VMS202: C++/CLI and the Future of C++
Arjun Bijanki
Take an advanced look at the benefits and features of C++/CLI development such as bringing native code to CLR, interoperating between native and managed code, and using the various C++/CLI mechanisms such as interface inheritance and generics.  Further details on the future of VC++ will be discussed, with an overview of current planned features and scenarios for the next version of VC++.

VMS201: The Power of Office Development in Managed Code
Mike Hernandez
Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System (VSTO 2005) empowers IT professionals, ISVs and System Integrators to build robust Smart Client solutions for the Microsoft Office System. Developers gain access to the complete power of the .NET Framework, including a rich VB .NET and C# coding experience, a huge selection of managed controls, improved deployment and maintenance of solutions, and improved security. Developers can also easily consume and expose XML Web services and line of business systems directly from Excel, Word and InfoPath documents and templates and Outlook Add-ins. VSTO 2005 solutions reduce end-user training and provide familiar user interfaces taking full advantage of Excel's calculation and presentation features, Word's document formatting and text management features, InfoPath’s information gathering and XML management features and extending Outlook’s email, calendar, task and contact functionality.

VMS208: Using Data in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System
Mike Hernandez
This session will show you how to use the new Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 visual data tools to bind data from an SQL Server database to managed controls and host controls within your Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System solutions. For example, you’ll see how easy it is to drag and drop a table or stored procedure from a data source on to a Microsoft Office Excel worksheet and then add controls to the Document Actions task pane that will allow you to navigate through the data.

VMS204: Visual C# Under the Covers: An In-depth Look at C# 2.0 and C# 3.0
Mads Torgersen
Take an advanced look at the benefits and features of C# development such as generics, generic constraints, iterators, anonymous methods, partial types, and other C# language enhancements. Further details on the future of C# will be discussed, with an overview of current planned features and scenarios for C# 3.0.

VMS207: Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Adopting and Migrating
Michael Leworthy
So, how does an organization adopt Visual Studio 2005 Team System? What are the steps from migrating current source control systems, moving project information, adopting or extending process and methodologies, and migrating your current projects into VSTS. This session will overview common installation tasks, pitfalls and migration techniques. Included will be a case study on how the 500-person development team behind Visual Studio 2005 Team System, spread across 5 geographic locations, has been using this technology from almost day 1.

VMS205: Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Mission Critical Development (Part 1)
Michael Leworthy
Over the past decade, we have been witness to several spectacular software failures. In 1998, a division by zero error brought a Navy warship to a standstill. In 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter was lost because the decision to use the Metric system versus the Imperial system was not communicated to the team. These two examples illustrate the wide spectrum of ways an organization’s attempt to build to robust and reliable software can be undermined. A miscalculation by a single developer can bring an entire ship to a standstill. The lifework of an accomplished team can be ruined because a simple decision was not communicated. Visual Studio 2005 Team System was designed from the ground up to provide a collaborative environment to help teams communicate and work productively. This session will illustrate how each discipline, everyone from project managers, to architects, to developers and testers benefits from technology designed to make them more productive, as well as technology that helps them work together. (Part 1 of 2)

VMS206: Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Mission Critical Development (Part 2)
Prashant Sridharan
Over the past decade, we have been witness to several spectacular software failures. In 1998, a division by zero error brought a Navy warship to a standstill. In 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter was lost because the decision to use the Metric system versus the Imperial system was not communicated to the team. These two examples illustrate the wide spectrum of ways an organization’s attempt to build to robust and reliable software can be undermined. A miscalculation by a single developer can bring an entire ship to a standstill. The lifework of an accomplished team can be ruined because a simple decision was not communicated. Visual Studio 2005 Team System was designed from the ground up to provide a collaborative environment to help teams communicate and work productively. This session will illustrate how each discipline, everyone from project managers, to architects, to developers and testers benefits from technology designed to make them more productive, as well as technology that helps them work together. (Part 2 of 2)

KEYNOTE SESSION

VSKEY: Integrating Your Team Better from Development to Deployment
Prashant Sridharan
In many cases, the largest barrier to successful implementation of custom software is the communication process between the teams that develop the applications, and the teams that deploy them. Very rarely do they have a deep understanding of each others environment, or the constraints and challenges right across the lifecycle. Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio Team System have been built specifically to break down these communication barriers, helping development teams deliver faster, secure and more reliable applications that deploy in the datacenter the right way every time.

Data and XML

VDA401: Advanced Data Access Patterns with ADO.NET 2.0
Julie Lerman
Most demos and samples for ADO.NET deal with small amounts of data and simplistic functions. This session will take a look at how to design and code your data layer for dealing with real-world, high-end, data-intensive applications. We’ll look at some advanced patterns for handling more sophisticated scenarios such as updating huge amounts of data, leveraging middle-tier caching for heavy traffic Web sites, and an inmemory query processor that the ADO.NET team has built that we can use today. Much of what will be shown will leverage features of ADO.NET 2.0 as well as some of the performance improvements that have been made to the internals.

Debugging

VDE201: 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.

LIVE

VLI200: .NET Rocks! Live!
Carl Franklin
Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell bring .NET Rocks! to you! Attend this live program of “the Internet Audio Talk Show for .NET Developers” right here at DevConnections. Guest to be announced.

MULTITHREADING

VMU401: Multithreading Changes in the .NET Framework 2.0
Stephen Toub
It wasn’t very long ago that only hard-core system developers worried about multithreading. Today, with multiprocessor machines becoming commonplace, nonconcurrent applications are at a disadvantage, unable to benefit from the computing power available to them. The .NET Framework 1.0 and 1.1 offered useful and powerful tools to help you build multithreaded functionality into your programs. It’s even better with the .NET Framework 2.0. From new synchronization primitives to the BackgroundWorker component to ThreadPool enhancements, this session will take you on a whirlwind tour of what's new with threading in the .NET Framework 2.0.

PERFORMANCE AND SCALABILITY

VPE301: Not Faster Processors, But More Processors
Carl Franklin
The trend in PC performance is no longer to make revolutionary advances in CPU speed, but to add more processors to a single CPU, which means multi-threaded programming skills will continue to be highly valued. .NET 2.0 simplifies making asynchronous calls in Windows applications to the point where mere mortals can handle multi-threaded calls with only a few lines of code. In this session, we'll compare the 1.1 way to the 2.0 way using Visual Basic 2005.

REPORTING

VRE301: Visual Studio 2005 and Reports--The Fifth Paradigm
William R. Vaughn
Not that long ago, SQL Server released its new Reporting Services extension to its Standard edition. Those of you that didn’t plan to deploy any version of SQL Server with your applications were disappointed because you couldn’t take advantage of this new (and very cool) technology to create interactive reports. Fortunately, Visual Studio 2005 exposes the same RDL report design interface used for SQL Server Reporting Services but without SQL Server to host the report processor. This session discusses  how to get started with Visual Studio Reporting, how to layout a report, use the Report Viewer control, build queries and capture parameters from the user. You’ll see how to build common report types, including table, matrix and reports containing charts and pictures. I plan to show how third-party controls can be integrated into your report and cover deployment, security and protecting your data as well. I’ll also talk about how to convert existing SQL Server Reporting Services RDL reports to the new Visual Studio 2005 RDL format so you can leverage the work you already did with Reporting Services.

Security

VSC201: Encryption 102 for .NET Programmers
Dan Appleman
This session is an introduction to encryption with a hand-on slant. Learn to use the .NET encryption classes to encrypt any type of data. Learn to use public key encryption for key exchange. Learn how encryption relates to obfuscation, and how people often confuse the two. Covers new .NET 2.0 features such as the SecureString class. This session is for those who haven’t used encryption yet and have been intimidated by convoluted technical documentation. The emphasis will be on straightforward solutions to common problems.

Smart Client

VSC302: Secure Smart Client Deployments with ClickOnce
Brian Noyes
Deploying distributed applications with ClickOnce solves many maintenance and supportability issues with smart client applications due to its easy-to-use model. But along with that flexibility comes concerns about the security of applications deployed with ClickOnce. This technology supports a rich model for deploying applications in a trustworthy fashion that will prevent any harm to the client machine during deployment, as well as a rich runtime security infrastructure that ensures the application is not allowed to perform any operations or access any resources that it should not. This session will cover the security facilities of ClickOnce, discussing and demonstrating how to define and configure the security requirements for a ClickOnce deployed smart client application. It will start with a quick introduction to ClickOnce and how it works, and then proceed directly into the security aspects of the technology. The session will demonstrate how to configure trusted publishers that can determine what permissions a ClickOnce application will be granted without user prompting, and how to allow user prompting for Internet scenarios.

VSC301: Smart Client Composite Shells
Billy Hollis
Smart client applications that grow beyond a few forms often need a UI manager that provides a single entry point for the application, and centralizes functions such as security, user settings, and data access. Such a “shell” program can also provide usability enhancements such as graceful shutdown of the application, and ensures behavioral consistency among different parts of the application. This session looks at such shells, including the Composite Application Block from Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices group, to understand the general architecture involved, and how to plug your own functionality into a shell to get a finished application.

WinForms

VWF302: Disconnected Windows Forms Application Architecture
Rockford Lhotka
More and more, users want to take their applications on the road. Achieving this goal requires the use of Windows Forms, but also requires serious architectural work to allow the application to run while disconnected and yet seamlessly reconnect when the user reconnects to the corporate network. Not only must the application provide off-line caching of data, it must allow interactive updates and smooth synchronization. Learn about the issues you’ll face and the solutions at your disposal when using Windows Forms and .NET in Visual Studio 2005.

VWF303: Objects as Data Sources in Windows Forms and WPF
Rockford Lhotka
Custom objects can be first-class data sources in Windows Forms 2.0 and in WPF (Avalon). Building your objects properly for Windows Forms 2.0 today can help you migrate to WPF in the future. Learn what you need to do to make your custom objects act properly as data sources, including the implementation of key interfaces and the raising of key events. You’ll take away knowledge you can use today and in the future with WinFX.

VWF301: Windows Forms with Pizzazz
Kathleen Dollard
You’re ready to build a WinForms application, or you’ve already built one, and suddenly you find that you need to implement a feature .NET doesn’t support out of the box. Maybe someone wants to disable or hide items in a treeview based on contents, alter control layout based on roles, apply a pseudo-skinning model, and support special events. Look at how you can leverage WinForms and .NET fundamentals like owner draw, event management, and control inheritance to create beautiful and highly functional WinForms applications.

C# IDE

VCI301: What's New in the Visual C# 2005 IDE?
Juval Lowy
While C# 2.0 introduces a wealth of exciting new language features, the development environment, and the Visual C# 2005 IDE also comes loaded with new features and capabilities. The new features not only support the new language features, but also provide innovative new development power tools from code refactoring to code expansions and meticulous customization of code formatting. This session describes the new Visual C# 2005 project system and its hidden nuggets, the setting and resource editors, environment settings, code formatting, exporting and importing of personal settings, navigating to type definition and references, debug-time Visualizers, Visual Studio debug-time host process, edit-and-continue, and code refactoring.

TRANSACTIONS

VTR401: Transactions for the Common Type
Juval Lowy
Transactional programming has traditionally been the privilege of database-centric applications. Other types of applications did not benefit easily from this superior programming model. The .NET Framework 2.0 introduces rudimentary support for volatile resource managers, enabling you to enlist transaction support against memory-based resources such as class member variables. The session starts by briefly discussing the problem space transactions address and the motivation for using them, as well as some basic terms such as ACID. It then introduces the concept of a resource manager and explains how and to what extent volatile resource managers are supported in .NET 2.0. Next, the session presents the required building blocks for properly utilizing volatile resources and how they can be used to wrap existing types. Besides making extensive use of C# 2.0, the session walks through some advanced .NET 2.0-enabled programming techniques such as type constraining and object cloning, transaction events, and resource enlistment.

RSS

VRS201: RSS, Podcasting, and Syndication
Carl Franklin
These are terms you should be familiar with in the age of blogging and Windows Vista. In this session, you'll get the big picture as well as some code you can use to aggregate RSS from weblogs, news feeds, and other sources; as well as code to publish your own RSS feeds.

Application Configuration

VAC301: Drive Application Behavior with Application and User Configuration Settings
Brian Noyes
.NET 2.0 includes powerful new capabilities for defining and managing your application configuration settings in a strongly typed way. There is new support in Visual Studio for declaring your settings scoped to the application or user that you can read or write from anywhere in your application, and the settings you create get added to a strongly typed wrapper class as well as being placed in your configuration files. This session will explore these capabilities and demonstrate how to best use them in Windows, Web, and class library projects. You will learn how to declare and use the strongly typed settings in your application, how to use custom types, and how to programmatically access the settings through the wrapper class or the configuration API.

VISUAL STUDIO TEAM SYSTEM

VST301: Team Tools for Unit Testing, Profiling, and Static Analysis
Kathleen Dollard
Among the many tools provided by Visual Studio Team System are three key tools for developers both in and out of large enterprise settings. Unit testing, profiling, and static analysis are each aimed at helping you write better, more maintainable code. This session introduces technical details of each tool, and then dives into how to use each effectively. You’ll learn strategies and guidelines to plan unit testing based on what you’re testing – both the type of application and the type of module you’re testing. You’ll see how to automate creation of some tests through Declarative Unit Testing. Moving on to Profiler, you’ll see how to isolate performance problems and predict performance bounds of your application because you’ll understand better what’s happening at runtime. Finally, you’ll see how to control the quality of your application code by taming the challenges of Static Analysis, previously known as FxCop. This session focuses on making you effective with the key quality tools offered by Visual Studio Team System.

C# Language

VCI302: Extending Visual Studio--Custom Tool Cook-Off in C#
Mark Miller
Visual Studio was designed for customization, and in this session we’ll show you how to do it. Find out how easy it is to integrate your own tools and feature ideas into the Visual Studio IDE, shaping the development environment to better suit your needs. We’ll add commands, create tool windows, intercept keystrokes & mouse activity, paint on the editor surface and more! Along the way we’ll explore the various IDE-extending mechanisms at your disposal, including macros, Microsoft’s Automation model, VSIP, and the DXCore, a free component-based framework for visually extending the IDE. Bring your cool ideas for VS and we’ll turn them into real features live in this session.

VCL301: Generics in the Real World
Kathleen Dollard
What are the new generics features of 2005 actually good for? Walk through the syntax of generics and basic rules regarding their use. You’ll see generic classes, interfaces, methods, and delegates. Then explore how to integrate generics into your applications and architectures–both the new framework generics and your own generics. Generic framework collections offer more features, such as a find based on a generic delegate and performing an action on all members of a collection. Your own generic classes can derive from generic or non-generic framework classes to customize their functionality. See how your generic classes can reuse type-specific code you can’t currently put into your base classes. You’ll walk away ready to integrate generics in either VB or C# to make your applications easier to write, faster, and more robust.

Deployment

VDP301: Patterns for ClickOnce Deployment and Versioning
Michele Leroux Bustamante
Although ClickOnce is a new technology to .NET 2.0, basic functionality for security, versioning, and deployment features can be easily configured through the property dialog. But through deeper understanding of the desired deployment, versioning, and clientside experience you’ll soon need to understand how you can achieve greater control over these features. This session explores some typical patterns for managing smart client deployment and versioning with the ClickOnce foundation and programming model. You’ll learn the implications of ClickOnce on application design and gain some prescriptive guidance beyond the basics of ClickOnce, including how to handle localized applications; how to control version updates; how to roll over data directory items on update; the impact of offline data and synchronization; and how to decouple these and other strategic features from your application code. After attending this session, you’ll have a better idea for the design decisions you’ll need to make to satisfy the needs of your next .NET 2.0 smart client app.

Object-Oriented Design

VOO301: Object Serialization Today and Tomorrow
Rockford Lhotka
Serialization of objects is central to our ability to build distributed systems for client/server, n-tier or SOA using the .NET platform. In .NET 1.x and 2.0 you can serialize objects using the XmlSerializer, BinaryFormatter or SoapFormatter. Each of these technologies offers strengths and weaknesses. WCF (Indigo) provides the XmlFormatter that offers many features common to both the XmlSerializer and BinaryFormatter. Learn about the strengths and weaknesses of all four serialization technologies and how to best apply them to your application requirements today and into the future.

.NET VERSION 3.0 (WINFX)

VWX303: Designing Services with Windows Communication Foundation
Michele Leroux Bustamante
Services are the natural evolution of distributed components and RPC, providing greater possibilities for reuse and distribution from earlier component-oriented approaches. The Windows Communications Framework (WCF) introduces interesting possibilities for enterprise system design, specifically with regards to service design. Services are not RPC or Remote objects, however, they do solve the same problems. With WCF, a service-design approach applies to accessing functionality near or far, and satisfies the same implementation goals of Enterprise Services, Remoting, and Web services all in one. In this session, you’ll see several examples of exchange patterns and transfer modes and see how to apply WCF principles to system design. You’ll learn how various WCF contracts and configurations can be applied to specific exchange patterns, how application-level messaging improves upon the parameter list approach, and see how common enterprise system design practices can now be more easily approached with the progressive service design and distribution support of the WCF.

VWX301: Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation
Billy Hollis
As systems become more distributed, the requirement to coordinate actions with workflow becomes more prominent. To address this need, Microsoft is building workflow capabilities into the WinFX framework libraries. This set of framework classes is called the Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), and is coming in the Windows Vista release cycle. This session will cover the basics of using WWF and introduce WWF’s visual designer and visual debugging. A typical workflow will be analyzed and programmed from start to finish.

VWX304: Programming Windows Communication Foundation--A Developer's Primer
Juval Lowy
SOA tenants and goodness aside, 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 starts by describing the essential WCF programming concepts: clients, services, contracts and end points, and shows how to build and host simple services. Then, you will see some more advanced concepts at work, such as service behaviors, asynchronous one-way calls, transactions, and instance management. After attending this session you will be able to start programming and exploring WCF.

VWX302: Smart Client Connectivity with Windows Communications Foundation (aka Indigo)
Brian Noyes
While WCF is at its core a connectivity technology, it does allow your smart client applications to go to the next level, allowing features such as callbacks, asynchronous classes, peer to peer communication, session management, and distributed transactional data access. This session will not only discuss the essential steps required in building your smart client applications on top on WCF, but also the changes required both to the application development and deployment models. In addition, you will see that getting things working correctly requires the right combination of WCF configuration settings and security policy on the client side, as well as a myriad of topics—from updates and metadata exchanges—to transactional binding and marshaling to user interface threads.

VWX306: WCF Operations and Calls
Juval Lowy
With WCF, developers have several options for dispatching calls to the service: request reply, one-way fire and forget, duplex calls or even data streaming. This 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, concurrency, transactions, threads and reentrancy. 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.

VWX305: Windows Communications Foundation: Writing Reliable and Transacted Distributed Applications
Shy Cohen
How do you manage client sessions? What do you do when your network disconnects halfway through a request? How do you synchronize state changes across multiple Web services? How do you overcome a system crash without losing important messages? WCF provides simple and powerful reliability mechanisms that allow you to easily address these types of network and application issues. Take an in-depth look at reliable sessions, queues, and distributed transactions, and how these technologies are used to achieve reliable, transacted communication.

MSDN Events at Microsoft Day -- Fundamentals Track

VMF203: Building Office Solutions with Visual Studio Tools for Office, Version 2005
Bernard Wong
Support for the VBA language in Microsoft Office won’t be going away anytime soon, but let’s face reality—VBA also won’t be getting any better, just older. If you’ve been thinking about exercising your .NET and managed code skills in the context of running inside of the Microsoft Office applications then come to this session and find out about the Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO), version 2005. We’ll use this less well-known member of the Visual Studio product family to create custom smart tags, actions panes and other programmable elements within well-integrated Office solutions. We’ll also briefly look alternatively at programming Office automation from Visual Studio 2005 without VSTO via COM Interoperability and the various Office Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs).

VMF202: Doing the ‘Net with .NET – Exploring the System.Net Namespace in the .NET Framework 2.0
Glen Gordon
The .NET Framework 2.0 lets you write connected apps more easily than ever. In this session, we’ll explore the new and improved classes in the System.Net namespace. You’ll see how to build an application that is aware of the network status and connectivity details. We’ll also explore how to incorporate SMTP and FTP functionality directly into your application. We’ll touch on security and caching for network-enabled applications. Finally, we’ll show you how to use HTTP Listener to write your own simple Web server with very little code.

VMF204: Overview of the patterns & practices Enterprise Library
Glen Gordon
Countless .NET developers have already found the patterns & practices collection of Microsoft guides to be invaluable resources for specific recommendations about how to design, build, deploy, and operate architecturally sound solutions; often with extensive application code already written, tested, optimized and ready for your use. Enterprise Library provides the next generation of these patterns & practices Application Blocks. Attend this session to find out more about what Enterprise Library will provide for your enterprise applications in the scenarios of caching, configuration, cryptography, data access, exception handling, logging and security.

VMF205: The Next Generation--Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and XAML
Bernard Wong
Windows Vista, due later in 2006, will introduce not only the next major version of the Windows operating system but also WinFX, its object-oriented, managed set of application programming interfaces (APIs). WinFX will be the first major upgrade to the Windows APIs since Win16 passed the torch onto Win32 back in 1993! This session will provide an overview of the Windows Presentation Foundation (aka WPF and formerly known as Avalon), the most important and far-reaching aspect of the WinFX framework where we define the user experience of our applications via XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language). Attend this session for a peek at the next generation of application design and presentation.

VMF201: What's Up with Visual SourceSafe?
Bernard Wong
A version control system is an important mainstay in the toolbox of many developers. Yet in recent years, Microsoft hasn’t been very generous with their investments into the Visual SourceSafe product which previously had its last major release in 1998, alongside Visual Studio 6.0 and its contemporary, Internet Explorer 4.0. Through the intervening years and the introduction of .NET, all that came were bug fixes and the ignominious advancement of the version number to just 6.0d. Now it is the robust, integrated toolset of the Visual Studio Team System platform that is getting all the attention and glory. So where does this leave Visual SourceSafe 2005? Is it just a rebadging of some more bug fixes or does it really earn its new product name? In this session, we’ll look to see if there is still a place for Visual SourceSafe in your developer toolbox if you don’t need or can’t afford Visual Studio Team System.

Visual Studio "Fundamentals - Essentials"

VFE204: Build a Realistic Data Access Layer with the .NET Framework 2.0
Dino Esposito
If you know about data readers and DataSets, know that stored procedures are faster than SQL Server commands, and tend to feel uncertain when you see a SELECT * or a Visual Studio .NET data wizard, then congratulations, you have passed the test and might just be ready to build a realistic data access layer with the .NET Framework 2.0. What will you need? First, a working knowledge of some design patterns to get started and get some guidance on how to lay out entities. Second, a working knowledge of collections and generics to more easily map groups of entities to programmable objects. Third, a clear idea of how to implement boring but necessary things like security, sorting, paging, caching, connections, transactions, and perhaps validation and  serialization. In this talk, we’ll build a SQL Server Northwindbased data access layer using the Table Data Gateway pattern and bind its objects to ASP.NET and Windows Forms clients.

VFE205: Improve Your .NET and Visual Studio 2005 Debugging Skills
Kathleen Dollard
Things go wrong for even the best developers and the best constructed applications. While we often overlook the importance of debugging, how efficient you are resolving those problems depends on good debugging skills. Learn basic problem solving techniques that work well on complex problems and explore three categories of tools that .NET provides. Structured exception handling offers bug response to the user and information for the programmer. You’ll learn how to manage framework exceptions and your own custom exceptions at both a local and a global level. Once something goes wrong and causes an exception or a logic error, you need to determine how to fix it. The first-class debugger in Visual Studio offers a wealth of information, especially with the new 2005 enhancements. Tracing (and its twin Debug) lets you gather information without disrupting operations and communicate across time and space to help resolve future bugs quickly. You’ll learn how tools and process can improve your innate problem solving skills for quick bug fixes.

VFE202: New Tool on the Block - Putting the Visual Studio Class Designer to Work
Nickolas Landry
Good software design is often difficult, complex and sadly overlooked. Fortunately, Visual Studio 2005 introduces a cool new tool to address this age old need. The Class Designer is a graphical tool that greatly facilitates the creation of classes, structures and interfaces using a visual design environment. Not only will you be able to visualize the structure of classes and their relationships but changes to the class diagram will be immediately reflected in code and, of course, vice versa! You’ll find the Class Designer useful throughout the entire software lifecycle from documenting and communicating the class hierarchies and inheritance trees, to reviewing, annotating and refactoring your designs. Attend this session and you’ll be able to rapidly design your class architecture faster than it takes to spell out UML!

VFE201: Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) in Principle and Practice
Markus Egger
The .NET platform was designed from the onset for object-oriented development. To fully leverage the .NET platform to maximum effect then, it's essential to understand the principles of object-oriented development and how they are supported from languages such as Visual Basic .NET and C#. This session not only shows the theory, but it also explains how to apply that knowledge to real-life projects and how to unleash the true power of object-oriented development. We will cover core topics such as classes, objects, encapsulation, inheritance, partial classes, generics, and much more. This session even touches on advanced topics such as object-design and design-patterns. After attending this session, you will know what object-oriented development is really all about and how you can apply it to your everyday development efforts easily and effectively.

VFE203: Reading and Writing XML in .NET
Alex Homer
The XML support in version 1.x of the .NET Framework provided a fresh approach to many of the issues that developers using XML have faced in the past, and it was obvious that this was only a beginning of the evolution of XML handling within the .NET world. XML is becoming part of almost everything we do in terms of working with data, even when we view it as relational data, and in version 2.0, Microsoft is making this significantly easier by introducing new approaches to XML data handling. This is in line with the W3C proposals for the InfoSet model, and the fact that in most cases, we use XML simply for representing data. This session looks at the new features in the System.Xml namespaces of version 2.0 and delves deeper into the most useful areas such as reading and writing XML, the enhanced XML document objects, XSLT transformations, XQuery queries, and more. It also demonstrates the new features of Visual Studio 2005 that make working with XML schemas and XSLT even easier.

Visual Studio - Beyond the Essentials

VBE204: Crash Course on Developing Mobility Solutions
Nickolas Landry
While the rate of personal computer innovation is slowing significantly, the mobility space is exploding with a proliferation of new wireless standards, gadgets and devices of all sizes, shapes and denominations. Similarly, there’s no shortage of technologies available from Microsoft when it comes to developing mobile solutions for the enterprise. The obvious question that follows is how do you select among technologies as disparate as Windows Mobile 5.0, .NET Compact Framework, Windows CE, Pocket PC, ASP.NET mobile controls and even more! In this rapid-fire session, you will see a broad demonstration-driven survey of what it is like to develop Smart Client and Web solutions with these different mobility developments options using .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005.

VBE203: Five (Supposedly) Scary Things About .NET (That Don't Really Have to Be)
Julie Lerman
.NET finally enables Visual Basic developers with some functionality and concepts that have no equivalent match in Visual Basic 6.0. Among these are topics that Visual Basic developers typically tend to avoid when learning .NET but they really don’t need to be so intimidating. This session will delve into five of these daunting challenges - delegates, reflection, threading, Code Access Security (CAS) and declarative programming - and explain them from the perspective of a Visual Basic developer.

VBE205: The Best Free .NET Developer Power Tools
Steven Smith
This session will demonstrate about a dozen of the most powerful free .NET utilities available, and how you can use them to improve your productivity. Most people have heard of some of these, but some will be new to most people. Save yourself a few hours of trying these out yourself. Come find out which tools are worth using and why. This session has been updated for .NET 2.0 but is very applicable to .NET 1.x developers.

VBE202: Visual Basic vs. C# - The Rematch
Dan Appleman
Both Visual Basic .NET and C# have significant new language features in their 2005 incarnations. What did they change and why? How do the languages compare now? Where are the two langauges going from here with C# 3.0 and VB 9.0?