VSC01: Securing WPF Client Applications
Brian Noyes
Writing a client application that allows the user to log in and then restricting access to what parts of the application the user can use is a common requirement. But too many people spin their own solutions without fully leveraging what is already there for you in the framework. In this session, you will learn how to fully leverage Principals, Identities, the Client Application Services framework, WCF Service security, and other forms of security available to you to keep your users from doing things they shouldn’t in your WPF apps.

MICROSOFT DAY - VISUAL STUDIO

VMS01: Building Business Applications with Visual Studio LightSwitch
Orville McDonald
Visual Studio LightSwitch is the simplest way to build business applications for the desktop and cloud. LightSwitch simplifies the development process by letting you concentrate on the business logic, while LightSwitch handles the common tasks for you. In this demo-heavy session, you will see, end-to-end, how to build and deploy a data-centric business application using LightSwitch. After that you will discover what is under the hood to better understand the architecture of a LightSwitch application. Finally you will learn how you can use Visual Studio 2010 Professional and Expression Blend 4 to customize and extend its UI and Data layers for when the application’s requirements grow beyond what is supported by default.

VMS04: Building Modern Line-of-Business Applications with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional
Orville McDonald
In this demo-intensive session we take a look at improved support in Visual Studio 2010 for building distributed business applications. We focus on Visual Studio support for building rich client experiences with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Microsoft Silverlight, creating and consuming WCF services, sharing business validation rules between client and server, implementing local caching of read-only data on the client, and sharing common application services like authentication and authorization between Windows and Web client applications. Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 raised the productivity bar for business application developers. Visual Studio 2010 builds on that foundation bringing unmatched productivity gains to distributed business application developers.

VMS03: C# 4 New Features
Alexandru Ghiondea
This session covers features introduced in C# 4.0, including a new type (dynamic), named and optional arguments, and embedded type information. While the heritage of C# is as a static language, many objects in the programming world are more dynamic, originating from COM, JavaScript, Python, or other sources. The 4.0 version of C# introduces features that make interaction with that world painless. Features like dynamic, named and optional, and embedded type information enhance the experience of working with COM and dynamic objects to the point where it feels like you never left the static world.

VMS02: Visual Basic 2010 Overview
Anthony D. Green
Come learn about language enhancements in Visual Basic 10.0 and some golden nuggets in .NET 4 and how you can leverage the two together in the new Visual Studio 2010 IDE to solve problems better, express complex concepts easier, and write killer apps faster than ever. Statement lambdas, array literals, and interoperability with dynamic languages are a few language features you can expect to learn about. Demo applications will cover a variety of technologies, including WPF, Silverlight, Speech Synthesis, and the Task Parallel Library. We’ll also save time for Q&A and cover any questions you may have for the Visual Basic product team.

LANGUAGES

VTL03: .NET 4.0 - New Features in Languages and the Framework
Kathleen Dollard
Each release of .NET brings new features that affect how we write code. This version of .NET has several improvements to the .NET Framework including new data types, support for code contracts, a new garbage collector, dynamic language support, better interop, co-variance and contra-variance. The C# and Visual Basic languages surface several of these framework changes, and each receives a handful of new features that bring the two languages closer to parity. While the two languages remain distinct, the merging of the teams has created an opportunity for unified vision with new features being contemplated for both languages and future features generally being included in both languages. Come see how your core tool evolved with this iteration of .NET’s ongoing evolution.

ARCHITECTURE, PATTERNS & PRACTICES

VAR02: A Modular Approach to Development Process
Juval Lowy
Architects always strive for modularity to achieve extensibility, maintainability and reuse. The technology for the modules, the glue, changes over time, from objects, to .NET to WCF. And yet, all of these introduce inherit complexity. When you design a highly modular system, it would be naive of you to expect that the only things you will do differently will be limited to design and technology. The development process itself needs to be modular, accommodating the complexity of the modules as a system. In this intense session, Juval will share his original techniques, metrics and ideas, all practiced in real life, allowing for a module-oriented development process. This session presents a battle-harden development process that you can immediately apply to achieve robust applications, manage requirements and ensure faster time to market. You will also see how the various team members – the architect, the project manager and developers should work in concert, and their respective tasks and responsibilities towards the modules.

VAR01: Taking Advantage of Architectural Tools
Kathleen Dollard
Some of the most exciting features of the Ultimate version of Visual Studio support architectural view of code. This isn’t just relevant to architects – these tools allow coders to more rapidly create code, understand existing code and validate code against certain types of architectural rules. You’ll see how to explore an application with the Architect Explorer, generate code from a UML Class diagram, understand existing code with sequence diagrams, and evaluate several scenarios with directed graphs. Directed graphs aren’t just for dependencies – you can use them for other containment visualizations, such as visualizing the contents of Managed Extensibility Framework containers. Layer diagrams describe isolation patterns in your architecture and you can create them during initial phases of your app, or generate them from an existing application. You can set rules for how layers interact and validate your code base against these layering rules. You’ll see aspects of the architect from a both a top-down design first perspective and bottom-up perspective that helps your team communicate and evolve existing code.

LIVE

VLV01: .NET Rocks! Live
Richard Campbell
Carl Franklin
Come watch Carl and Richard interview the movers and shakers of the .NET industry at this live recording of .NET Rocks - the Internet audio talk show for developers. Check the web site close to the show date for announcement of the guest.

UI DESIGN

VUI01: Using Natural User Interface (NUI) Technologies to Improve User Experience
Tim Huckaby
This session will demonstrate how multi-touch enabled applications can be used in multiple vertical industries to improve the communication, education, collaboration, and experience overall across the software continuum. The user experience demonstrations will highlight the use of these Microsoft technologies:
• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) can be used to visualize data. WPF is the next-generation presentation sub-system for Windows. It provides .NET developers and designers with a unified programming model for building rich Windows smart client user experiences that incorporate UI, media, and documents.
• Windows 7 Touch - Windows 7 offers more choice in how users interact with their PCs, such as through MultiTouch gestures. With WPF support for Windows 7 MultiTouch .NET programmers have a revolutionary new way to build interactive user experiences.
• Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. And with its 3.0 version it is multi-touch capable.
• Microsoft Surface is a multi-touch product from Microsoft which is developed as a software and hardware combination technology that allows a user, or multiple users, to manipulate digital content by the use of natural motions, hand gestures, or physical objects by the use of natural motions, hand gestures, or physical objects.

WINDOWS PRESENTATION FOUNDATION

VWP04: Build Composite WPF and Silverlight Applications with Prism
Brian Noyes
Building composite apps that are easier to maintain, test, and extend is a great goal, but having some patterns and code to help you get there is even better. The Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight (aka Prism) gives you just that. In this session, you’ll learn how Prism can support you with modular apps that have dynamic UI composition and loosely coupled communications. You’ll also learn a little about the next version of Prism that is due out in the fall, and how it adds more focus on MVVM and MEF integration.

VWP03: Building Data Visualization Applications with the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight
Tim Huckaby
This session will be heavily demo-focused to accentuate how the power of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Microsoft Silverlight can be used to visualize data to produce amazing software. WPF is the next-generation presentation sub-system for Windows. Silverlight is a broad reach sub-set of WPF that runs cross platform in the browser. These two XAML based developer technologies provide developers and designers with a unified programming model for building rich Windows client and RIA (Rich Internet Application) user experiences that incorporate UI, media, and documents. WPF & Silverlight use vector-based graphics rendering, which results in better graphics and presentation for an application. WPF & Silverlight also have other consistent features such as layout, styling, and data binding, which, when you mix with interactivity, enables scenarios such as interactive data visualization. When you put all this together, you have a unified API for various presentation components, such as 2D and 3D documents and declarative programming through XAML, which is a powerful platform for data visualization that can be used to really “light-up” you enterprise and Internet applications. These XAML-based developer technologies are manifested in three major application platforms (Windows Client (WPF), Silverlight & Microsoft Surface) and all will be covered in this session at some level.

VWP02: Develop Business Application Screens in WPF
Paul D. Sheriff
WPF is an incredible tool for developing business applications! If you are a Windows Forms or VB6 developer, you probably already have a standard look and feel for your applications. Learn how to create standard business application forms using XAML and WPF. You will see how to create a shell for hosting windows and user controls, how to create login and about forms and even a standard add, edit, delete form. You will walk away with tons of samples that you can put to use right away.

VWP01: New WPF 4 Features in Visual Studio 2010
Ken Getz
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) 4 provide a host of new features, including the Visual State Manager, new controls, a freshly redesigned designer, and more. This session gets developers, both new and experienced with WPF, up to speed on some of the most popular new features.

WINDOWS COMMUNICATION FOUNDATION

VWC02: Build N-Tier Silverlight Data Applications Easily with WCF RIA Services
Brian Noyes
Building a service-based data application sounds like something big and scary when you are first adopting .NET, but WCF RIA Services takes the fear factor out of the equation. RIA Services allows you to just focus on the data and logic you need and will generate the right code on the client and server side to make that happen. RIA services takes a wizard- and code generation-based approach to provide a prescriptive pattern for building rich data-driven Silveright applications in minimal time that are supported by back end services that you don’t have to write – you just write the data access and business logic and the services that wrap them are generated for you along with the consuming code on the client side. This session will take you through an end-to-end tour of building apps with WCF RIA Services.

VWC01: Discover a New WCF with Discovery
Juval Lowy
Up until WCF 4.0, the service address had to be known in advance to the client. This complicated deployment and run time configuration. In addition, the service had no way of knowing that its port or pipe is available for use in the first place. With WCF 4.0, you can use service address discovery to address both issues. The client can discover at run time the service address, and the service can pick up any available address on the fly. WCF also offers announcements of the service when its goes on or off line, and scoping the discovered services. Moreover, it turns out that discovery opens the door for new ways of composing applications and new design patterns of distributing information in the system. This session starts by discussing the basic support of discovery in WCF and then presents helper classes that streamline the interaction with discovery both on the client and the service side and the related design patterns, including a framework for a discovery-based publish-subscribe system.

VIRTUALIZATION

VIR01: Virtualize TFS 2010 with Hyper-V R2  
Brian Randell
Virtualization has changed the way IT runs things. Why shouldn’t developers do it too? In this session, come learn how you can correctly virtualize your TFS development environment using Hyper-V running on Windows Server 2008 R2. You’ll first learn about picking the right hardware. Then, you’ll learn about performance best practices, high-availability strategies, and management best practices. In addition, you’ll learn how developers can use virtulization for great development and test flexibility at their desktop. You’ll learn how you can virtualize not only your TFS Server, but developer workstations, build servers, test servers, and more.

OFFICE DEVELOPMENT WITH VISUAL STUDIO

VOF01: Integrating WPF & WCF into Your Office Business Applications
Tim Huckaby
This session will highlight many of the ways that the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and the Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) can be leveraged in Office applications built with Visual Studio 2010 Tools for the Office System (VSTO). Visual Studio 2010 offers an array of new features aimed at a wide range of Office solution types. With Visual Studio 2010, you can build solutions that incorporate the native capabilities of the Office client applications (like Outlook) combined with the sophisticated UI capabilities of WPF that’s connected to remote data and services via WCF and use the RAD features of LINQ to manipulate that data. These new technologies provide opportunities for building powerful solutions with functionality that was previously difficult or impossible to achieve. Now that Office has evolved into a true development platform, Office-based solutions are becoming increasingly sophisticated, less document-focused, and more loosely coupled. This session will show you how easy it is to build robust solutions that leverage the latest technologies.

TESTING

VTE01: Code Correctness and Smart Tools for .NET Developers
Dino Esposito
Software contracts are not a new concept but only now it finds a widespread implementation in fundamental frameworks like .NET. In .NET 4, Code Contracts is an API that helps and encourages developers to formalize and assert under which condition each method is expected to run, which conditions it ensures will be verified at the end and which conditions always hold during the life of the object. This information can be consumed in many ways. It is helpful for statically checking the correctness of the code; it represents a form of exception handling; it can simply be part of the software specifications. Finally, it can be input to some smart test generator tools. This session offers an overview of the Code Contracts API in .NET 4 and keeps an eye on emerging semantic tools like Pex to generate ad hoc tests.

VTE02: Kill Bugs Faster and Build and Run Your Virtual Test Lab Using Microsoft Visual Studio Lab Management 2010
Brian Randell
Developers. Testers. Project Managers. Pointy Haired Bosses. Come one, come all, and learn how you add a new tool to your kit to find a kill bugs faster. Watch as Brian fires up Microsoft’s new Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 with Team Foundation Server 2010. He’ll use this to create a virtual test environment on top of Hyper-V that mimics a production environment. Something you can do whether an in-house configuration or one at your customers. Using the Build features of Team Foundation Server 2010 with Team Lab, you can automate the deployment of a single virtual machine or an entire virtual domain and Brian will show you how. Then you can execute automated tests in this virtual environment to increase your automated test coverage. In addition, your testers can use the virtual environment to run manual tests. Finally, the best part of all of this is that if a bug is found, they can snapshot the virtual environment and provide that to a developer so they can ferret out the bug right where it reared its ugly head. Brian will show you this too and show you why you’ll want to create your own virtual test lab and manage it with Visual Studio Lab Management.

CLOUD COMPUTING

VCL01: Introducing the Azure AppFabric Service Bus
Juval Lowy
The services bus is arguably the most accessible, ready to use, powerful, and needed piece of cloud computing. The service bus allows clients to connects to services across any machine, network, firewall, NAT, routers, load balancers, virtualization, IP and DNS as if they were part of the same local network, and doing all that without compromising on the programming model or security. The service bus also supports callbacks, event publishing, authentication and authorization and doing all that in a WCF-friendly manner. This session will present the service bus programming model, how to configure and administer service bus solutions, working with the dedicated relay bindings including the available communication modes, relying on authentication in the cloud for local services and the various authentication options, and how to provide for end-to-end security through the relay service. You will also see some advanced WCF programming techniques, original helper classes, productivity-enhancing utilities and tools, as well as discussion of design best practices and pitfalls.

VCL02: Rocking AppFabric Access Control: Practical Scenarios, Killer Code and Wicked Tools
Michele Leroux Bustamante
AppFabric Access Control is a feature of the Windows Azure platform that makes it easy to secure web resources such as REST-based services using a simple set of standard protocols. In fact, AppFabric Access Control uniquely facilitates several scenarios not previously possible including a standards-based mechanism for securing web resources, identity federation for REST, and secure calls from Silverlight and AJAX clients to web resources including REST-based WCF services or REST-based MVC implementations. In this session, you will get a tour of the AppFabric Access Control feature set and learn how to implement these key security scenarios with the help of some custom tools that encapsulate common functionality, exposing a simple object model for working with the protocols underlying Access Control. In addition, you will learn how to integrate typical Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) authorization techniques such as ClaimsPrincipal to decouple the authentication and authorization mechanism from the business logic.

TIPS & TRICKS

VTO02: Visual Studio 2010 Tips, Tricks and Tall Tales
Kathleen Dollard
The first part of this session is a whirlwind tour of Visual Studio 2010 features designed to make your life easier. You’ll see keyboard shortcuts, new dialogs, hidden features of dialogs and debugging enhancements focusing on the gems that are getting the least attention. The session then moves into making Visual Studio work for you. You’ll find out how to leverage macros and write your own code snippets. While these features have existed in previous versions of Visual Studio, most programmers don’t take advantage of them. Diving into new VS 2010 features, you’ll also see how to create a project start page listing tasks and project news. Finally, you’ll see how to build a Visual Studio extension to share among your project team. This session focuses on Visual Studio Professional and above. Visual Studio is the tool where you spend much of your time – efficiently using it adds up to real time savings.

MANAGED EXTENSIBILITY FRAMEWORK

VME04: Designing and Exposing MEF Parts
Kathleen Dollard
The Managed Extensibility Framework lets you create extensions to your application. This session starts with an introduction on MEF so you don’t need previous experience. The core of the session is strategies for designing extension points and how to expose and consume parts. Cardinality allows you to specify how many are expected and creation policy controls whether a new part is created each time one is requested. You’ll see two approaches to prioritization, a technique for falling back when parts aren’t found, sequencing parts, and making runtime decisions on what parts to select. Many of these strategies are based on export metadata, and you’ll learn how export metadata works and how to create strongly-typed export metadata. This session takes you from zero to sixty using MEF in the most common scenarios.

XAML

VXA02: A Simple UI Shell for XAML Applications
Rockford Lhotka
With every new UI technology it is necessary to find coding patterns that enable user navigation and interaction. In the past we’ve seen SDI and MDI models, and applications that are modeled after Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Money and others. And we’ve seen things like composite UI frameworks, including the Prism framework. In this session, you will learn several basic concepts and techniques you can apply when designing and building Silverlight and WPF applications that enable flexibility in your overall application shell implementation. While building a complete UI framework is no small task, even the simplest applications can benefit from the concepts and techniques covered in this session.

VXA03: Building a WPF/Silverlight UI in Visual Studio 2010
Rockford Lhotka
Visual Studio 2010 provides a powerful XAML designer you can use to build compelling user interfaces for Silverlight and WPF applications. In this session, you will learn about the exciting capabilities of the new designer and how you can use it to perform UI layout and set up data binding. This new designer brings XAML development in close parity to Windows Forms, and really shows the promise and capabilities of the WPF and Silverlight technologies.

VXA01: Write Your Own Declarative Frameworks for XAML Development
Billy Hollis
If you’ve worked with WPF or Silverlight for a while, you’ve seen how helper components can tie into XAML with attached properties, allowing framework-level components to be used declaratively. In this session, you’ll learn to write your own XAML-enabled helper components. We’ll start with the basic construction of dependency and attached properties, and then look at a useful, complete example of a helper component for injecting customized, data-driven labels into an application. You’ll also see some pitfalls such as memory leaks that can easily occur with inadequate coding patterns in helper components, and learn how to avoid these issues in your own development.

ENTITY FRAMEWORK

VEF02: Getting Persistent Ignorant with Entity Framework
Julie Lerman
Entity Framework in .NET 4 has finally embraced agile development. Thanks to it’s new POCO support, you can now build completely persistent ignorant entity classes. In this session, we’ll look at building an intelligent repository from entity classes and mocking up some extra classes in order to build unit tests against methods that have some dependency on the Entity Framework without touching the EF APIs. A prior understanding of the PI and Unit Testing should keep your head from spinning too much.

VEF01: Getting Started with POCOs in Entity Framework
Julie Lerman
One of the most important new features of Entity Framework in .NET 4.0 is the support for simple objects. There is no more need to rely on the EntityObject, freeing you up to use your own classes with ease, use agile patterns and test methods that happen to involve EF activity. In this session, you’ll learn about the various types of POCO support (snapshot, virtual and code-only) in Entity Framework and take a high-level look at some of the ways they can be implemented.

.NET FUNDAMENTALS

VFN03: .NET Framework Security 101
Michele Leroux Bustamante
The .NET Framework is an incredibly powerful platform supporting the development of data-driven, service-oriented applications that involve the use of data access technologies such as LINQ and Entity Framework; services built with WCF; web applications built with ASP.NET, AJAX and MVC; and client applications built with WPF, Silverlight or mobile development tools. In the midst of all this power, there are still some fundamental security concepts that are important across all development for the .NET Framework including identity management, authorization, code access security and cryptography. In this session, we’ll review a core set of security concepts across different aspects of .NET development including the implications of code access security; authentication and authorization of users; impersonation vs. trusted subsystem security models; security principals and role-based security; secure database access and secure messaging using cryptography techniques. All concepts will be illustrated in the context of relevant scenarios using Windows, Silverlight or ASP.NET applications that communicate with WCF services and ultimately data repositories. Get up to speed on .NET Framework security fundamentals to be sure you are leveraging these concepts in your application development efforts!

VFN05: A Simplified Model-View-View-Model Approach
Paul D. Sheriff
Are you struggling with how to use MVVM? Feel confused by all of the (overly complex) MVVM patterns and tools out there? If so, you are not alone. However, MVVM does not have to be hard. In fact, if you are willing to not take a purist approach, then MVVM becomes very easy to do. Some of the main goals of MVVM is to help you develop code that is testable and re-usable. In this session, you will learn step-by-step how to get to MVVM quickly and easily.

VFN01: Basic UI Design Concepts for Developers
Billy Hollis
The transition to XAML-based user interfaces is underway, and most developers are still using UI design principles from the 1990s. With new degrees of freedom, it’s time to throw away obsolete conventions and find new ways to make users productive and happy. That means getting back to the basics on fundamental principles of user interface design. In this session, we’ll do a ground-zero discussion of the design principles around colors, fonts, animation, spatial arrangements, and interaction patterns. We’ll also look at state management as a key to make interfaces usable and productive.

VFN06: Build Your First XAML Application (Part 1)
Ken Getz
WPF and Silverlight makes it possible to build rich graphical user interfaces, but it doesn’t necessarily make it easy. Getting your head around where to start, and how to display information, can be a daunting task. This session gets you started with XAML, and demonstrates creating a working video-player application, using user controls, templates, and more. Not the typical first introduction to XAML, this session actually shows you features you can use now to get started building great applications.

VFN07: Build Your First XAML Application (Part 2)
Ken Getz
Given the skeleton application you saw created in Part I of this session, this second half completes the XAML video-viewer application using data binding to fill a list of videos, templates to display the video thumbnails, converters to convert from a file name to a video thumbnail, and applying styles to change the look of the application. By the time you have finished this session, you’ll have the basic skills you need to get started using Visual Studio’s XAML designer to create WPF and Silverlight applications.

VFN04: Common Pitfalls of Object-Oriented Software
Dino Esposito
It’s so easy to use objects and save yourself some coding using inheritance. It turns out, instead, that inheritance is a delicate tool whose role is often misunderstood and that sometimes you are better off avoiding to stay on the safe side. Inheritance entails objects sharing behavior and context which can lead to nasty effects especially during maintenance cycles. In this session, I’ll go through a few common mistakes that I’ve seen and done several times. Avoiding these mistakes doesn’t automatically make your code perfect, but it certainly slows down the inexorable process of biodegradability of your classes.

VFN08: Fundamentals of Data Binding in Silverlight
Paul D. Sheriff
Data Binding in Silverlight is much more than just binding to data in a database. You will learn various methods of using data binding including binding to data in a database. You will see many examples of loading data into combo boxes, list boxes, and other Silverlight controls. You will learn how to populate Silverlight controls using a WCF Service.

VFN02: WCF Made Easy: The Essentials
Michele Leroux Bustamante
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a staple for today’s .NET Framework application – making it possible to build data-driven, service-oriented applications. WCF 4.0 introduces new features to simplify configure, secure, host and manage WCF services. This session (Part 1 of 2) will explore the fundamental requirements for building WCF services including contract design, bindings, behaviors, exception handling and hosting – and with the help of new WCF 4.0 features show you how you a painless WCF development experience. You will learn how to create ASMX-equivalent services with the simplest possible feature set, but also learn recommended practices for the most common scenarios beyond ASMX. The goal is to provide you with a recipe for the most common architectural scenarios to show you how easy WCF can be – with some useful tools that can be applied to simplify the process.

WINDOWS PHONE 7 DEVELOPMENT

VPH01: Adding Location Intelligence to your Windows Phone 7 Apps with Bing Maps
Nickolas Landry
This session will not teach you why we are on Earth, but it will teach you how to find out where we are on it. Find the user? Find the phone. Thanks to standard built-in Location Services and hybrid positioning hardware, every Windows Phone 7 knows where it is. In this session, ActiveNick shows you how to build a truly “smart” phone application by adding Location Intelligence Services (LIS) to it. Using Bing Maps and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 for Windows Phones, you will learn how to locate the device in the world using the phone GPS and other Location Services, display maps and manipulate them with touch gestures, geocode addresses into lat/long pairs, perform proximity searches and display the results on map and more. We’ll discuss the various mapping technologies, SDKs and APIs in the Microsoft world and explore how they apply within a distributed architecture that integrates Windows Phones. Location Intelligence is a natural extension of mobility and you cannot ignore it, so why would you ignore this session?

VPH06: Building Casual Windows Phone 7 Games in Silverlight
Evan Hutnick
Windows Phone 7 is based around two primary development technologies- XNA and Silverlight. Normally, you would think that XNA is strictly for games and Silverlight strictly for applications, but this isn’t the case at all! In this session, we’ll see how some of the unique features of Silverlight on WP7 can allow us to create fun and engaging casual games. Using a few basic casual game concepts as a starting point, we’ll see how a rich, event-driven UI can create casual games quickly and easily all while taking advantage of the graphics and interactivity that Silverlight provides us with.
Core concept for the session is to introduce the platform differences when considering game development, then working through an example (with lots of code snippets) for putting together an easy but cool casual game.

VPH02: Building Windows Phone 7 Games in 3D with XNA Game Studio 4.0
Nickolas Landry
Why would you be forced to buy a Mac and learn yet another language to write mobile games? The truth is you can reuse your finely honed .NET and C# skills to write games that will run on Windows, Xbox 360 and the new hot kid on the block: Windows Phone 7. Enter XNA Game Studio 4.0. Join ActiveNick in this session as your fast track to the world of mobile game development where we jump right away into the fun stuff. We’ll go through a quick recap of XNA Game Studio and dive right in. No, we won’t be building no Atari 2600-style 2D games, let’s mess around with the cool 3D stuff. We’ll cover designing games for mobile phones, adapting desktop & console XNA code for Windows Phone 7, tapping into the phone hardware, discuss media assets and the Content Processing Pipeline and basically cover as much demo code as 75 minutes will allow. Forget SharePoint and Entity Framework, this is the kind of coding you signed up for when you decided to go pro as a coding geek.

VPH04: Converting an Existing Silverlight Application to Windows Phone 7
Evan Hutnick
This session will explore just what it takes to convert an existing Silverlight 4 application to the Windows Phone 7 platform. Topics covered will include how to convert your UI to take advantage (and fit within the constraints of) the Windows Phone 7 size limitations and how to convert a UI meant for the desktop to fit in an 800x480 screen. We will also look into some of the differences in the frameworks and how to overcome them in the more limited framework that Windows Phone 7 utilizes. By the end of the session we will have a fully working WP7 equivalent of the original Silverlight 4 application.

VPH08: Developing Windows Phone 7 Applications for the Enterprise
Al Pascual
In this session, I’ll cover the architecture and development of Windows Phone 7 solutions for the enterprise. We will also perform a complete deployment using the Windows 7 Marketplace to only deploy to unique devices and how to support those applications and push updates. I’ll spend time explaining the best way to create Silverlight libraries using MVVM and the best way to create data layers that can be reused in other applications. I’ll give you design tips and go over the design requirements for Windows Phone 7 to create a better user experience. You’ll also learn how to secure mobile web services and how to push configuration changes to user devices. After the session, you’ll have all the tools required to start developing for Windows Phone 7 with Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend 4, as well as privately deploy mobile applications to their customers via the Windows Phone 7 MarketPlace without being visible to other users.

VPH03: Device & Server: Networking & Notifications in Windows Phone 7 Applications
Nickolas Landry
Phones are inherently connected. Windows Phone 7 devices are no exception. They are connected to the server, your company, the Internet, other phones and the cloud. This session explores how to design and build connected mobile applications, and what you need to do when that connection drops (trust me, it’ll happen). Learn how to build applications that take advantage of the Windows Phone 7 communications and networking APIs, leverage WCF REST services, discover how to send push notifications from the server to the phone, and how to deal with transient state when offline, all through insightful demos. We’ll also discuss what you can do to optimize message performance over wireless connections, how to deal with security and more. Mobile devices are also part of the enterprise equation and today you can learn how to reach out to them.

VPH07: Information at Your Fingertips, Literally: Data on the Windows Phone 7
Billy Hollis
We’ve come a long way from Bill Gate’s promise of 15 years ago to put information at our fingertips. With Windows Phone 7, Bill’s prediction has come true in a literal way. On WP7, you can use Silverlight to write touch-enabled programs that consume data via Web Services and WCF service operations. This session will cover the basics of accessing data, including authentication issues and various functional limitations that are specific to the current version of WP7.

VPH05: Metro for Developers on Windows Phone 7
David Kelley
This session is about what metro is and how developers can do it without breaking things to much. Designed to make developers dangerous to themselves and others when it comes to look and feel. We’ll talk about things like typography and white space from the dev point of view and abit about working with designers.

VPH09: Windows Phone 7 Application Performance Optimization
David Kelley
This session is about getting the most performance out of your Windows Phone 7 applications. Application performance is often all about "perceived" performance rather than "real performance" and this is especially true on Windows Phone 7. Optimizing mobile applications to perform well on Windows Phone 7 is a little bit of both perceived performance based on strong UX and about building for what Windows Phone 7 does well. We will talk about what approaches work best and emerging best practices for Windows Phone 7 as well as Silverlight techniques as applied to the phone.

MICROSOFT DAY - WINDOWS PHONE 7 DEVELOPMENT

VMP02: Building Integrated Mobile Applications with Windows Phone 7 Hardware and Services
 Microsoft
Designing and building a mobile application is so much more than just learning the API and fitting the UI on a smaller screen. Windows Phone 7 devices offer very powerful features to its users, and they will expect your applications to leverage them. Come learn how to build integrated mobile applications with various Windows Phone 7 services such as the Camera, Contacts list, Email & SMS/MMS support, the Phone Dialer, Calendar, software keyboard, microphone, GPS & compass and more... Demos, demos and more demos! This is the session where you can learn how to take your Windows Phone applications to the next level.

VMP01: Getting Started with Windows Phone 7 Development
 Microsoft
This session is your fast track into the new wonderful world of Windows Phone development. Move over Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7 is here, ready to conquer. Come learn how your valuable .NET and Silverlight skills now make you a hot mobile developer. We’ll perform a quick lap around Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 for Windows Phones, build our first app using Silverlight and Expression Blend for Windows Phone, and debug it with the Windows Phone Emulator. We’ll then explore the various Windows Phone 7 SDK services and features, such as touch gestures, accelerometers, rich media, notifications, location and more. It’s time to drop that “other” phone. Pick-up a phone you will actually enjoy coding for. If you’ve waited this long to jump on board the mobility bandwagon, wait no more: This is the mobile platform you always wanted!

VMP03: Selling your Mobile Apps on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace
 Microsoft
You built a really useful Windows Phone 7 application? Designed a hot mobile game? Now what? I bet you’re itching to sell that baby to show your developer mettle to the world. But where do you start? This session walks you through the process of commercializing your first Windows Phone 7 application or game on the Windows Marketplace. We’ll go through the account creation, requirements and discuss how the Windows Marketplace deals with the two biggest pains for any software producer: distribution and monetization. We’ll also discuss strategies, dealing with the competition, differentiating yourself, marketing your mobile apps and more. Isn’t it time YOU got paid for the code YOU write? Booyah! Windows Phone 7 is your path to MAD Money!

VMP04: Windows Phone 7 Architecture Deep Dive
 Microsoft
Before you can design an advanced Windows Phone 7 application, you might want to understand the underlying architecture of the mobile OS platform. This session digs into the foundation of the Windows Phone 7 OS and its core services. We’ll discuss the various OS components, where Windows CE fits in, the evolution from and comparison to Windows Mobile, the UI and navigation paradigm shift, multitasking, state management and isolated storage, networking, communications and notification services, access to the phone hardware, performance, security and more. Know your turf, know your phone, this is a session you cannot miss.