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VMS201: Building Next Generation User Experiences for Windows Client Applications using Microsoft Expression
Microsoft
An overview of .NET Framework 3.0’s Windows Presentation Foundation, the XAML language, and design and implementation of UI using Microsoft Expression Blend.

VMS202: Growing Your Business Using Office as a Development Platform
Misha Shneerson
Mike Hernandez
Microsoft Office is the leading suite of productivity tools for information workers and Microsoft Visual Studio is the leading toolset of choice for a vast majority of developers. Given the wide distribution of Microsoft Office, there are tremendous opportunities to build applications for your customers that leverage their investment. This session introduces you to the overall Office development story, and you’ll learn about some of the new features the 2007 Office system provides that enables developers to build people-ready business applications. The session then focuses on using Visual Studio Tools for Office to combine the benefits and advantages of the Visual Studio development environment and the robust features of Microsoft Office to create intuitive, scalable, line-of-business solutions for your customers.

VMS203: Introducing Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft 2007 Office System
Misha Shneerson
Mike Hernandez
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office (VSTO 2005) is the default toolset for building managed solutions based on Microsoft Office. Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System (VSTO 2005 SE) builds on the very rich capabilities of VSTO 2005 and introduces new features for developing client solutions based on the 2007 Office System. In this session, you’ll learn how you can build application-level, add-in solutions based on 2007 Office System, and how to leverage new 2007 Office System features such as the ribbon, custom taskpanes, and Outlook form regions.

VMS204: Introduction to .NET 3.0
Ani Babaian
Welcome to Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0, the new managed code programming model for Windows. If you want to create visually stunning user interfaces, build connected applications that interoperate across platforms, and model a range of business processes, and provide a better login and authentication experience for your customers, this is the session for you. In this session, you’ll learn how Microsoft’s next generation developer platform, .NET Framework 3.0, enables you to address all of these scenarios and more. You’ll get the big picture on .NET Framework 3.0, including an overview of its new technologies (Windows CardSpace, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)) and how it relates to .NET Framework 2.0. You’ll walk away understanding how .NET Framework 3.0 simplifies software development and enables you to build new types of applications.

VMS305: LINQ to SQL: Bringing SQL Code into Visual Studio
Young Joo
Database-centric applications have traditionally had to rely on two distinct programming languages: one for the database and one for the application. LINQ to SQL is a component of the LINQ project designed to help integrate relational data and queries with C# and Visual Basic. With this advancement, database queries that previously were stored as opaque strings now benefit from static type checking, CLR metadata, design-time type inference, and of course IntelliSense. LINQ to SQL also supports a rich update capability that lets you save changes to an object graph back to the database using optimistic concurrency or transactions. This session will cover an introduction to common SQL queries that can be done natively in the language, a discussion around how LINQ to SQL optimizes performance and execution on the server, and how Visual Studio enhancements like the Object-Relational Designer and IntelliSense give developers the power and productivity to leverage LINQ to SQL entities.

VMS307: Real World SOA using WCF and WF
Ani Babaian
Welcome to the world of Service Oriented Architecture. SOA isn’t new but represents a substantial shift in how we build our applications. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) radically changes the face of distributed programming for developers using Microsoft® .NET Framework. WCF unifies the existing suite of .NET distributed technologies into a single programming model that improves the overall developer experience through a consistent architecture, new levels of functionality and interoperability, and all the extensibility points you could want. But the real world is about workflow as well. Windows Workflow is the new programming model for building workflow-enabled applications. This session is about building real-world applications that include both WCF and WF.

VMS311: Smart Clients: What's New in Visual Studio "Orcas"?
Saurabh Pant
Visual Studio "Orcas" is about making the rapid application development experience even easier. In this overview we will introduce new features that allow Smart Clients to go where they never have before: including Occasionally Connected Systems, SQL Server Compact Edition, Client App Services, N-Tier Data, ClickOnce Deployment enhancements, as well as out-of-the-box ways to future proof your existing applications: including Windows Forms / WPF Integration, and Vista enhancements. Add to that the designer productivity enhancements and see an exciting new wave of smart client development.

VMS309: Sneak Peak at Visual Studio "Orcas"
Young Joo
Come see how Visual Studio Codename “Orcas” will provide support for building applications for Windows Vista, the .NET Framework 3.0, the 2007 Microsoft Office System, ASP.NET and mobile devices. This session will look at new features like LINQ, and designers for the .NET Framework 3.0 and the 2007 Office system.

VMS310: SQL Server Compact Edition and the Occasionally Connected Client
Steve Lasker
Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition (formerly SQL Server Everywhere Edition) is the compact database for rapidly developing applications that extend enterprise data management capabilities to the desktop and mobile clients. Find out what SQL Server Compact Edition has to offer at the “edge of the network“ and in occasionally connected scenarios.

VMS308: SQL Server Schema Versioning and Database Builds
Gert Drapers
Learn how you can version and manage your SQL Server schema and make them part of the daily build process using Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals and Team Build.

VMS312: Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server Planning and Deployment
Sudhir Hasbe
Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server is proving to be very hot, but how do you plan, deploy, and manage a successful deployment? This session will give an overview of deployment scenarios, including single .NET projects, plus entire migrations to VSTS and VSS.

VMS313: Visual Studio Tools for Applications: Next Generation Application Extensibility
Russ Fustino
Joe Healy
Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) provides managed extensibility to software vendors, accelerating and simplifying the development of tailored solutions. VSTA leverages the development environment of Visual Studio and the security of .NET, enabling new customization scenarios for Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). In this session, you will learn how to use VSTA to build rich, robust, and secure customizations to consume Web services, validate users, and automate repetitive tasks.

VMS306: What Every Developer Should Know About Managing Application Identity
Ani Babaian
Identity management and access control in connected systems has gone beyond a technical concern and become a top business issue as organizations look to reduce security risk, decrease operational costs, satisfy regulatory requirements, and deepen their electronic relationships with customers and partners. In this session, learn about Microsoft's framework for identity and access technology, including solutions for Directory Services, Strong Authentication, Identity Lifecycle Management, Information Protection, Windows Cardspace, and Single Sign-On. This session is about learning how these can be used within your application development.

VMS315: Windows Vista for Managed Developers: Beyond NetFx3
Jono Wells
Windows Vista brings with it a fantastic platform for managed development, namely .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly WinFX). However, there are many new native APIs (obviously not part of NetFx3) in Windows Vista. In this session, you’ll discover how you (a C# or Visual Basic developer using Visual Studio 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).

VMS214: Windows Vista Overview for Developers
Jono Wells
Windows Vista provides a wealth of new user experiences that enable users to have greater confidence in their PCs, clear ways to work with information, and more options for connecting to applications, people, and data. In this session, we’ll review our top-10 developer "calls to action" by walking through several out-of-the-box experiences and illustrating how you can provide similar experiences in your applications.

SMART CLIENT

VSM302: Cutting Edge Smart Client Applications
Tim Huckaby
For the last few years, with the Smart Client Revolution in full swing, smart client applications like Windows applications are prevalent in the enterprise because of the challenges of deployment and maintenance have been mostly overcome. Now, because deploying a smart client application safely can be as simple as posting the exe on a Web page, building smart client applications with rich GUIs is an architectural decision that must be considered in the application design phase of every project. This session will be heavily demo-focused on the next generation of smart client applications and design patterns used in real smart client applications. WPF, Windows Forms, Compact Framework, Visual Studio Tools for the Office System, deployment and updating—this session will delve into the tips and tricks, positives and negatives when designing and building smart client applications.

VSM303: Real World Deployment of .NET 3.0 Smart Client Applications
Brian Noyes
Once you integrate the powerful features of .NET 3.0 into your applications, you still need to get those applications into user’s hands. ClickOnce still makes a great deployment model for .NET 3.0 apps as well, whether you are including WCF, WPF, or WF capabilities into your applications. But along with .NET 3.0 comes some new considerations and capabilities with respect to ClickOnce deployment. This session will quickly review the capabilities of ClickOnce and what some of the challenges and solutions are for real world deployments of applications. It will cover the specific security and dependency requirements for deploying smart clients that use WCF for remote communications and WF for internal workflow management. It will also cover the ClickOnce deployment and application models for WPF applications.

LIVE

VLV200: .NET Rocks! Live
Carl Franklin
Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell bring their blockbuster talk show live to the Connections stage. No matter who the guests are you can bet the discussion will be spirited, relevant, and focused. This session will be recorded and published at http://www.dotnetrocks.com

VISUAL BASIC LANGUAGE

VVB201: I Want "My" Namespace
Paul D. Sheriff
A whole new namespace is introduced in Visual Basic 2005 called "My". This namespace contains classes that make it much easier to do common programming tasks that were easy in Visual Basic 6.0, but were a little harder to find in VB.NET. You will learn how to gather machine information, access the Forms collection, how to work with the file system, get resources and application settings, and many other topics.

VVB202: What’s New in Visual Basic 9.0?
Billy Hollis
The upcoming “Orcas“ release for Visual Studio includes many new features in the Visual Basic language and environment. The overall theme of the changes aligns well with VB’s traditional focus on data-related applications and dynamic language features. This session highlights those changes, including the unified data model for treating data from varied sources in a similar, integrated way, new capabilities for selecting and manipulating data with Language Integrated Query (LINQ), embedded XML, dynamic typing and type inference (also called implicit typing), improved IntelliSense, and several others.

UI DESIGN

VUI301: Understanding Efficient User Interface Design
Markus Egger
The user interface is of tremendous importance as it is the only part of any given application that is visible to the user. Unfortunately, techniques and guidelines for efficient user interfaces remain a subject of mystery for most developers. This session explores user interface design on multiple levels. It discusses user interface design philosophy as well as specific techniques available in Visual Studio and enhanced possibilities in Visual Studio 2005. The session presents many examples based on real-life applications.

RSS

VRS301: Programming RSS with Windows Vista and .NET 3.0
Dan Appleman
Vista supports a centralized RSS subscription model that allows developers to incorporate syndicated information into virtually any application. This session will explore RSS under Vista and .NET 3.0 from a developer’s perspective, including subscribing to data, managing subscriptions, and publishing data from various types of .NET applications.

.NET VERSION 3.0 (WINFX)

VFX301: Claims-Based and Federated Security with WCF
Michele Leroux Bustamante
The identity model in WCF supports a rich, claims-based approach to authorization. Virtually any security token can be represented as a set of claims, including tokens that contain Windows credentials, user name and password or X509 certificates. Normalized claims are the heart of any federated security model—allowing developers to decouple how tokens are mapped to a set of domain-specific claims and appropriately decouple how users are authorized based on those claims. This session will first show you how to build a claims-based security model using custom authorization policies, permissions, and attributes. Then, you’ll learn how this plays into a federated model allowing you to decouple authentication and authorization from your business service implementations. In the process, you’ll learn about SAML tokens, how to create custom claims, and how the flow of communication between clients, token issuers, and services works.

VFX302: Programming Windows Communication Foundation -- A Developer’s Primer
Juval Lowy
How do you actually build and consume WCF-based services? At its core, the WCF programming model is simple and straightforward, requiring actually very little work on behalf of the developer. The session describes the essential WCF programming concepts: clients, services, contracts, and end points, and shows how to build, configure, and host simple services. After attending this session you will be able to start programming and exploring WCF.

VFX305: Transactional WCF Services
Juval Lowy
Transactions are the key to building robust, high-quality service-oriented applications. WCF provides a simple, declarative transaction support for service developers, enabling you to configure parameters such as enlistment and voting, all outside the scope of your service. In addition, WCF allows client applications to create transactions and to propagate transactions across service boundaries, and to achieve that over a variety of transports, including HTTP, using WS-Atomic Transactions. This session explains how to configure transaction flow at the binding, contract, and service level, how and when to configure transaction protocols, local vs. distributed transactions, setting of service transaction, declarative voting, and what are the available configurations that best fits various application scenarios. The session ends by discussing relevant design guidelines such as transactional service state management and activation mode.

VFX306: WCF Contract Design and Versioning Scenarios
Michele Leroux Bustamante
Contracts are a critical part of service-oriented system design. This session will provide practical guidance for designing service contracts, data contracts and message contracts. You’ll learn when to use code-first or contract-first approaches; when to use code sharing vs. contract sharing; different approaches to contract versioning based on the level of strictness in your environment; and advanced scenarios for type serialization that may require more control than data contracts provide.

VFX307: WCF Operations and Calls
Juval Lowy
With WCF, developers have several out-of-the-box options for dispatching calls to the service: request reply, one-way fire and forget, duplex calls, or even data streaming. The session starts by describing each of the available operation types, offering practical insight and examples on when and where each best applies, as well as how the operation type relates to other WCF aspects such as error handling, reliability, binding, and concurrency. Then, you will see how to improve and extend the basic offering to support callback set up and teardown, manage callback ports and channels, and provide for type-safe duplex proxies. Finally, you will see an original framework for supporting a loosely coupled publish/subscribe events service.

GENERAL PROGRAMMING

VGP301: Best Practices with the .NET Event/Delegate Framework
Mark Miller
This session will introduce the delegate and show how it works behind the scenes. We’ll start off easy enough: creating and handling unique events with custom event arguments, and then dive into the details of the architecture and show how you can totally control the inner workings of event subscription and notification. Learn how to reduce your working set, improve performance, and avoid memory leaks. We’ll also explore how to protect against malicious or poorly-programmed event handlers.

VGP302: Create Your Own Configuration Management System
Paul D. Sheriff
In .NET 2.0, configuration management has been completely overhauled. The new ConfigurationManager class is now used, along with other Configuration classes, to handle configuration management. In this session, you will learn how to create a configuration handler to read configuration settings from any “data store“. You will learn how to create a set of Providers to be able to switch where the data is stored simply by changing a configuration setting, not changing and recompiling code! You will see Provider examples that can read settings from your .config file, an .XML file, or from the Registry.

VGP303: Demand-load Add-in Frameworks
Mark Miller
Do your applications take forever to start up? Learn how to convert your traditional static .NET exe into a truly nimble app, starting up to 10-times faster and with greater flexibility. This session will provide a bird’s-eye view of the process of converting your application to load on demand, and will keep things grounded with code that shows how to do it. This session will also dispel at least one popular myth about performance and granularity, and we’ll take a look at other benefits delivered by add-in architectures, like the ability to outsource portions of your code to developers off-site while keeping intellectual property safe inside the company net.

VGP304: Discoverability and the .NET Framework
Dan Appleman
Have you ever spent days looking for a solution to a problem? Or spent hours implementing a solution that turned out to be easily solved using a .NET class you weren’t aware of? The .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET is HUGE. And there’s tons of information available—the problem is, finding the solution to your particular problem can be a huge challenge. In this unusual session, we’ll explore techniques, strategies, and resources for discovering information about .NET. Bring your favorite techniques to share during an open brainstorming session that will follow the first part of the session.

VGP305: From Zero to N-Tier in 75 Minutes
Paul D. Sheriff
You know you need to code using N-Tier techniques, but you are not really sure how to. In this session, you will watch as the presenter converts a typical two-tier application into an N-tier application. You will learn how to create a data access layer, data tier classes, and business rule classes. Best practices and a standard approach to building these classes will be presented.

VGP306: Lego Mindstorms NXT Programming with Visual Studio and the Microsoft Robotics Studio
Nickolas Landry
Did you ever think of extending your programming skills to affect the real world, interact with it, and work with your "senses"? Sure, management systems and database-centric applications are the bread and butter of the IT developer, but there is also a whole world in motion out there that requires automation. What would you rather program for: R2-D2 or a secure Web service? This session is your first foray in the world of robotics using the Microsoft Robotics Studio, an integrated environment based on Visual Studio for academic, hobbyist, and commercial developers to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware. Come explore this fascinating realm of motorized and sensor-driven automation with cool, live demos based on the new Lego Mindstorms NXT. We’ll cover the extensible run-time architecture, the programming interface used to address robots using 8-bit or 16-bit processors as well as 32-bit systems, debugging robot applications scenarios, using the high quality visual simulation environment that uses the Ageia Technologies PhysX engine, remote control via a serial port, Bluetooth, RF or Wi-Fi, and more. Whether your interest is as a hobbyist or a developer seeking new professional challenges, this session will get you, and your robot, rolling in no time!

VGP307: Tracing and Logging in .NET
Dan Appleman
Instrumenting an application is one of the best things you can do to make your application supportable and maintainable. This session covers intermediate and advanced design patterns for instrumenting your application and covers the new instrumentation features of the System.Diagnostics class.

VGP308: Windows Vista and .NET
Stephen Toub
Windows Vista brings with it a plethora of new APIs for developers to take advantage of in their native applications, but many of these APIs can be used from managed code, too! Come learn how to take advantage of much of this cool and useful functionality in your .NET apps.

SERVICE BROKER

VSB301: Queue-based Applications using SQL Server Service Broker
Billy Hollis
Queue-based designs offer loose coupling, performance smoothing, and robustness to distributed applications. Prior to SQL Server 2005, the main options for queuing were MSMQ and "roll-your-own". Included in SQL Server 2005 is a new option Service Broker. Queues now become a first class database citizen, and this session introduces how developers can incorporate them into applications. Basic operations, including creating queues and contracts for queue items, sending and receiving queue items, and using SQL to interrogate queues will be covered. The demonstration will include a minimal .NET wrapper for queues that uses generics to establish type-safe queues backed by Service Broker.

VISUAL STUDIO "ORCAS"

VOR301: ADO.NET Orcas Overview
Julie Lerman
The next version of ADO.NET will present a host of new ways to interact with data in your .NET applications. The Entity Framework provides for abstracted access to your data, client-side views and schemas, and mapping of data to objects. You’ll be able to build queries on the client side against your own views and schemas using Entity SQL and LINQ. LINQ can also be used to query datasets in memory. It’s an exciting new set of capabilities and this session will take a look at the current state of the upcoming ADO.NET and its Visual Studio integration tools.

VISUAL STUDIO TOOLS FOR THE OFFICE SYSTEM

VTO301: Designing and Building Applications with Visual Studio Tools for the Office System (VSTO)
Tim Huckaby
This session focuses on the power and developer productivity of Visual Studio Tools for the Office System (VSTO). VSTO is a .NET smart client technology and this session will delve into the tips and tricks, positives and negatives when designing and building smart client applications with VSTO 2005 and 2007. VSTO allows you to build managed-code applications with .NET languages like VB.NET and C# and have the functionality of those applications manifest in the rich user interfaces of Microsoft Excel, Word, Outlook, and eventually the rest of the Office stack. You will learn just how easy it is to build powerful VSTO applications in this session, and how to deploy those applications.

VTO302: Managed Preview Handlers for Vista and Outlook
Stephen Toub
Windows Vista and Outlook 2007 both support preview panes for previewing files and attachments without explicitly opening them in separate applications. Even better, this mechanism is now extensible through the development of custom preview handlers. Come learn about COM interop, shell add-ins, how to write preview handlers in managed code, and more.

WINDOWS PRESENTATION FOUNDATION

VWP301: Effective Windows Presentation Foundation Design
Kathleen Dollard
Windows Presentation Foundation takes us into a new realm of graphics. Business programmers will see both direct and indirect effects. Indirect effects will appear in the future as new UI widgets become available and today as WPF lets you design new capabilities into your client applications. This session focuses on the direct effect of how you can use WPF to make better user interfaces faster. WinForms offer limited scaling, opacity, and animation, but WPF takes off the roof in supporting these capabilities. WPF provides support for flow and table layout, including a great design time experience and autofit support. WPF also allows simple manipulation of graphic primitives and amazing control over text appearance. Finally, you’ll see how to fully customize the look and feel of your apps on a global basis—either to customize for individual clients or to keep your application looking fresh through future UI fashion changes. This session focuses on taking these exciting features out of your toolbox to use in rapidly creating user interfaces that are effective for the end user and consistent with the Vista user experience.

VWP302: Revving up with Windows Presentation Foundation
Kathleen Dollard
Windows Presentation Foundation offers the first new options for creating the visual aspects of your applications in well over a decade. See how to implement WPF in both Windows XP and Windows Vista. This session starts by using grids to lay out controls you drag from the toolbox. You’ll see how the WPF Grid supports varying text widths and visual adornments. You’ll look behind the scenes at the simplicity of the declarative approach supported by the visual designers and understand the model that separates the behavior and visual aspects of each control. Building on this model, you’ll see how to create your own controls and how to use resource configuration to provide flexible consistency across your application. You’ll also learn how to use triggers to provide dynamic user interface behavior. This session shows you the similarities and differences between WPF tools and WinForms and how to implement WPF interfaces in your own applications.

VWP304: WPF and Windows Forms Interoperability
Brian Noyes
When it comes to adopting WPF, it is not an all or nothing proposition. You can continue to use Windows Forms for the core business functionality of your application and integrate WPF controls for high-end graphic features as needed, or you can build a whole new WPF application and incorporate legacy Windows Forms controls to leverage past investment. This session will discuss and demonstrate the interoperability features of Windows Forms and WPF. You will learn what you can and can’t do, how to integrate the two technologies, and what the impacts are of doing so.

WINDOWS WORKFLOW FOUNDATION

VWF301: Encapsulate Business Processes with Custom WF Activities
Brian Noyes
You can build very complicated and powerful workflows with the base activity library activities that ship with WF. However, just like with any code, repeating patterns will emerge as you build out your workflows and it doesn’t make sense to have repetition in workflows any more than it does in code. Where the added value of WF really starts to shine is when you start building custom libraries of activities to encapsulate your business processes and common patterns of lower level activities. This session will discuss and demonstrate how to design and build custom activities. You will learn about simple and composite activities, what their lifecycle is, and how to design those activities for the best design time user experience possible. You will also learn about the instancing behavior of workflows, which is one of the more complicated aspects of WF that you will have to master to effectively design complex custom activities.

VWF302: Exposing a Workflow as a (Web) Service
Dino Esposito
A workflow is a way to model and code a business process. Once compiled, the process is persisted as a class library and can be called as such from client applications. However, in the context of an enterprise distributed application the class of applications that most require workflows it might be preferable to encapsulate the business process in a service. The Windows workflow API provides a native way to expose a workflow as an ASP.NET Web service. As an alternative, you can create a new WCF service and use the workflow API to model its internal logic. In this session, you’ll see how and any related pros and cons.

VWF304: Transactional Tasks in Windows Workflow Foundation
Dino Esposito
Among the various built-in activities of the Windows Workflow Foundation there’s one that adds transactional semantics to all or part of the workflow. The TransactionScope activity is entirely based on the services of the .NET Framework 2.0 TransactionScope class. All activities composed in the scope of the transaction form a unit of work that fulfills the classic ACID schema. The TransactionScope activity also supports compensation, that is the process of logically undoing the completed transactions in case of any subsequent business exceptions. In this session, we’ll examine dos and don’ts of transactional tasks in Windows workflows.

VWF305: Windows Workflow-Giving Power Users Real Power
Kathleen Dollard
There are two ways to grant significant power to users of your Windows Workflow application. You can use a rules engine to let them fine tune decision points in a workflow you create and maintain, or you can embed the workflow designer in an application for power users. The first approach orchestrates the relationship between the programmer and end user in ways that support traditional development models. The second approach turns development on its ear and frees you to focus on implementing business processes with much less concern for managing variations in how different departments view the business. You don’t actually lose control because you define the sub processes presented as possible activities for the workflow. These processes can be any combination of traditional libraries and additional workflows controlled by programmers. In addition to understanding the architectural implications of rules based and user designed workflows, you’ll learn about important supporting details, such as validating custom activities and designers that express key information about your custom activities. You’ll leave this session ready for vibrant planning for new ways to incorporate power users and knowing how to implement these workflows when they fit your application.

LANGUAGE INTEGRATED QUERY (LINQ)

VLQ301: Introduction to LINQ
Markus Egger
LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is one of the most significant new features that will be available to developers in “Orcas“ (the next version of Visual Studio) timeframe. It enables the developer to use query language constructs (such as SELECT statements) as part of the native Visual Studio languages (in particular Visual Basic and C#). LINQ can be used in a familiar fashion to query data, but it really goes far beyond this fundamental capability. LINQ allows using queries on anything that exposes structure, including objects and collections of objects. LINQ is also more powerful than your typical query language in what it can return as the query result. In particular, LINQ can create any object construct as the result set. LINQ needs to be seen in action for one to really appreciate its power. This session provides an overview of LINQs capabilities and features and their particular implementations in C# and VB.

ENHANCING THE VISUAL STUDIO IDE

VID301: Visual Studio IDE Beneath the Surface
Billy Hollis
You use the Visual Studio IDE every day, but how much of it do you really use? Do you use the Clipboard Ring? How about Incremental Search? Do you know how to write macros? Can you assign actions to your own keystrokes? Do you know how to create your own code snippets? Do you know what attributes on your properties will integrate your controls and components with the IDE’s property window? The more "no" answers you made, the more likely it is that this session will help you become a more efficient user of Visual Studio 2005.

MOBILE DEVELOPMENT

VMB301: Remote Mobile Communications Using WCF and .NET Compact Framework 3.5
Nickolas Landry
Communicating with the server-side and the rest of your corporate network infrastructure is a key aspect of any mobile smart client application that lives within a distributed enterprise architecture. However, mobile devices aren’t always on the Web or docked into the corporate network. Therefore your applications have to handle a range of scenarios for transferring data to and from the home office during times when a connection is available and storing information locally when a connection is not available. WCF provides a new unified programming model for building connected applications with managed code on the desktop and the server. Thanks to the WCF extensible channel architecture, mobile devices can also participate and leverage WCF, but only a subset of the full WCF model is supported. This session explores the similarities and the differences in building mobile communications infrastructures using .NET Compact Framework 3.5 and WCF. Through live demos, we’ll cover the WCF programming model and channel layer messaging, the supported channels, integrating with the desktop and server-side, extensibility points, the role of Exchange 2007, e-mail and AirSync, and more. If you think you know everything about WCF, think again mobile devices are also part of the enterprise equation and you need to learn how to reach out to them.

VMB302: SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition for Windows Developers
William R. Vaughn
Clearly, the alternatives exposed by the newly reconfigured SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition are some of the most enabling technology enhancements we’ve seen in some time. Given that JET is being phased out, developers need to be made aware of this new approach to local, lightweight, secure data storage. This session walks developers through the re-engineered Compact Edition and discusses what's new (and what's the same), compares the SqlCe and SqlClient namespaces and the SQL Express, JET and SQLCe engines. It also details which architectures can benefit from SQLCe, how SQLCe is implemented, coded, deployed and managed using code and the SQL Server/Visual Studio toolsets. Also included is a detailed code and tools demonstration that illustrates techniques used to create and protect a SQLCe database, import and export data, design in replication, setup TableAdapter classes or untyped DataSets, leverage the unique TableDirect and SqlCeResultSet, and create SQL-driven queries. The session is written for developers familiar with JET/Access or SQL Server development tools, techniques, architectures and coding practices.

VMB303: What’s New for Mobile Developers in Windows Vista, Visual Studio “Orcas” and .NET 3.5
Nickolas Landry
Great technological advances in the field of mobility have allowed us to reach even farther out, beyond the physical boundaries of the enterprise. Faster wireless networks, broader coverage, more powerful devices, different form factors and state of the art development tools have all contributed to the mobile revolution currently in progress. Visual Studio "Orcas" incorporates both native and managed development for Windows Mobile devices. This session provides a comprehensive overview of all the pieces of Visual Studio that a device developer show know, along with many tips and tricks to make you more productive as a mobile developer in a Windows Vista world. This session is useful for anyone considering a move to the latest device development tools and who wants to get an overview and understand any limitation of the new Development Tools Set. Learn about the new .NET Compact Framework 3.0, WCF for devices, unit testing for mobile device applications, the Database Tools, the new Microsoft Device Emulator 2.0 and the Remote Tools, Windows Mobile "Crossbow", SQL Server Everywhere Edition, the Windows Mobile Device Center in Vista, the Mobile Client Software Factory and more.