In this session, we’ll show how to turn yourself into a Visual Studio 2008 guru with the new language and IDE features. Tips and tricks include how to maximize your VB IntelliSense experience, leverage Refactoring features, and improve the performance of your queries. We’ll explore language-integrated XML, navigate XML gotchas and show how to express what you wish in fewer lines of code. We’ll go deep into LINQ best practices, pitfalls to avoid, and answers to frequently asked questions. With 95% of the time in Visual Studio and 20+ tips and tricks, this is bound to be an informative talk. So if you’re interested in getting started on the right foot with Visual Studio 2008, don’t miss it!.

The new wave of Web applications are built on technologies such as AJAX and Microsoft Silverlight, which enable developers to build better, richer user experiences. These technologies bring a shift in how applications are organized, including a stronger separation of presentation from data. The goal of the ADO.NET Data Services Framework (aka "Project Astoria") is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by Web clients within a corporate network and across the Internet. Data services are reachable over HTTP, and URIs are used to identify the various pieces of information. Interactions with the data service happen in terms of well established and broadly adopted formats such as JSON and protocols such as the Atom Publishing Protocol.

There’s no doubt that building a distributed  system with WCF is much easier than with any other Microsoft technology. But, how can we be sure that we are doing it the right way? In this session we will go over common scenarios developer face when building and hosting WCF services, such as error handling, serialization of messages and service configuration. We will see how extending the WCF ServiceHost in the infrastructure level can help us to build a robust, reliable and manageable system.

The patterns & practices Smart Client Software Factory includes a set of assets for developing composite smart client applications in Win forms. With the release of Windows Presentation Foundation customers are now finding they have similar needs around WPF. The “Acropolis” incubation project which was perceived as the answer has now been folded into a future platform release. So where does this leave customers that are adopting WPF today? Come to this session and find out about the new CodeName “Prism” project that we (patterns & practices) are developing jointly with the UIFX team. Using “Prism” you’ll be able to develop composite applications that leverage the full power of WPF. We’re also investing a lot of effort to improve the adoption experience, including giving you more flexibility around how our assets are consumed. This includes making them play better with your existing infrastructure and frameworks and giving your more choices as to what you use and don’t use. Come to this session and we’ll take a dive into “Prism” and see how it can help you with your future WPF composite application solutions.

The Web Client Software Factory is a set of guidance for building Composite Web Solutions. Often, however these solutions offer a less than productive user experience due to the limitations of working in the browser. In WCSF 1.0 the focus was on dynamically discovering and composing a set of loosely coupled components at runtime. In the next release of WCSF based on customer feedback, we've continued down this path and further extended this focus to building Rich Internet Applications using ASP.NET AJAX. This includes a host of new capabilities that build upon and extend ASP.NET AJAX, as well as core enhancements to CWAB for supporting composite UIs. We've also heard a lot of customers asking us to make working with and evaluating the factory assets simpler. We've have responded by breaking up the factory into a set of smaller "bundles" that give developers more options as to how they consume the assets. Come to this session and we'll talk about the new capabilities as well as the new different ways we are delivering our guidance. We'll also touch on our plans for supporting MVC.

The Goal: Building a web application.
The Tools: Endless. From Visual Studio 2008 to SharePoint,  from ASP.NET to Ajax, from Ajax to Silverlight, from Silverlight to Volta.
The Problem:  Choosing the right tools.
The Solution: This session.
The Cool Stuff:  We are going to develop a social networking website for Tech Ed 2008.

In the beginning, Microsoft created MTS and COM. And Microsoft said "Let there be COM+" and there was COM+. And Microsoft saw that COM+ was good. Then Microsoft said, "Let companies build securable & scalable enterprise applications." And it was so. 
In the second creation, Microsoft created .NET. This created a better world, easier and simpler. And Microsoft saw that .NET was good. Than Microsoft created System.EnterpriseServices as a bridge to the first creation.
Then Microsoft said, "Let us make WCF, in our likeness, and let it rule over all communication mechanisms and become the foundation for enterprise applications". And Microsoft saw that it was good, or is it?

WPF, XNA and Silverlight are completely independent technologies. WPF – for rich business client (desktop) applications, Silverlight for rich internet applications and XNA for PC and XBOX games development. So how can they play nicely together? Come see Tamir Khason and Alex Golesh building a real world computer game, running on WPF, XNA and Silverlight – all together! We’ll learn which Framework provides richness and flexibility, and which Framework provides performance and complexity. Sometimes, we’ll use the GPU forces and sometimes, wont, but in the end, we’ll have three computers, one XBOX and one “special device” - which is not toaster,  playing together the same game. The same game that was developed by using almost the same code, but wrote by using different frameworks. It is Show Time! (Good time is guaranteed!)

Silverlight is a next generation technology aimed at driving cutting edge user experiences to the browser. It is architected so that it can be used seamlessly with server technologies to provide a presentation tier for nTier applications. In this session, Laurence Moroney, Microsoft will present how to build an nTier application including SQL Server on the back end, ASP.NET in the business logic tier and a Silverlight front end. In addition, Laurence will present how other middle tier technologies such as PHP or Java may be used with Silverlight.

Inside .NET Framework 3.5, there is new functionality allowing Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services to be built and consumed from a Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) workflow. This session will introduce the feature, discussing motivation, scenarios, and reasons for using this feature, an architectural overview and demos moving from a simple service written as a workflow to a complex scenario with many workflows communicating with each other. Additionally, the ability to execute workflows as a service requires the WCF runtime to be aware of durable instances, that is, the state of a given service. This talk will also highlight the ability to durably store the state of a WCF service written in imperative code.

F# is a typed functional programming language for the .NET Framework.  It combines the succinctness, expressivity, and compositionality of typed functional programming with the runtime support, libraries, interoperability, tools, and object model of .NET.  This session will introduce the F# language, library and tools.

Most .NET database applications out there use ADO.NET to access and manipulate data, and most of them have a data-access layer built on top of ADO.NET to abstract out many of the details related to data-access that can get in the way of business logic. In this session we’ll introduce the ADO.NET Entity Framework, a high-level data library that pushes up the level of abstraction application developers need to work at when dealing with data in databases. We’ll discuss how the system supports conceptual modeling, the use of the object services layer to do object-relational mapping, and how great integration with LINQ (language-integrated query) brings new levels of productivity to the data-access development space.

Changes and new features of Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 make developing and deploying applications on IIS 7 even better than before. In this session, we cover important aspects of IIS 7, like HTTP pipeline integration, new configuration model, extensibility etc., which make ASP.NET even more powerful. Come to see how to build application that can leverage new features and prepare existing applications for smooth migration.

Parallel Processing is both dangerous and powerful at the same time. With the increasing number of Multicore computers developers must align their applications to work in the parallel environment. In this session we will see Microsoft's approach in this area and how Parallel Extensions for .Net can make this task much easier. This session is for both .Net and C++ developers.

It is 6:32 pm on a Thursday evening, and you want to go home. But there is one application refusing to run properly that stands between you and home sweet home. You have no source code, no Visual Studio or debugging capabilities. All you have are bunch of DLLs and Exe files that underperform. What next?
Join Sasha Goldstein as he takes a snapshot of the system and analyze it to determine the problem root cause, without any system downtime.  Use the latest debugger extensions, real case studies and scenarios to enrich your debugging arsenal for real-life situations

The UpdatePanel can "AJAXify" a web site, but is it the optimum solution? Did you know that writing client JavaScript code can reduce bandwidth and make your web site faster? Why bother the server if you don't have to?
In this session we'll see how to use various client side techniques to create slick, quick, dynamic sites (some with their server side counterparts). We'll also write custom AJAX controls to encapsulate dynamic client side behavior in reusable components.

With Microsoft SQL Server Compact, developers can now easily cache data on the client in a compact, yet capable, transactional, queryable document-like database format. To maintain the cache, Sync Services for ADO.NET enables developers to easily cache data directly or over services using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). Visual Studio codename "Orcas" delivers new integrated, developer-oriented sync designers making caching an easy task to increase user productivity, decrease the server workload, and simplify data access. In addition to caching, you can use Sync Services for ADO.NET to enable full offline scenarios as well. Find out what SQL Server Compact Edition and Sync Services for ADO.NET have to offer for the "edge of the network" clients.

Silverlight is an amazing step forward to WEB.2 , the way that silverlight work: platform independent and some API’s the installed on the client.
Because of that facts a lot of security issues should be addressed before deploying any silverlight / WEB 2.0  based solution.
During the session we will cover the security issues with WEB 2.0 implementation such as AJAX and silverlight.

The new ASP.Net MVC Framework enforces a clean separation of concerns between the models, views and controllers within a web application, and enables, among other advantages, red/green test driven development (TDD) very easily. The ASP.Net Dynamic Data Controls helps you build a presentation layer based on a database schema in just a few minutes. In this session, we'll talk about how to create and test ASP.NET applications based on MVC  and see how the Dynamic Data Controls can reduce hours of work. Join Noam King as he builds sexy web applications leveraging these new alternatives in web development.

Whether you were first introduced to .NET via the .NET Compact Framework in Windows Mobile or via the full .NET Framework on the PC, it may make sense to share your code assets between the two platforms. In this session we will explore when you should be doing this and when not. We will then explore the options available (e.g. directly sharing binaries or conditional compilation) and drill into problems and workarounds. This will include framework differences, platform / OS differences, optimal usage of Visual Studio 2005 (and Visual Studio 2008) and how things have improved since .NET Compact Framework 1.0 and 2.0 (going towards v3.5).

The motivating theme of Windows HPC Server 2008 is enablement of integrated solutions leveraging broad Microsoft platform technologies. Learn about how new technologies at Microsoft enable a new category of parallelism applications, so customers can leverage the trend towards the exploding number of servers in distributed clusters.  This session will provide a technical overview of a SOA programming model for dividing, encapsulating and distributing tasks to a large number of compute nodes, resulting in significant improvement in processing time and reliability.

At the end of the day, human beings are significantly depended upon their visual system to “see” the world we live in. We perceive rich visual information, we analyze this data and we use this visual analysis process to reach important and sometime critical decisions. In many cases the way the information is visually presented is crucial to our decision making process. You are invited to Hear Dr. Yaakov Greenshpan in this session in order to learn about the ways we can use WPF and Silverlight technologies to help us all reach better decision using better data visualization.

Windows Presentation Foundation is a great platform for building and designing the next generation Windows client applications. Data binding and data templates are two related outstanding features in WPF which provide a simple and consistent way for applications to present, visualize and interact with data. In this session we will learn how to design and develop WPF Windows client around data binding, we will observe how data binding helps to eliminate boilerplate code related to data, and we will talk about important aspects such as threading, memory, debugging and best practices.

The Windows Threadpool was introduced in Windows 2000 and is now widely used, particularly by services to lower the overhead of thread operations.  Yet the original interfaces and implementation made it difficult to use successfully.  In Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 a new threadpool interface and implementation is provided which is simpler and easier to use correctly, while providing better performance and facilities for more robust programming.  In this presentation we will look at the new threadpool, give some examples of the problems which have been addressed, the design rationale, and dive into the implementation details and kernel-level mechanisms it relies on (such as the use of completion ports to manage concurrency).

Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 are not all about LINQ. Come see a demo-rich overview of the top killer features Visual Studio 2008 and .Net framework 3.5 has to offer, and get a sneak view into the future roadmap of the .Net Framework.

Visual Studio 2008 introduces many exciting improvements in the data access area that help developers face their daily challenges. In this session we will explore the new Dataset enhancements, and see how we can query them using LINQ to Datasets. Then, we will see LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities and talk about when each of them should be used. Throughout the session, we will see how these improvements can be easily adopted in exiting projects.

There are many new native C/C++ APIs (obviously not part of the .NET Framework) in Windows Vista. In this talk you will discover how you (a C# or Visual Basic developer using Visual Studio 2008 or 2005) can take advantage of this new functionality. This demo-driven session, will teach you how to make your application feel like a real extension to the Windows Vista platform (and not like a ported application that just runs on it). Vista-only features covered include Windows Error Reporting enhancements, Restart API, Recovery APIs, Restart Manager, writing managed preview handlers and conforming to User Account Control (UAC). As a bonus, these features are also available in Windows Server 2008.