11/9/2008

SPR201: Database Best Practices for the Involuntary DBA (9 AM - 4 PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Paul Randal
Kimberly L. Tripp
Have you been nominated as "the SQL person" on your team? Are you a developer who's suddenly found their test database has become critical for your company's business? Have you become a DBA—even only accidentally—and do you find yourself managing SQL Server database(s) more and more? Are you sure your data is protected? Are you sure your applications can scale? The one thing you NEED now, to manage this system correctly—is knowledge! We'll cover all of the critical components related to configuring, implementing, and maintaining a SQL Server system. Topics will include an overview of SQL Server components, protecting and maintaining the data, writing effective server-side components (e.g., procedures and transactions), and many other items that all require server-side smarts. Come to this workshop to find out the things you need to know to successfully manage SQL Server from the beginning—a day spent here will save you many more!

11/10/2008

VPR202: ADO.NET Entity Framework: 0-60 (9 AM - 4 PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Julie Lerman
This full day workshop will provide you with a more complete overview on ADO.NET Entity Framework, Microsoft's new core data platform, than you could possibly get in an handful of introductory sessions. In this workshop, you will learn what the Entity Framework is and how it fits into your application and enterprise architecture. We will begin with an introduction to the Entity Data model, how to build it, and how to implement it in its simplest form. Then you will learn how to take advantage of the true power of the Entity Data Model by creating customized mappings. You will learn how to query Entity Data Models using LINQ to Entities and Entity SQL with Object Services and stream data with Entity Client. The session will also explore some of the more complex features of object services as well as offer guidance as to when and where you will want to use the Entity Data Model and which of its core querying methods is right for different scenarios. Throughout the workshop we'll look at some practical applications of Entity Framework.

VPR201: Introducing Windows Workflow (9 AM - 4 PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Kathleen Dollard
You’ve heard about Windows Workflow Foundation, but no one’s shown you how to implement it for your applications. This workshop starts with an overview of Windows Workflow and why it’s likely to become a key part of your development strategy. You’ll watch the creation of a complex sequential workflow integrating human and computer-based actions. Then you’ll see a similar problem solved using a state machine workflow. Each workflow includes standard Windows Workflow tasks, custom tasks, and rule-based decisions. You’ll see interactions with things outside the workflow—including notifying people and other systems, handling events, and implementing data exchange services. The workflow becomes more sophisticated as it integrates with the Visual Studio 2008 features that integrate with WCF. Workflows don’t just handle process—they also manage the grimy details of robust systems—transactions and compensation, tracing, status reporting, and exception management. You’ll see how to implement these details and understand the role of the host in providing necessary services. Before closing we’ll circle back around to designing workflows. Workflow design presents new challenges to developers, particularly since you can share this design experience with power end users—actually letting them design portions of the workflow. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to recognize good workflow candidates, make decisions on workflow granularity, determine how to share design responsibilities, and implement workflow details.

HPRA02: Platform Extensibility Model for SharePoint Products and Technologies (9 AM - 4 PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Michael Herman
The goal of the Platform Extensibility Model for SharePoint Products and Technologies is to help architects and project planners understand how best to map their solution requirements with the ITB (In The Box) features of the SharePoint platform to minimize the amount of custom coding and maximize the amount of solution development through configuration (solution composability). The SharePoint Feature Dependency Network is also introduced.

SPR303: Query Tuning in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and 2008 (9 AM - 4 PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Itzik Ben-Gan
This workshop teaches you how to optimize problematic queries by tuning indexes and writing efficient code. The workshop covers in detail internal structures and index access methods, which are the fundamental building blocks that you need to be familiar with in order to master the art of query tuning and optimization. Once you get familiarized with those fundamental building blocks, you will learn how to put your knowledge into action by benchmarking various indexing options, analyzing their performance, and choosing the most ideal design. The workshop will also teach you how to tune and optimize your solutions by applying query revisions that can yield improvements in orders of magnitude in many cases. The workshop will also teach you how to get rid of cursors when set-based solutions are most appropriate, and how to identify the uncommon cases where cursors are the last resort that will yield better performance than set-based solutions.
If time permits, the seminar will also discuss compilations, recompilations, and reuse of execution plans.
The seminar will cover new features in SQL Server 2008 where relevant.

SPR302: Relational Data Warehousing: Leveraging Key Features of SQL Server 2005/2008 (9 AM - 4 PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Paul Randal
Kimberly L. Tripp
Relational data warehouses are critical to every business, but building one using SQL Server has traditionally been difficult due to the lack of enabling features. SQL Server 2005 began addressing this with the addition of partitioned tables/indexes and online, piecemeal operations such as index maintenance, backups, and restores. SQL Server 2008 adds many significant new features to aid in relational data warehousing, such as data compression, change data capture, and filtered indexes, plus some excellent additions and refinements to partitioning. In this information-packed session, we will examine how you can make the most of the key Database Engine features in SQL Server 2005 and 2008 to implement and manage a mission-critical relational data warehouse. Attendees will also receive a copy of our very popular SQL Server 2008 VPC with over 24 hours of hands-on labs targeting many of these features.

HPRA01: SharePoint Server 2007 Document Management Best Practices (9 AM - 4 PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Ben Curry

Document management is the process of applying creation, management, storage and other rules to how documents are created, persisted and expired within an organization. Document collaboration is merely the process of checking out, checking in, and versioning a document before it is published. Windows SharePoint Services gives you document collaboration where as SharePoint Server 2007 gives you document management. Records management encompasses all of that which is document management plus it applies to a broader set of content elements—not just documents. Any electronic record, such as a list item or log entry, can be managed as well in SharePoint Server 2007 if there is a need to do so. Managing these documents involves workflows, templates, expiration policies, and integration with the Microsoft Office suite. This workshop will cover the following:

1. Creating and managing Web applications for document collaboration.

  a. Content database planning and management.

  b. Information architecture.

  c. Site directory.

2. Creating and managing document libraries from an administrator’s perspective.

3. Creating and managing large lists for performance using indexed columns and folders.

4. Integration with third-party products and Microsoft Outlook 2007.

5. An overview of using Workflows for business processes.

6. Leveraging content types for document management.

  a. Templates.

  b. Expiration.

  c. Metadata collection via site columns and document information panels.

  d. Workflows.

7. Replacing file shares with SharePoint (or why not to).

8. Configuring document repositories for search and findability.

9. Managing documents from multiple locations.

10. Creating and managing a records repository.

11. Understanding and using the Recycle Bin for item recovery.

APR201: Silverlight 2 Development Workshop (9 AM - 4 PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Dan Wahlin
Silverlight 2 provides a powerful framework for building Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) that capture the attention of end users. In this workshop, Dan Wahlin will discuss Silverlight 2 technologies including language features, built-in controls, control templates, styles, networking features, animations, data binding, and more. Learn to build engaging applications using the latest client-side technology.

Post-Conference

11/14/2008

SPS301: DataDude to the Max (Bring Your Own Laptop) (9 AM - 4 PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Gert Drapers
The latest release of Visual Studio Team System Database Edition, not only enables support for SQL Server 2008 and all its new metadata, it includes a completely revamped build and deployment engine and new tools for increasing the quality of your database schemas. This workshop will guide you through  all the steps from how to get set up, creating your initial enlistments, building deployment packages, how to create configuration files for your deployment packages, and how to test and validate your deployments. If you bring your own notebook you can follow along using the VPC provided. You can attend without a laptop but your experience will be significantly better with one! This is meant as an advanced workshop and will expect a reasonable laptop configuration in order to participate:
* Virtual PC 2007—already installed
* At least 1 GB of physical memory w/512 MB dedicated to the VPC environment (2 GB is preferred w/1 GB dedicated to VPC)
* 12 GB of physical disk space (20+ GB is preferred)
* DVD drive

VPS201: Implementing Best Practice Data Architectures (9 AM - 4 PM)
Add'l Fee $399
William R. Vaughn
Many companies are at the stage of morphing or merging small applications into large systems but fail to implement efficient, scalable, supportable designs. Other shops are transitioning from Access/JET, Visual Basic 6.0, or other older technologies to the .NET Framework but have been unable to get a foothold on the best practices and available architectural choices. This often means customers are unhappy with performance, data security, and responsiveness of the development team to requested changes. After code review we typically find problems that center on data architecture and implementation issues where fairly fundamental concepts have been overlooked or misunderstood. We find developers that are unsure about how their DBMS engine works, that they’ve chosen the wrong engine or have pushed it well beyond its limits. We find teams and data architectures that fight over shared resources and confusing design choices as Microsoft constantly adds new solutions.

This workshop is designed to help developers gain a solid footing on the foundations of data access architecture. We discuss several alternative approaches and where each is best suited. We discuss how SQL Server works and how to choose the “right” version for their design today and tomorrow. We discuss the Visual Studio and SQL Server tools including SQL Server Profiler, SQL Server Management Studio, and the Visual Studio code generators that can make the job seem easier but might also be the source of performance or code maintenance issues. This workshop includes Bill’s popular sessions on “Getting Connected” and “Managing CLR Executables” as well as sessions on the new RDL reporting technology. This content is updated to reflect Visual Studio SP1 Business Intelligence tools in anticipation of SQL Server 2008’s RTM.

This workshop is all about data. It’s about data architectures, data validation, connecting to data engines, running efficient queries, managing the resultsets, building server-side executables, cursors, constraints, indexes and managing users, and rights and security. It’s about choosing how and where to save, retrieve, and protect data. It’s about how to build efficient forms-over data applications whether they are Windows Forms, WPF, WCF, ASP.NET or whatever new paradigm Microsoft thinks up between now and when the conference starts—or years in the future.

APS301: Patterns of ASP.NET AJAX Application Architecture (9 AM - 4 PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Dino Esposito
ASP.NET AJAX applications do not have much in common with classic ASP.NET applications based on the Web Forms model. Architecturally speaking, AJAX applications are based on a two-tier presentation model where the front-end runs entirely on the client and is written in JavaScript and the back-end is an ad-hoc service layer that exposes public HTTP endpoints. Any data exchange between the tiers is based on JSON packets. ASP.NET AJAX provides an excellent model for designing and building a service-based back-end using either ASMX Web services or WCF services. But it is not of much help as far as the presentation is concerned. Once the client has collected raw data as the result of a server operation, how can you craft some good user interfaces? The first problem to face is just the implementation of an HTML factory. This can be a piece of software that runs entirely browser side and is coded using JavaScript. At the very minimum, it requires helpers for data-binding and templates. Alternatively, you can force some of your AJAX services to operate as HTML factories and return HTML snippets in front of raw data. Performance and design considerations apply to both solutions, as you can easily imagine. A full Web-based rich user interface, though, also requires care when it comes to time out or throttle calls that may put too much pressure on the server. Not to mention that users of an AJAX application are active all the time and can start unneeded and unwanted operations if HTML input elements are not properly disabled. In the end, architecting a true AJAX solution is not a walk in the park. But thankfully a number of recognized patterns exist to provide guidance on the toughest decisions.

VPS202: Service-Orientation, WCF, and You (9 AM - 4 PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Juval Lowy
Contrary to common wisdom, service-orientation is not just for high-end applications. Every application should be service-oriented, and Windows Communication Framework (WCF) is the .NET runtime for developing, deploying, and consuming service-oriented applications. But what is service-orientation really about? What does it mean for mere developers? Is there substance behind the hype? In this comprehensive one-day workshop, Juval will first demystify service-orientation for you, and introduce the basic motivation for service-oriented applications and their operating principal and concepts. In that light, Juval will then describe what WCF is and how it is designed, and demonstrate its advantages over traditional .NET programming. You will see that WCF is more than just the next generation platform for building connected systems. In many respects, WCF is the next development platform for Windows applications, providing system features that are presently crafted by hand on top of .NET and Windows. With WCF, every class automatically benefits from these system features, from security to transactions to tracing and logging and much more. To maximize the use of these off-the-shelf plumbing aspects you should push the service boundary down into your system, but taken to its ultimate conclusion—should every class be a WCF services? And what about performance? The workshop will next demonstrate the power and productivity of WCF, contrasting WCF used granularly on every class with classic .NET in terms of performance, throughput and scalability, and will substantiate the provocative claim that every class can and should be a service. Don’t miss on this unique opportunity to understand SOA and WCF from Juval Lowy who has been part of the strategic design effort for WCF from the beginning, and who offers a profound insight on the methodology, the technology, and its application.

HPSD01: The SharePoint Developer, Designer, and Power User Game Show (9 AM - 4 PM)
Add'l Fee $399
Dustin Miller
During the SharePoint Developer, Designer, and Power User Game Show, you'll learn the right way and the wrong way to develop custom solutions, design master pages and themes, and customize your site with tools like SharePoint Designer. This post-con workshop is designed to appeal to developers, Web designers, and even "power users" who want to know how best to take advantage of SharePoint as a platform for collaboration and development. While there will be some focused discussions involving topics like .NET coding, master page and page layout design, and Data View Web Parts, the workshop will include sample code and ideas for every attendee, and is designed to allow everyone to take away something useful and powerful for their own SharePoint projects, no matter what their role. While there won't be lab assignments during this session, written labs will be provided to each attendee via an online site exclusive to this post-con workshop. Plus: It's a game show! Plan to have fun and maybe even win some prizes!