Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Beyond .NET 3.0: Vista and the Managed Developer, Intermediate
Brian Randell
10:30 a.m.
While .NET 3.0 provides great new features for managed developers on Vista, there are many great areas that require just a bit of extra work. Yes it may be P/Invoke or COM Interop, but you're hard core. So come along as we see what's out there and how we can get to it! We'll look at the new RSS APIs, Power Management for mobile desktops, Sidebar Gadgets, the Restart Manager, and more. If you want to build the richest, managed Vista applications, this talk is for you.

Implementing SOA Design Patterns with WCF, Advanced
Rob Daigneau
Both Service-Orientation and the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) offer the promise of greater interoperability and ease of integration, but in order to realize benefits such as these we must evolve the way we architect solutions. While many of the lessons learned from Distributed Object-Oriented Architectures can be leveraged, much of what we did “back in the day” will not help us to achieve the goals of SOA even if we choose to use the WCF. In fact, many of the old ways have become Anti-Patterns.

In this session you’ll see how the WCF can be leveraged to create extensible, versioned, responsive, interoperable, and easy-to-maintain services. We’ll also see how Microsoft’s “Web Service Software Factory” might help or hinder us in our efforts.

Windows Presentation Foundation: Making it Real, Intermediate
Billy Hollis
2:00 p.m.
You've seen enough WPF demo applications. Now you're ready to see something close to a real world application, so you begin to understand what WPF's real advantages are. This session presents two simplified real-world WPF apps - a browser-based shopping application, and an RSS reader with a scalable, interactive user interface. We'll analyze the technologies that made them possible, and discuss the obstacles to doing your first real-world WPF application. This session presumes that you have seen an introductory session on WPF and XAML.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) for .ASMX and Remoting Developers, Intermediate       
Richard Hale Shaw
3:15 p.m.
NET Web Services (.ASMX) are great -- so long as you don't mind that they lack high fidelity to .NET data types, have no built-in support for security or transactions, and only offer HTTP/SOAP endpoints. Oh, yeah, they can be kind of slow. .NET Remoting, on the other hand, can service binary protocols, offers greater fidelity to .NET data types, and is relatively performant. But Remoting isn't cross-platform where .ASMX services are, and still doesn't directly address security or transactions. And neither .ASMX services nor Remoting objects are compatible: each has its own, distinct programming model.

Enter WCF: while "packaged" into Windows Vista, WCF is a .NET 3.0 technology that runs on Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. And what .ASMX and Remoting lack, WCF delivers: it directly addresses security and transaction issues, and offers a single programming model while supporting both binary and SOAP endpoints. In this session, Richard will introduce key WCF concepts geared to .ASMX and Remoting programmers who're ready to begin migrating to .NET 3.0.

Introduction to Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation, Introductory
Michael Stiefel
4:30 p.m.
What do email, meeting planning, document approval, budgeting, manufacturing processes, resource planning, and product lifecycle management have in common? Work flow: long running, complex business processes that interact with human decision making. But traditional, conventional programming techniques require you to spend an enormous amount of time building your workflow infrastructure before you write a line of application code. Fortunately, there’s a solution: Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) arrived with .NET Framework 3.0, and offers a programming solution that lets you focus on writing business workflows immediately, without having to solve the difficult problems of workflow plumbing. In this session, I will introduce the fundamentals of building workflow applications.
 
Using an example of a simple business process, I will show you how to build a simple workflow application. I will also explain the fundamental parts of WF such as hosts, workflow, the activities and the basic workflow patterns.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Creating Custom WCF Behaviors, Advanced
Rob Daigneau
10:30 a.m.
Custom behaviors provide a mechanism to modify the WCF runtime execution at the proxy (i.e. client) or dispatcher (i.e. service) via attributes, configurations, and even programmatic means. This powerful technique may be used to inject common and “cross-cutting” logic upon Services, Contracts, Endpoints, and Operations, which in turn yields limitless possibilities.

In this session we will explore how WCF custom behaviors might be leveraged to implement a concept similar to Aspects. You'll learn how this powerful feature can be used to apply cross-cutting logic to your services in a manner that is both simple to understand and implement. You'll also see that the concepts of SOA, OOP, and AOP (i.e. Aspect-Oriented Programming) should be thought of as being complementary rather than competing.

Building Custom Controls in WPF, Intermediate
Mark Miller
11:45 a.m.
Create custom controls that exploit key features of the WPF framework. Shapes, adorners, decorators, layout controls, and standard descendants will all be covered. We'll also talk about templates, styles, triggers, and data binding. All examples will follow WPF conventions to create lookless controls that maximize restyling opportunities.

Using the Windows Workflow Foundation Rules Engine as a Stand Alone Rules Engine, Advanced
Michael Stiefel
2:00 p.m.
Windows Workflow Rules Engine can be used independently of a workflow. Application developers can use this rule engine to model their business rules without the need to build a workflow application. The goal of this session is give architects enough information about using the Rules Engine so that they can use it in their applications and services. Some of the challenges of using the WF Rules Engine that are discussed are true even if the engine is used as part of a workflow.

Up to now there has been no Rules Engine that shipped as part of the Windows platform despite the fact that business rules are an essential part of many software applications. Now, however, the Rules Engine that ships as part of the
Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) can be used as a component of any application without having to use the workflow runtime or build a workflow. This talk explains how to solve the challenges that exist in using the engine in this fashion. You have to understand how to design and code the integration and connection of the Rules Engine with your application. You have to understand how to incorporate modified rule sets into your application without having to rebuild the application. You have to understand how to architect and build an application that allows you to edit the rules outside of your application. While you can host the rules editor that ships with WF, it is a tool that does not fully exploit the expressive power of a rule. In addition, it is a programmer’s tool that cannot be used by a business analyst. No facility for rules management exists. You will have to build your own, and decide how you want to handle the versioning of rule sets. You also have to understand how to define rules in terms of your application’s domain knowledge if you want to maximize the flexibility of rules in your application. Understanding WF is helpful for this talk, but it is not a prerequisite.

WPF with Expression Interactive Designer and Visual Studio, Intermediate
Billy Hollis
3:15 p.m.
While the next version of Visual Studio will have a basic designer for user interfaces in Windows Presentation Foundation, gaining full access to the WPF feature set will require using Expression Interactive Designer. Though Expression can be used by non-programming visual designers, many developers who specialize in UI design will need to learn to use it too. This session explores using Expression for interactive UI design, and using the resulting XAML template in Visual Studio to create the code-behind.

Best Practices for Designing and Building SOA Applications with WCF, Intermediate
Richard Hale Shaw
4:30 p.m.
Just 'cause it's new doesn't mean it's good: "Indigo" was re-designed 3 times before it became WCF. Just 'cause you can do it that way doesn't mean you should: yeah, you can create WCF contracts that look and behave just like some Remoting and .ASMX Services, but why should you? What's the best way to get started with WCF? When should you use SOA approaches to contract design -- and why? How do you accommodate versioning your contracts? And what's the controversy over Data Contracts, anyway? In this session, Richard will address the topics and more. We'll look at the shoulds and shouldn'ts, dos and don'ts for WCF development, and how you can start leveraging this powerful new technology to service-enable your distributed application development.