Full Day Workshops

Choose from a broad range of content and topics by expert presenters. VSLive!’s pre- and post-conference workshops give you more technical content than most development conferences’ entire programs.

Pre-Conference — Sunday March 25

Build Distributed Object-Oriented Apps in .NET 3.0
Rockford Lhotka, Magenic Technologies
In this workshop you will learn how to design Windows, Web and Web Service-based applications that have a reusable business layer composed of objects. You’ll learn how to achieve high levels of reuse, scalability, long-term maintainability, and other benefits. Learn how to apply WCF, WF, WPF, System.Transactions, generic, and data binding when building distributed applications on .NET.

Making the Tough Choices: Selecting the Right Techniques for Your Application
Deborah Kurata, InStep Technologies, Inc.
Visual Studio and the .NET Framework allow you to do so many things in so many different ways. The question you frequently face is: “Which way do I do it in my application?” The common answer of “It depends” just does not cut it. You don’t have time to make the wrong choice. You need to know which technique is right for you and for your application.

This workshop will cover many of the tough choices you face, and provide clear criteria on selecting the right tools and techniques for your application. It will provide guidance on selecting the appropriate set of classes for your application. It will look at inheritance-based, interface-based, and attribute-based techniques to clearly delineate the best time to use each. And much, much more. You will leave with a good sense of how to make the tough choices and develop applications that are easier to build, test, and maintain.

Getting the Most Mileage out of Team System: The Developer’s Perspective
Benjamin Day, Benjamin Day ConsultingOk, you’ve heard all the Microsoft claims about Visual Studio Team System/Team Foundation Server, its features and benefits, and what it’ll do for you: blah, blah, blah. The question is: as a Developer, what do you need to know about Team System to be more productive? Visual Studio Team System is out there and it’s got a ton of features.  It’s supposed to be great for developers, but where do you start?  What do you really need to know?  More importantly, what do you need to know as a developer to be more productive? 

Bottom line: Team System is all about you writing high-quality code.  When you write quality code, you catch problems early and you try to make sure that those problems never come back.   

In this tutorial, Ben will explore how Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server can help you to write quality code. 

We’ll start with unit testing: What is unit testing?  What is Test-Driven Development?  What are all different test types?  How do you design for testability? What are good tests vs. poorly designed tests? What’s a “mock” object?  How do you test user interface functionality?  What’s code coverage?  Why would you want to use code profiling on your unit tests?  What’s the best way to unit test your stored procedures?

Next, we’ll talk about managing your code with Team Foundation Server source control: How do you ensure that your code base is clean?  How do you keep people from breaking the build?  What’s “continuous integration?"  How to use check-in policies to avoid source control anarchy?  Why use Static Code Analysis?  How do you use branching and merging to manage multiple versions of an application?  What’s a shelveset – and why does it take care of the “hit-by-a-bus factor?”

Then we’ll cover how Visual Studio Team System helps you manage your database code:  How can you manage databases with Team Foundation Server source control?  How do you manage new versions of the database schema?  What’s the best way to get test data?  Why is “Rename Refactoring” better than CTRL-H (Find & Replace)?

Finally, we’ll discuss the Team Foundation Server build system: What’s a Team Build?  What’s MSBuild?  What’s a build script?  How do “desktop builds” fit in? 

When we’re done, you’ll have learned the Developer-centric features in Team System that leverage unit testing, source control, and Team Builds to be highly productive and develop high-quality software.

SQL Server 2005: Power to the Developer
Brian A. Randell, MCW Technologies
SQL Server 2005 is a monumental release for developers. But where do you start? How do you get the most out of this monster product? In this workshop you'll get those questions and more answered.

You'll learn first about correct installation and configuration--what do you mean “I don't just accept the defaults?” You'll learn how to define your schema using the built-in tools, design tools like Visio, and the new Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals product. You'll learn about security up front so you can build it in "by design.” You'll learn all about the CLR and .NET Framework integration and whether it's right for you. You'll learn about the new support for XML, and more importantly when you should use it. You'll learn about correct transaction management and how to take advantage of features added to the SQL Client stack. Finally, you'll learn how to "make it go faster" - performance and your SQL Server applications.

This workshop will focus on the SQL Server 2005 product using both Windows Forms and ASP.NET clients in both client-server and n-tier mode with business objects.

Post-Conference — Thursday March 29

Windows Workflow: A Gentle Introduction
Kenneth Getz, KNG Consulting, Inc.
Windows Workflow makes it possible to incorporate workflow behaviors into your own applications, without needing to provide your own infrastructure and "plumbing". This workshop introduces the basics of Windows Workflow, and demonstrates how to create, debug, and host workflows within your applications. Using the workflow extensions for Visual Studio 2005, you’ll learn how to take advantage of Windows Workflow, creating new workflow activities, reacting to events, and hosting the workflows. If you’re interested in adopting this powerful new technology, you need to attend this workshop.

Windows Presentation Foundation: From the Ground Up
Billy Hollis
If you're ready to start programming in WPF, or you just want to see what it's good for and evaluate it for your projects, then this workshop can be your first step. We'll begin with the very basics - built-in controls, basics of XAML, and how to do user interfaces with adaptive, scalable layout. Then we'll look at interactive features such as animation and media, and then onto styling, how to use the designers (including Expression Interactive Designer), how to build your own WPF controls, and more. We'll take a short look at doing 3D constructs in WPF, and then finish off with a discussion of user scenarios for WPF and the relevant technologies that are important for each.

Advanced C#: Moving up to LINQ, WCF and Framework 3.0
Richard Hale Shaw, Richard Hale Shaw Group
The wait for WCF, WPF and WF is over: they're here, real and ready-to use today. And LINQ (along with C# 3.0) is on the horizon: leveraging the power of C# 2.0 Iterators and Anonymous Methods, it won't be long before Lambda Expressions, Extension Methods and the LINQ libraries will be de riguer. How should you best prepare for these new technologies? What are the best ways to leverage C# 2.0 features while anticipating the move to 3.0? How should you go about Service-enabling your applications and components to use WCF? When should you replace your Remoting and .ASMX applications with it?

In this workshop, we’ll spend a day using VS2005, .NET 3.0, and the latest CTPs/Betas of Orcas (the next release of Visual Studio) building live code examples (which you’ll get a copy of, afterwards) to get answers.

We’ll start C# 2.0 Custom Iterators: how can you use the PipeLine Pattern to wire them together the way LINQ wires together SQL Where and OrderBy clauses? What will LINQ do differently - and how? Then we'll move to Anonymous Methods: where should you use them, anticipating Lambda Expressions when C# 3.0 arrives? What opportunities will you have once Lambdas are finally here?

We'll also look at patterns for refactoring existing C# code to apply Generics and eliminate unnecessary methods, properties and classes. And we'll dig into the Framework itself to find examples of bottlenecks that you'll want to eliminate in your own code.

Finally, we'll take up WCF: how can you service-enable your layers to make them more malleable, adaptable and versionable?

By the end of the day, you’ll have a much deeper understanding of C# 3.0, Framework 3.0, WCF, and the Patterns and Practices for leveraging them.

(Prerequisites: you must already have 1 year of C# development experience with VS2005 and .NET Framework 2.0: no hand-holding if you don't. While .NET 3.0/C# 2.0 experience is not required, you may find it useful to bring a laptop with VS2005 and the latest CTP pre-installed.)