TechDays 2009 – more confirmed sessions

As you may have seen on the TechDays agenda page, the full details on the SharePoint pre-conference have been posted. In the meantime we are finalizing the full agenda for the 11th and 12th March conference days. You may expect this to be online in the coming days.

And if you cannot wait to see a more elaborate list of sessions, be sure to check out the speakers which have almost all been updated on the Brainmasters page. Check out my previous post with a set of confirmed sessions as well.

Here’s another preview of sessions coming to Belgium in March:

Live coding Silverlight and WPF, by Laurent Bugnion
Does Windows Presentation Foundation’s learning curve intimidate you? Did you hear about Silverlight but didn’t have the occasion to try it yourself? Are you afraid that, though it is using well known .NET languages and libraries, it has specificities that are difficult to understand? Discovering these two platforms on your own can seem like a frightening step. In this very interactive session, Laurent will code Silverlight and WPF in front of you, and will let the audience’s questions guide him in this journey through rich user experience. Simple tools like KaXaml and SilverlightPad will be used, as well as the powerful development environments Visual Studio and Expression Blend. Depending on the audience’s desires, this session can take you into Expression Design, Designer-Developer workflows, the Model-View-ViewModel pattern, web services communication, Animations and Transforms, Multimedia integration, and many other topics. Samples will be made in both WPF and Silverlight in a fun way that should allow everyone to overcome their inhibitions and to get started without pain!

Interesting to know: Laurent has recently released the book Silverlight 2 Unleashed and will be available for a book signing. Keep an eye on the bookstore during the event.

The Daily Scrum, with Stephen Forte & Joel Semeniuk
One of the most popular Agile project management and development methods, Scrum is starting to be adopted at major corporations and on very large projects. After an introduction to the basics of Scrum like: project planning and estimation, the Scrum Master, team, product owner and burn down, and of course the daily Scrum, Stephen (a certified Scrum Master) shows many real world applications of the methodology drawn from his own experience as a Scrum Master. Negotiating with the business, estimation and team dynamics are all discussed as well as how to use Scrum in small organizations, large enterprise environments and consulting environments. Stephen will also discuss using Scrum with virtual teams and even an off-shoring environment. The session will finish with a large Q&A on best practices.

Did you know Stephen and Joel are also book authors? Book signing sessions will have people lining up :)
- Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2008, (Leonard Lobel, Andrew J. Brust, Stephen Forte)
- Managing Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (Joel Semeniuk)

ASP.NET 4.0 what is coming? How do I prepare my app? – by Scott Galloway
Did you know .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 from last Summer added quite some interesting features to ASP.NET? Join this session to get an update and take a walk through the 4.0 landscape from ASP.NET and learn how you can get involved in shaping ASP.NET future. This talk focuses on the next release of ASP.NET including web forms and MVC. Do you love web forms? See how you can taking control of your control IDs, learn about better ViewState managment in GridView and ListView, and get more control over the CSS markup of ASP.NET server controls. See how Dynamic Data makes building you data-driven apps easy. If you're considering MVC, we look at the feature set and understand how to create applications with this technology.

Live Mesh and Live Framework: Make your application’s data available anywhere and anytime, by Peter Himschoot How to make your data available everywhere, online or offline? Microsoft Live Mesh with the Live Framework solves this problem by providing a framework that syncs your data across all your applications, devices, your friends and on the web. In this session you will learn about the benefits of this approach and see how to program against the Live Services from any device, platform, runtime, or programming language.

SQL 2008 For Developers, by Lynn Langit
Lynn's demo-filled presentation will give .NET developers an overview of the numerous new capabilities in SQL Server 2008: from support for Spatial Data types to a mechanism to store SQL BLOB data using the NTFS file system, and several things in between. There are also improvements in the area of SQL CLR and XML, Reporting Services, etc. This presentation will take a technical dive into the new things you will find in SQL Server 2008. Lynn's sessions are always highly interactive, educational and a lot of fun.

Lynn is now finalizing her newest book which should be ready just around TechDays: Smart Business Intelligence Solutions with Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008.

Under the hood in Silverlight's controls skinning framework, by Gill Cleeren
While Silverlight offers us a lot of controls to build business applications, you might feel the urge to change them even more to suffice the needs of your application. A round button perhaps? Or a non-rectangular textbox? It’s all possible with the Silverlight skinning framework. In this session, you’ll see how to overhaul the look of your controls as well as create your own from scratch.

Building Workflow Services in .NET 3.5, by Kurt Claeys
About creating business processes in Workflow Foundation and integration with other applications using WCF. The Workflow first approach vs. the Contract first approach. The use of the wsHttpContextBinding. Big demo of a real life scenario based where a public webapplication start a process, internal applications are communicating with the process and at the end thirdparty services are called.

See you at TechDays, don’t miss it!