-by-step how to create a SharePoint Portal and team sites. In addition you will learn to create Web Parts, the best way to deploy web sites, how to use Web Services to interact with SharePoint and how to customize the look and feel of SharePoint.

Prerequisites: A basic knowledge of SharePoint; a good knowledge of .NET and creating ASP.NET controls.

Build a VB 2005 Application in a Day
Ken Getz, MCW Technologies
Are you just getting started with Visual Studio 2005? New to the entire .NET thing? Trying to remember stuff you learned two years ago, then got buried in "real" work and never used? If you're a current or reformed VB6 developer, and are ready to make the leap into Visual Studio 2005, you're ready for this workshop. Brian and Ken will lead you on a roller coaster ride through as many .NET features as they can fit into a single application, in a single day. By the end of the day, they'll have covered everything from an intro to .NET in general, through specific .NET framework classes, making a quick tour through ADO.NET, Windows and Web application development, all the way through Web Services. Watch out for MSMQ (Microsoft Message Queuing) around that corner! It, too, makes up part of the completed application. By the end of the day, you might feel like you've been on a 9-hour roller coaster ride, but subconsciously, you'll be prepared for the sessions in the rest of the conference, and for hitting the road running with Visual Basic and Visual Studio 2005.

Programming with Windows Communication Foundation ("Indigo")
Aaron Skonnard, Pluralsight
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), codename “Indigo,” is Microsoft’s next-generation platform for building connected systems using .NET. WCF makes it possible to build secure, reliable, and transacted systems through a simplified programming model that unifies and extends many of the previous .NET technologies including ASP.NET Web Services (ASMX), WSE, .NET Remoting, .NET Enterprise Services, and System.Messaging. WCF is sure to change the way every .NET developer builds connected systems in the years ahead. This workshop provides fast-paced exposure to WCF and teaches you how to get started today.

What you should expect to learn:
This course will help you understand the design principles underlying WCF, but it will also teach you the most practical aspects of using WCF today. You’ll learn about the WCF programming model and how to configure security, reliability, transaction supports. You’ll learn how to host services in different types of applications and over different communication protocols, while using SOAP and Web services standards when interoperability are necessary. By the end of the workshop you will feel comfortable tackling the most common WCF programming challenges.

Post-Conference — June 24

Building Maintainable, Scalable Sites with ASP.NET 2.0
Fritz Onion, Pluralsight
This day-long tutorial will walk you through many of the features of ASP.NET 2.0 that aid in building scalable enterprise applications. We will focus on features that improve reuse and efficiency, including data access layer construction, custom providers, and the many caching features of ASP.NET 2.0. Attendees will come away with a solid understanding of how to build sites that scale well and are easy to modify using the many supporting features of ASP.NET 2.0. Attendees will also take away a complete sample Web site built in ASP.NET 2.0 that incorporates all of the features and guidelines discussed in the tutorial.

ADO .NET 2.0 Coding and Best Practices for SQL Server 2005
Bill Vaughn, Beta V Corp.
This workshop leverages Bill Vaughn’s years of experience working with and writing about data access interfaces including COM-based ADO “classic” (ADOc) and ADO.NET. Bill has been working in the industry for over 30 years—14 of those at Microsoft. He’s written 11 books on data access technology as well as countless articles focusing on Visual Basic and Visual Basic.NET, Visual Studio, SQL Server and the software that connects them. As many can attest, Bill’s sessions are entertaining, lively forums that leave developers with an honest and technically solid understanding of the latest Microsoft technology. While sometimes irreverent, Bill is not shy to point out the best and worst of the technology—he’s well known for his no-holds-barred but straightforward critiques of ADO and the Visual Studio tools. This is not a marketing talk. When you’re done, you’ll know what works and what doesn’t.

Advanced C#: Patterns and Practices in .NET Framework 2.0
Richard Hale Shaw, Richard Hale Shaw Group
The arrival of .NET Framework 2.0 brings with it a whole host of Best Practices and Patterns you should utilize and take advantage of: what classes and members should you use instead of those in .NET 1.x? How best to leverage Generics, Iterators and Nullable Types? And how best to streamline your class libraries to make them better quality, more reusable and extensible? In this tutorial, we’ll spend a day using VS2005 to build live code examples (which you’ll get a copy of, afterwards) to get answers.

We’ll start with Generics, how to apply them and how the Type class has been extended to detect and consume them. You’ll learn how to build Generic classes, methods interfaces and Delegates. We’ll delve into Generic Constraints and the classes and interfaces in System.Collections.Generic. We’ll also examine how to apply Generics to Serialization and Remoting. Finally, you’ll learn Best Practices—when you should and shouldn’t use Generics, and some do’s and don’ts for how to apply them.

Then we’ll turn to Iterators: we’ll learn how Iterators work, how to define them, when to have them return IEnumerator vs. IEnumerable (or their Generic counterparts), and how to use the new yield keyword. You’ll even learn how to use recursion to create truly powerful Iterator objects. After that, we’ll review a number of new C# 2.0 and Framework 2.0 features, including: Nullable Types, Anonymous Methods, Reference Aliases, Friend Assemblies, and other powerful Framework 2.0 features.

Then we’ll dive into the Framework Design Guidelines: how do you create types and members that are best designed for re-usability, when should you create types that are extensible – and how – and (horrors!) what naming conventions should you apply?

By the end of the day, you’ll have a much deeper understanding of C# 2.0, Framework 2.0, the Framework Design Guidelines, and Patterns and Practices for leveraging them.

Prerequisites: you must already have 1 year of C# development experience with VS.NET 2003 and .NET Framework 1.x: no hand-holding if you don't. While .NET 2.0/C# 2.0 experience is not required, you may find it useful to bring a laptop with VS2005 pre-installed.

Advanced Windows Forms
Keith Pleas, Guided Design and Billy Hollis, DotNetMasters
Ready to move beyond the basics of forms-based applications? Learn advanced techniques with real-world examples in this Black Belt session on Windows Forms. You’ll discover capabilities you never knew existed, learn to use advanced OO capabilities in Windows Forms, find out how to build large, complex Windows Forms applications, and get an advanced look at the changes in Windows Forms 2.0 for Visual Studio 2005. The workshop will include several production-ready components and examples for you to use in your own projects.