Connect 05' Technical Sessions

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Visit the Microsoft New Zealand: Connect '05 site to register.

Dates and Cities for the Technical Sessions:

  • Wednesday 16th November - Wellington
  • Tuesday 22nd November - Christchurch
  • Tuesday 29th November - Auckland

KEYNOTE

Visual Studio Team System: Managing the Software Lifecycle with Visual Studio 2005 Team System

Speaker - Wayne Ewington (Microsoft Consulting Services)

Visual Studio 2005 Team System is an extensible life-cycle tools platform that significantly expands the Visual Studio product line and helps software teams collaborate to deliver modern service-oriented solutions. This session spotlights key features of Visual Studio 2005 Team System and demonstrates how integrating this product into the development process reduces the complexity of delivering high-quality, fully tested applications.

Introduced in this session is the Whidbey Rocks demo application that will be used throughout the developer track. The software developers at Whidbey Rocks use Visual Studio 2005 Team System to orchestrate the construction of their concert ticketing and promotion system, which includes Web applications, smart client applications, SQL Server 2005 databases, and BizTalk Server 2006 integration. The presentation incorporates five roles: project management, infrastructure architect, application architect, developer, and tester. While most of the actual development will be performed in the subsequent sessions, this kick-off session will allow us to explain the goals of the software, set up the team project, select a methodology, identify the team, design the architecture, and send out tasks to each of the team members to construct individual components of the application.

Design and Development Tools for Building Mission-Critical Applications

Speaker - Ulrich Roxburgh (Microsoft Consulting Services)

SQL Server 2005, BizTalk Server 2006, and the .NET Framework 2.0 offer a compelling platform for building mission-critical service-oriented applications. This session introduces the features of Visual Studio 2005 that enable developers and development teams to build high-performance, secure, and reliable solutions using innovative designers, advanced code profiling and analysis tools, and an enterprise-ready platform. Among the highlights: how to use Visual Studio 2005 to incorporate SQL Server 2005, BizTalk Server 2006, and other operations infrastructure early in the design process.

Web Development

Speaker - Nigel Parker (Developer & Platform Strategy Group)

Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 combine to form a rich platform for building, testing, and deploying state-of-the-art Web applications. ASP.NET 2.0 is replete with new features, from data source controls and master pages to membership and role management services—features that reduce the amount of code required to create a typical Web site by up to 70%. Visual Studio 2005 features an all-new Web development interface that speeds the development process while offering a rich design-time experience and seamless integration with Visual Studio 2005 Team System.

The primary goal of this presentation is to introduce developers to ASP.NET 2.0’s most compelling new features and to the Visual Studio 2005 features that support them. A secondary goal is to demonstrate some of the ways in which Visual Studio 2005 Team System can benefit Web developers, and to drive home the message that ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and Visual Studio 2005 Team System offer a compelling upgrade to Visual Studio 2003 and ASP.NET 1.1. An important take-away is that these products are second to none when it comes to building scalable, high-performance, Web applications

Smart Client Application Development & Deployment

Speaker - Darryl Burling (Developer & Platform Strategy Group)

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 greatly simplifies the development and deployment of smart client applications targeting both the Windows and Microsoft Office platforms. This session demonstrates how to create sophisticated, online/offline-capable applications and smart documents using Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Office 2005, and Windows Forms 2.0. Attendees will also learn about ClickOnce, Microsoft’s new deployment technology which combines the power of Windows-based development with the flexibility of Web-based deployment. Highlights include how to use Visual Studio skills to create rich applications that take advantage of existing functionality in Excel, Word and Outlook, all of which are part of Microsoft Office 2003.

The central message of this presentation is that end-users and developers alike prefer software that provides a rich user experience—software that enriches and simplifies the user’s experience in the most natural way for the task at hand. A supporting theme is one of data access that best suits the end-users’ software-use lifestyle as well as situational environment. For example, we show data that is accessed by a ticket-sales tool, which is connected, but then the same data is accessed from an Excel-based application in both the connected and disconnected states. Additionally, the Excel-based application demonstrates the use of VSTO to provide a flexible and familiar environment for a professional, such as an analyst, who can benefit from the rich features of Excel rather than learn a custom application. (Though in fact, the Excel workbook is also a custom solution.)

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