Application Development Track (Room 132)

Introduction to MSBuild 3.5 and Team Build 2008
Presented by Stephen Andrews

Did you know that .csproj and .vbproj files are really MSBuild files? More than build processes though, MSBuild is a full-featured automation language. It includes structured control flow, variables, refactorability, error handling, logging, and powerful extensibility. You can easily integrate MSBuild into your own enterprise processes and start adding value right away. We'll also look at how Team Foundation Build extends on this foundation and adds robust integration with Team Foundation Server.

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The Digital Black Belt’s Guide to Building Secure ASP.NET AJAX Applications
Presented by Joe Stagner

You think your ASP.NET AJAX application is secure, but how do you know? Are you SURE? Would you bet your career on it?

Secure application design is 1/3 Architecture, 1/3 Code and 1/3 Operations. You can’t retro-fit a secure architecture. In this Digital Black Belt crash session you’ll get a whirlwind tour of how to write secure Web applications with ASP.NET AJAX. You can’t learn it all in a day, but you can get started with secure development techniques and learn what questions you need to be asking each day in your development process.

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Demystifying URL Rewriting and HTTP Modules & Handlers
Presented by Miguel Castro

By now we’ve all seen blogs with interesting looking URLs. URLs like “…archive/2007/11/9.aspx”. Visually this may look like there is a page for every day of the year, but in fact there is not. URL rewriting allows you to expose friendly URLs while maintaining control of the actual redirection taking place. In fact, you can do this with just about any extension you want, really giving your site some URL customization. But this isn’t just for exposing friendly looking URLs; it is essential for search-engine optimization as well. I’ll show you how easy it is to provide this functionality for your site and how you can wrap it all up in a URL rewriting engine.

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Understanding the Provider Pattern
Presented by Dani Diaz

The Provider Model is a design pattern used in many features of the .Net Framework (Specially in ASP.Net). In this session we will discuss how we can use this design pattern to create extensible and scalable applications. We will also look at some of the implementations of the Provider Model in ASP.Net 2.0 and create our own custom provider.

IT Professional Track (Room 131)

What's New in Windows Server 2008
Presented by John Weston

Windows Server 2008--in addition to incorporating new capabilities and enhancements to existing features--includes a number of improvements in the core OS that enhance the Operating System’s capabilities; such as features aimed at increasing the ability of Windows Server 2008 to support highly critical workloads by improving operational reliability, reducing system failures, and easing management. We will also discuss improvements in other related elements of the platform that help Windows based systems and services move an organization's IT Department forward.

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Microsoft Unified Communications
Presented by John Weston

Microsoft unified communications technologies use the power of software to deliver complete communications—messaging, voice, and video—across the applications and devices that people use every day. Integrating the experiences you associate with the telephone—phone calls, voice mail, and conferencing—the work you do on a computer—documents, spreadsheets, instant messaging, e-mail, and calendars—has the power to fundamentally change the way people work. We believe unified communications will transform business in the coming decade in the same way e-mail changed the business landscape in the 1990s. When phone services become software, are managed by a server, and are delivered to desktop applications, many interesting things happen.

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The Nortel/Microsoft Innovative Communications Alliance - Transforming Business Communications
Presented by Perry Heliger

Nortel and Microsoft have formed an industry-unique, comprehensive Innovative Communications Alliance to accelerate the transformation of e-mail, voice, video and Web-conferencing into advanced unified communications solutions.

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Cisco Digital Signage
Presented by Steve Barrows

Introducing Cisco Digital Signage, a comprehensive solution for easy, flexible, and centralized management and publishing of compelling digital media to networked, on-premise digital signage displays. Digital Signage builds on the power of the Cisco Digital Media System, enabling organizations to use high-quality and compelling digital media to easily connect customers, employees, and students anywhere, anytime.

Digital signage is a new emerging technology that comprises a network of centrally managed, on-premise digital displays that are addressable for delivery of targeted information, entertainment, merchandising, advertising, training, and communications.

Digital Signage is optimized for marketing, communications, and training, leading to differentiation and improved end-user experiences. It is an innovative offering for a wide variety of industries including retail, financial, government, education, healthcare, and transportation.

Emerging Technologies Track (Room 130)

Business Application of Social Widgets
Presented by Raymond Steigerwalt

Social networking has provided an ever increasing base of potential customers. The technology also lends a unique opportunity to interact with targeted demographics on a scale not possible with traditional advertisement mediums. The topic of discussion will be effective means of harnessing social mediums such as Facebook to create effective viral advertisement campaigns as well as creating a channel for transparent consumer feedback.

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The Evolution of Software as a Service
Presented by John Fallon

Over time the dynamics of IT within the business world has rapidly changed. From a programmer’s standpoint, this has changed the most. In the past there was a need for the programming team to not only worry about the complex functionality built into the application but also had to be concerned with the hardware necessary to bring their application to life. The idea of the cloud has since removed this extra layer which allows the developers to concentrate on what they know best.

This is most evident within companies such as Amazon, SalesForce.com and many others. They offer storage, backups and also web services to utilize their servers as if they were right in your very own office. We will take a look at what companies have done in the past and also how companies have changed their IT infrastructure to take full advantage of the cloud. We now have accessibility anywhere and everywhere.

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Finally, Distributed Caching a Reality for the .Net Environment - How to Make your Apps scale beyond current limits
Presented by Ancil McBarnett

Is it possible to achieve performance, high availability, scalability (and linear scalability at that to over 1000 servers), all at once, in a .Net environment, without sacrificing any one of the three? Why haven't current scaling and clustering paradigms fall short of this reality?

In this presentation, we will turn current clustering paradigms on its head and cover cutting edge application development considerations for maximum scalable performance and reliability in clustered .NET environments. This presentation focuses on improving scalability and scalable performance of applications through the use of clustered caching and data grids to reliably share live data among clustered application nodes, providing transparent fail-over as a key element of uninterrupted operation and reduced load on the database tier as a key element of scalability. We will also discuss how you can simply improve performance and scalability of the existing ASP.NET applications by storing session state in a data grid.

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WCF the Manual way... the Right way
Presented by Miguel Castro

Visual Studio 2008 has plenty of templates to get us started with WCF, but with that comes a lot of extra weight that we simply do not need. In this session, I’ll teach you how to write WCF services in a completely manual fashion, including both the service side and the client side. You’ll see that it’s not hard, not a lot of work, and results in a much cleaner solution. We’ll keep WCF short, sweet, and to the point, just like this abstract.