4/11/2010

SPR302: A 360-Degree View of SQL Server 2008 R2 Business Intelligence (9:00AM - 4:00PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Stacia Misner
In this workshop, we’ll take a holistic look at the BI features in the latest version of SQL Server by reviewing the architecture requirements, exploring the implications for existing BI applications, and introducing new capabilities that support the transformation of data into business insight. We’ll discuss the scalable data warehousing capabilities supported by “Madison”, master data management with Master Data Services, and complex event processing with StreamInsight. We’ll also explore the new self-service reporting and analysis features in Reporting Services and Gemini. Of course, you’ll see demonstrations of the new features in this workshop, but you’ll also have a chance to ask lots of questions and to get a look “under the hood” to better understand what you’ll need to do to get the R2 BI features up and running properly. You’ll also learn how to prepare your data environment to leverage these features and how best to manage the user experience.

SPR301: Do You Feel the Need for Speed? Tuning for High Performance (9:00AM - 4:00PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Paul Randal
Kimberly L. Tripp
Whether you’re designing from the ground up or tuning a third-party application, this workshop will show you ways to tune even if you can’t change the code or schema. We’ll cover designing for performance, indexing for performance, and maintaining performance. These areas sound very generic but we’ll show you the top things you can put into production straight away to give you the biggest bang for your buck. Topics will include effective table design, vertical and horizontal partitioning, data type best practices, clustering key choice, nonclustered index strategies, fragmentation analysis, index and statistics maintenance, and more!

VPR02: Essential Business Desktop Programming with .NET (9:00AM - 4:00PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Paul D. Sheriff
Are you constantly struggling to keep up with all the new technologies coming out from Microsoft? Are you finding that you are avoiding conferences because you do not understand the sessions being presented? If you wish to learn the basics of some the new desktop technologies then this workshop is for you. The intent of this workshop is to prepare you for the sessions at the Visual Studio Launch conference. If you are fairly new to .NET, or have been doing desktop or Web development with .NET for awhile and you wish to learn the essential elements behind the new technologies like WPF, WCF and Unit Testing, you will find them here. In this one day, you will be exposed step-by-step to each of these technologies so you will feel comfortable moving on with more advanced topics. The following topics will be covered in this workshop:

• The essential OOP concepts you must know to be productive with .NET
• How, When and Why to use WCF
• Learn WPF from the ground up
• Data access methods for WPF
• Architecting for Unit Testing
Prerequisites: You have some basic knowledge of .NET.

VPR01: Every Class as a Service—WCF as the New .NET (9:00AM - 4:00PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Juval Lowy
Contrary to common wisdom, service-orientation is not just for high-end applications. Every application should be service-oriented, and Windows Communication Framework (WCF) is the .NET runtime for developing, deploying and consuming service-oriented applications. But what is service-orientation really about? What does it mean for mere developers? Is there substance behind the hype? In this comprehensive one-day workshop, Juval will first demystify service-orientation, and introduce the basic motivation for service-oriented applications and their operating principal and concepts. In that light, Juval will then describe what WCF is and how it is designed, and demonstrate its advantages over traditional .NET programming. You will see that WCF is more than just the next generation platform for building connected systems. In many respects, WCF is the next development platform for Windows applications, providing system features that are presently crafted by hand on top of .NET and Windows. With WCF, every class automatically benefits from these system features, from security to transactions to tracing and logging and much more. To maximize the use of these off-the-shelf plumbing aspects you should push the service boundary down into your system, but taken to its ultimate conclusion—should every class be a WCF service? And what about performance? The workshop will next demonstrate the power and productivity of WCF, contrasting WCF used granularly on every class with classic .NET in terms of performance, throughput and scalability, and will substantiate the provocative claim that every class can and should be a service. Don’t miss on this unique opportunity to understand SOA and WCF from Juval Lowy who has been part of the strategic design effort for WCF from the beginning, and who offers a profound insight on the methodology, the technology and its application.

APR01: Silverlight 4 Development Workshop (9:00AM - 4:00PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Dan Wahlin
Silverlight 4 provides a powerful framework that can be used to build Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) that look and feel much like a desktop application yet are deployed like traditional web applications. In this full-day workshop, Silverlight MVP Dan Wahlin will walk you through different features and tools that can be used to build Silverlight applications. Topics covered include XAML fundamentals, using layout and data entry controls, data binding, retrieving data from remote services, animations, out-of-browser options, printing, MVVM architecture concepts and more. If you're looking to jump-start your Silverlight development projects, this is the workshop for you!

Post-Conference

4/15/2010

VPS01: Azure Top to Bottom (9:00AM - 4:00PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Michele Leroux Bustamante
The Windows Azure platform is Microsoft’s cloud computing initiative supplying an operating system in the cloud—hosted in Microsoft data centers—in addition to data storage and other infrastructure and application services. It provides businesses with on-demand hosting, storage and management features in fashion with utility computing. This workshop will explore the cloud computing offerings from Microsoft including Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and the Windows Azure platform AppFabric. You’ll learn how Windows Azure can help businesses scale operations in the cloud, and how developers can build and deploy applications and services to the cloud with familiar development tools. You'll learn about storage options offered by Windows Azure and how that compares to SQL Azure; and how to employ the Service Bus and Access Control Service (part of AppFabric). This workshop will focus on practical reasons for applications to leverage each of these cloud offerings and dive deeper into many of the core services with demonstrations. At the end of this workshop, you will understand the lifecycle for building, deploying and securing applications in the cloud.

APS300: Building Web Applications with ASP.NET MVC (9:00am - 4:00pm)
Add'l Fee $399
Scott Allen
In this workshop, we’ll take dive into the ASP.NET MVC framework and see how to build lightweight, testable applications using the MVC design pattern. We’ll cover routing, controllers, view engines, and evaluate the trade offs in selecting models for our application. We’ll also see how to apply test driven design to drive the features during a development process and hook into the extensibility mechanisms of the MVC framework. The workshop will feature all the latest improvements in the framework, including how to use model metadata, display templates, and T4 technology.

VPS02: Real-World Development in Silverlight and WPF - Beyond the Basics (9:00AM - 4:00PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Billy Hollis
Do your Silverlight and WPF interfaces look like decorated versions of older technologies? Are you ready to really start taking advantage of advanced user interface technologies for greater productivity, lower training costs, and more satisfied users? Then come learn how to effectively use animation, transforms, styles, control templates, color, advanced layout options, and other capabilities to design and build impressive user interfaces in Silverlight and WPF. In the second half of the workshop, you’ll see demonstration and analysis of a complete Silverlight Web site like the one at www.slmasters.net that performs page navigation, animation of new pages, and contains other advanced features. Plus, you’ll walk away with that code as a starting point for your own efforts. If you’re ready to learn and apply real-world lessons for advanced user interface development, this is the workshop for you.

SPS300: Writing SQL Server Database Applications and Stored Procedures for Best Performance (9:00AM - 4:00PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Bob Beauchemin
In a database-centric application, whether the application performs well is usually highly dependent on whether the database code performs well. At the same time, we’re moving from traditional data access techniques like ODBC and ADO.NET to database code generation and object-relational mapping layers such as the ADO.NET Entity Framework. This gives application developers a choice of putting database code in stored procedures, using SQL code in applications, or using LINQ and having your SQL generated for you.

In this one-day workshop, we’ll cover how knowing how the SQL query processor, plan caching, and parameter processing works can vastly change your application’s database performance. You have control of this performance no matter how you choose to access SQL Server and we'll cover performance issues both inside and outside the server. Some of the topics we’ll cover include:

• Does using LINQ relieve the developer of database performance responsibility?
• Does writing stored procedures guarantee good performance? And are all stored procedures equally good performance-wise?
• Are stored procedures always faster than dynamic SQL?
• Is SQLCLR a good way to write stored procedures?

We’ll cover this with real-world examples illustrating methods to improve database code performance regardless of how the data access layer is structured.