The MSDN team will focus on what’s coming up next this year for .NET developers beyond Visual Studio 2008. We will also look at Silverlight, ASP.NET, ADO.NET and other future bits which involve more code and less PowerPoint.
Please be aware that the content for this rerun is exactly that covered in the other MSDN Roadshow 2008 events – so this event is aimed at Developers who could not make those earlier events.
Session 1 ADO.NEXT – Entity Framework & Data Services
The next version of ADO.NET will deliver exciting innovations around the shape of the data that we expose to applications, how we program against it and the ease with which we make it available. In this session we’ll be using Visual Studio 2008 in order to take a look at the ADO.NET Entity Framework which extends the existing database-neutral model of ADO.NET to include new capabilities that provide a greater level of abstraction between the schema of your database and the data entities that surface inside your application. We’ll also look at the programming models for Entity Framework including the object relational mapping capabilities that tie in with LINQ. Following on from that, we’ll dive into how ADO.NET Data Services can expose your data in a RESTful manner with just HTTP and XML/JSON in order to quickly make it available to as many client applications as possible.
Session 2 ASP.NEXT – The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions
ASP.NET 3.5 delivers a rich, scalable and highly productive web platform with innovations such as ASP.NET AJAX, LINQ and the new ListView control. Just over the horizon are the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions which deliver new functionality to both ASP.NET 3.5 and ADO.NET. In this session we’ll use Visual Studio 2008 to explore the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions including the new MVC (model view controller) framework, Dynamic Data, AJAX enhancements and Silverlight support.
The MVC support in the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions simplifies the implementation of the MVC pattern in ASP.NET allowing a clear separation of concerns and simplifying unit testing. Dynamic Data helps you to build a fully customisable, data-driven application quickly using an extensible scaffolding framework. The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions take the ASP.NET AJAX model even further with such things as support for managing browser history (browser navigation) to alleviate the problem of AJAX applications behaving differently to ‘traditional’ web applications. The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions fully embrace Silverlight and make extending your existing sites with rich Silverlight content easy with controls for embedding Silverlight applications and cross-browser, cross platform media players.
Session 3 Building Rich Internet UI with Silverlight 2
Last September Microsoft released its cross-platform offering for developing Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), Silverlight v1.0. In this session we introduce the upcoming Silverlight 2 release which in addition to XAML and script, adds support for managed development through C# and Visual Basic. The session assumes that you are familiar with either Windows Forms or ASP.NET and it makes no assumptions of any other knowledge. Come learn why you should care about Silverlight v2.0, what its capabilities are and how to get started from scratch.
Session 4 Getting the most from the Visual Studio Team Suite Toolbox
In this session, we’ll focus on improving the software that you develop. We will show how and why writing unit tests for your code will save you time and improve the quality of what you ship. We’ll look at how you can use the tools present in VSTS test to find performance bottlenecks in your web applications. Along the way, we’ll also look at how database developers can use improvements in the tooling to maintain SQL Server artefacts and to better integrate database development in the day to day process.