The Best of PDC is Rolling Through Colorado!

MSDN Unleashed is making its second tour through Colorado at the end of this month (January). 

Here’s what you can expect:

We will be providing overviews of some technologies first discussed at PDC, such as Windows Azure, C# 4.0 and ASP.NET 4.0.  But we will not only be talking about the future.  We will also discuss some recent releases that you can take advantage of now, including the WCF REST Starter Kit and the Silverlight Toolkit. 

What to expect with C# 4.0

We will take a look at some of the new and exciting features that are being planned for the next release of C#.  Some of the features that we will look at are dynamic lookup, the ability to program against fields, methods and types without C# static type checker and the new named and optional parameter support.

The Silverlight Control Toolkit

The Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of Silverlight controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle.  This 30 minute session will illustrate some of these new tools.  The session will illustrate the use of the ImplicitStyleManager and the new themes to skin your applications, charting controls, the expander and more.  This session is 100% demo-driven.

REST with WCF and the WCF REST Starter Kit

This session will provide a broad overview of REST support in WCF, including some key new features available in the recently released WCF REST Starter Kit.  The session will begin with a theoretical discussion of what REST is.  It will continue by illustrating WCF support for developing LO-REST and HI-REST APIs.  This session will be largely demo driven, with specific demos demonstrating consuming LO-REST services being consumed by AJAX clients, as well as developing HI-REST services being consumed by Silverlight 2 clients.  This session is 60% demo-driven.

Demystifying Azure

This goal of this session is to provide a framework for understanding the Azure namespace.  This namespace comprises Windows Azure (“The Cloud OS”), Live Services, .NET Services, SQL Data Services, and more.  The session will begin with a discussion of the hi-level features of Windows Azure (“The Cloud OS”), including scalable storage, a rich developer experience, automated service management and service hosting.  The session will then provide a high-level overview of the services available in Live Services and .NET Services.  The session will conclude with a brief overview of SQL Data Services.  This session will demonstrate the use of Azure Table Services, SQL Data Services and will illustrate the Developer Fabric.