TechDays 2008: new sessions added

Here's an update on yet more sessions that will be added to the final agenda of this year's TechDays (March 12-13 2008). You can already register and take the opportunity to witness the Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 launch event which is held on the 11th of March.

I thought it might interest some people to get the information as it comes available, but please note that this might still be subject to change. As you can see, some great speakers have been added.

Check out my previous post for first preview.

WCF and WF: Integrating two key technologies of .NET 3.5 (Ingo Rammer)
Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation are two cornerstones of .NET 3.5. In this session, you will learn about different ways to combine them to workflow-enable your WCF applications.

Advanced Debugging with Visual Studio (Ingo Rammer)
Basically every .NET developer knows the Visual Studio debugger, but only few know its little secrets. In this session, Ingo shows you what you can achieve with this tool beyond the setting of simple breakpoints. You will learn how advanced breakpoints, debugger macros and visualizers, interactive breakpoints, tracepoints and interactive object instantiation at development time can support your hunt for bugs in your applications.

Using Visual Studio 2008 as a RAD tool to build a distributed application (Jay Schmelzer)
In this demo intensive session we’ll take a look at improved support in Visual Studio 2008 for building distributed business applications.  We will focus on Visual Studio’s support for building and consuming WCF services, sharing business validation rules between client and server, implementing local caching of read-only data on the client, sharing common application services like authentication and authorization between Windows and Web client applications and much more.  Next we will turn our attention to web and see how Visual Studio 2008 allows us to easily incorporate rich experiences into our existing ASP.NET web sites using ASP.NET AJAX, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit and take advantage of improved HTML designer, CSS editor and JavaScript intellisense and debugging.  Visual Studio 2005 raised the productivity bar for business application developers.  Visual Studio 2008 builds on that foundation bringing unmatched productivity gains to distributed business application developers.

Visual Studio 2008: Building applications with Office 2007 (Jay Schmelzer)
This session provides an overview of the tools and technologies that enable developers to leverage the new Visual Studio 2008 and Office platform tools and technologies to build new and exciting Office Business Applications. You’ll learn a number of key technologies in this session, including the creation of Office smart clients, development of custom SharePoint workflow, and extension of Outlook to integrate key business data into one of our most popular productivity tools.

Visual Basic: Tips and Tricks for the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (Jay Schmelzer)
In this session, we combine some tips for existing Visual Studio features, and tricks for leveraging new Visual Studio 2008 features. We look at a variety of existing features including operator overloading, refactoring, creating your own snippets, some tips for using frameworks classes (and generics), and leveraging application settings. Then we look at new features including some LINQ Do’s and Don’ts, My Extensibility, and taking control of unit testing in Visual Studio. All of these tips are aimed at giving you a more productive, fun programming experience.

Office: Office Open XML Formats (Chad Hower)
Office 2007 now stores its documents in XML. This makes manipulation and creation of documents easy to do, even without Office installed. The Office Open XML format is also an ECMA standard and has backwards compatibility with older versions of Office as well as some capabilities on Linux and Macintosh, as well as Java. Surprised? Learn about these features and more in this session.

Architecture: Dude, where's my business logic? (Chad Hower)
Over the years we have moved from desktop, to client server, to 3-tier, to n-tier, to service orientation. In the process though many things have changed, but many habits have remained. This session discusses what we are doing wrong, and solutions.

.NET 3.0: WinForms and WPF (Chad Hower)
With two options for building forms, which is better to use? For the near future the answer often is both. In this session we will cover the strengths and weaknesses of each, and how to use them effectively together.

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