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Wednesday, 14 May
Application Design with Data
Overview of XML Web Services
.NET Framework Security
Applied ADO .NET
Designing Efficient XML Web Services
.NET Remoting
ADO .NET and XML
Extending XML Web Services
Reflection in .NET
ASP.NET DataBinding
Towards a Web Services Platform
.NET Serialization
Advanced ADO .NET Update Scenarios
Securing XML Web Services
Debugging in .NET

Visual Studio .NET: Tools to Power Your Vision
Ari Bixhorn, Visual Studio .NET Lead Product Manager, Microsoft
Visual Studio .NET delivers groundbreaking improvements to the world's most popular developer tool set. It provides a unified programming model for building Windows, Web, and smart device applications as well as for server-based components and XML Web services. Learn straight from the source how Visual Studio .NET addresses today's most pressing application development challenges using the skills you already have! You'll learn about the complete range of capabilities from visual modelers that aid in composing the most complex of enterprise-class applications to deploying an application to the smallest of devices.
9 a.m. Keynote

Building Windows Applications with Visual Studio .NET
Ari Bixhorn, Visual Studio .NET Lead Product Manager, Microsoft
Organizations striving to provide customers with the richest client experience possible know the importance of Windows-based applications. With Visual Studio .NET, the biggest challenges surrounding Windows application development have been addressed, enabling faster development and simplified deployment. In this session, learn the ins and outs of building robust Windows applications with Visual Studio .NET.
10:30 a.m. General Session

.NET Framework Essentials
Keith Pleas, Guided Design
Join Conference Chair Keith Pleas for an exclusive tour of the .NET Framework. This is your chance to get inside information from someone who has been working with the tool for over two years. You will learn how familiar concepts translate to the world of .NET, the services provided by the Common Language Runtime and Base Class Library, and how to apply some fundamental .NET concepts including namespaces, attributes, and interfaces.
2 p.m. Framework Essentials

Best Practices for ASP.NET
Chris Kinsman, Guided Design
Attend this session to see a variety of recommended practices when developing, deploying and supporting your ASP.NET application. This session will offer practical suggestions that you can put into practice immediately to improve your applications.
2 p.m. Web Apps for ASP.NET

Windows Forms for Visual Basic .NET
Francesco Balena, Wintellect
Take the VB 6 form engine, throw in the features VBers have asked for in these ten years, add new and more powerful controls, and embellish with some pizzazz, and voilà! you'll have an idea of what Windows Forms are all about. Come and see how you can migrate your form-based apps to the new Windows Forms package, and take advantage of the new event architecture, form inheritance, safe-subclassing, data-driven forms, and more.
2 p.m. Visual Basic .NET

Upgrade VB 6 Apps to .NET
Keith Pleas, Guided Design
Upgrading to .NET is a lot easier when you learn how to do it right. Hear some “tales from the trenches,” and find out what’s been learned. Keith will show you how to migrate from ADO to ADO .NET and from VB 6 “Ruby” forms to Windows Forms dealing with orphaned project types; DLL calls to Framework objects; and Interop with classic COM where necessary.
3:45 p.m. Framework Essentials

Server Controls in ASP.NET
Chris Kinsman, Guided Design
What if the ASP.NET toolbox doesn’t provide just the control you need? What if you often need a particular functionality, and would like to encapsulate that functionality in a control you and your teammates can use? You have the capability to create custom controls, just like the ones you’ll find in the ASP.NET toolbox. These custom controls have all the same capabilities as built-in server controls, starting with a toolbox icon down to full state management, event handling, and data management. Attend this session and you’ll learn to create custom controls that are every bit as powerful as the built-in controls in ASP.NET.
3:45 p.m. Web Apps and ASP.NET

Multithreading with Visual Basic .NET
Francesco Balena, Wintellect
Free-threading can be an effective way to speed up your application, or to bring it to its knees. It depends only of you, of course, and your understanding of subtle issues such as thread concurrency, resource contention, variable sharing, and synchronization. Before you start your first multi-threading VB .NET app, come to this session and learn about the SyncLock statement, background threads, the Monitor objects, critical sections, deadlocks, the thread pool, and asynchronous method invocation.
3:45 p.m. Visual Basic .NET

Windows Forms Controls for Visual Basic .NET
Francesco Balena, Wintellect
Attend this session and learn about the resource model used by the .NET Framework, as well as how to take advantage of resources to build localizable applications. You will learn how to work with string and binary data to build both Web and rich client applications customized to user cultures, too.
5:15 p.m. Framework Essentials

ASP.NET Custom Authentication
Roberto Brunetti, DevLeap
What does it take to secure a Web application? Attend this session for a look at security from all aspects. We will approach user authentication schemes, database authentication schemes, secure connections to back end services, and recommended physical deployment scenarios for Web applications.
5:15 p.m. Web Apps and ASP.NET

.NET Windows Resources and Localization
Keith Pleas, Guided Design
This session covers the resource model used by the .NET Framework and how to take advantage of resources to build localizable applications. You will learn how to work with string and binary data to build both Web and rich client applications customized to user cultures.
5:15 p.m. Visual Basic .NET

Wednesday, 14 May Sessions

Application Design with Data
Andrew Brust, Progressive Systems Consulting
The richness of the facilities offered by the .NET Framework means one thing is certain: there are many ways of implementing the same requirement, especially when it comes to ADO .NET and data access. What techniques are more maintainable? Which perform better? In this session we will address these issues by surveying the findings of developers in the field who, through experience, have formed strong opinions on these matters.
9 a.m. Data Access

Overview of XML Web Services
TBD
Microsoft's .NET framework provides flexible infrastructure and state-of-the-art tools for building Web services in ASP.NET using C# or VB .NET. ASP.NET makes it easy to expose methods on traditional .NET classes as Web service operations that are accessible via open XML and Web service standards. This session will show you how to leverage the .NET framework to start building Web services today.
9 a.m. Web Services

.NET Framework Security
Christian Weyer, Author & Consultant
Security is a hot topic these days, and one of the greatest concerns with Microsoft developers. Fortunately the .NET Framework provides a modern security infrastructure you can fully leverage in both an intranet and Internet scenario. In this session we'll discuss essential technologies like Code Access Security. We'll take a look at where code comes from-not just who executes it. And we'll also talk about ways to avoid pitfalls plus best trouble-shooting methods.
9 a.m. Advanced .NET Framework

Applied ADO .NET
Andrew Brust, Progressive Systems Consulting
If you want to get past the basics of ADO .NET and touch on its finer points, this is your session. We'll look at the sweet spots of Windows Forms data binding, take a behind-the-scenes look at strongly-typed DataSets, and cover how to implement connection pooling with SQL Server. We'll also survey some advanced techniques for using DataAdapters and Command objects with stored procedures and investigate the rich support for XML in ADO .NET.
10:45 a.m. Data Access

Designing Efficient XML Web Services
Christian Weyer, Author & Consultant
ASP.NET & WebMethods seem to make everything simple. But the programming of XML Web services for the purpose of interoperability should be affected strongly by a profound XML Schema & WSDL design: it is all about XML messages. This session will show you how to proceed in order to obtain a maximum of interoperability and flexibility with ASP.NET XML Web Services, and will show you how to properly design and implement XML Web services with ASP.NET.
10:45 a.m. Web Services

.NET Remoting
Dino Esposito, Wintellect
The .NET Reflection API is a set of classes that offer functions to explore the contents of assemblies and modules as well as the types and the metadata they contain. You can use the reflection API to discover classes in assemblies and methods, properties and events in a class. Attend this session—you'll learn how to define custom attribute and how to dynamically create instances of objects of a certain type and how to invoke methods on them.
10:45 a.m. Advanced .NET Framework

ADO .NET and XML
Andrew Brust, Progressive Systems Consulting
ADO .NET, rather than merely offering the ability to persist to an XML file, actually uses XML as the native format for representing its multi-table DataSets. Attend this session for a look at how ADO .NET objects map to various elements in the DataSet's XML schema and how to use XML from any platform to create, read, and modify ADO .NET DataSets.
2 p.m. Data Access

Extending XML Web Services
TBD
This session will show you how to extend the functionality of .NET Web services in order to satisfy additional distributed application needs (like security, routing, reliability, etc.) not provided in today's implementation. We'll cover ASP.NET's extensibility points including HTTP modules and SoapExtension classes, both of which provide hooks for performing pre/post processing on SOAP messages. In addition, we'll provide practical "extension" examples by introducing you to Microsoft's Web Services Enhancements 1.0 for Microsoft .NET (WSE).
2 p.m. Web Services

ASP.NET DataBinding
TBD
ADO .NET data binding isn't just for 2-Tier prototype applications anymore; it's now a serious technology for object-oriented, N-Tier applications. Join us for a look at the essential features—as well as the subtler advanced features—of data binding, both in Visual Studio and in code. We'll also take an in-depth look at strongly-typed DataSets and see how they figure into the whole data binding equation.
3:45 p.m. Data Access

Towards a Web Services Platform
TBD
As part of the Web's continual evolution, a new platform has emerged for building distributed applications known as Web services. Enterprises, software vendors, and developers everywhere are taking notice of the Web services platform, its accompanying benefits, and what it means to traditional software architecture. This session will outline the characteristics of this new platform and describe how the various XML and Web service technologies (such as XML 1.0, XSD, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI) fit together.
3:45 p.m. Web Services

.NET Serialization
Paolo Pialorsi, DevLeap
The .NET Framework offers two different methods for serialization of objects in memory. Both the runtime serializer and the XML serializer can be used to marshal objects across network connections or to persisted storage such as a file. However, they both achieve very different goals. In this session, we'll discuss the various serialization techniques exposed by .NET and when you should use each. We'll also spend some time discussing a few gotchas that occur when you use serialization with ADO.NET objects.
3:45 p.m. Advanced .NET Framework

Advanced ADO .NET Update Scenarios
Francesco Balena, Wintellect
ADO .NET lets you read data in a very simple way, either by means of the DataReader and the DataAdapter objects, but updating data in disconnected mode can be a non-trivial issue, and requires that you understand your database work. In this session you'll learn how to efficiently read and update tables in master-detail relationship, how to change the default optimistic locking behaviour, optimize updates, and simulate pessimistic locking, manufacture custom update commands on a row-by-row bases, and even how to resynchronize with your data source to understand what went wrong during an update operation.
5:15 p.m. Data Access

Securing XML Web Services
Paolo Pialorsi, DevLeap
This session will discuss the never-ending challenge of security on the Web. We'll start by reviewing the standard security techniques used in today's mainstream Web applications followed by in-depth coverage of WS-Security, the evolving message-level security framework for Web services. You'll learn about WS-Security's authentication, signature, as well as encryption support, and how you can begin using these features today with Microsoft's WSE 1.0.
5:15 p.m. Web Services

Debugging in .NET
Dino Esposito, Wintellect
.NET offers many advanced features that allow you to write better diagnostic and error handling code than ever before. Attend this session and learn the core concepts you must understand to debug effectively with .NET. You’ll walk away able to write the best code possible.
5:15 p.m. Advanced .NET Framework