Keynotes and General Sessions

VSLive! Opening Keynote

Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft
March 24
Bill Gates will present Microsoft’s overall developer strategy and vision, highlighting new developer and platform innovations including Visual Studio “Whidbey”, Microsoft Speech Server, and mobile device and wireless application development.

Kai-Fu Lee
Corporate Vice President of Natural Interactive Services Division, Microsoft
March 24
Companies that have successfully deployed self-service options for customers continually look for ways to improve and integrate these services by leveraging their existing programmer expertise and technology infrastructure. A key technology that can help a company further enhance self-service capabilities is speech technology. Microsoft is providing developers with a comprehensive speech technology package that integrates seamlessly into the Visual Studio .NET Web development environment, creating a faster, easier and more economical way for developers to leverage their programming expertise and extend their existing Web applications to include speech. Kai Fu Lee will expand upon the Microsoft Speech Server and Speech Application SDK — how they enable developers to build and deploy speech-enabled Web applications, permitting access not only from telephones and cell phones, but also from screen-based devices such as PDAs, smart phones and desktop PCs.

Going Mobile with .NET, XML and SOAP

Chris Anderson, Windows Client Platform Team, Microsoft
Thursday, March 25
From its inception, .NET has been based on the premise of connecting CLR-based code using XML and SOAP. This keynote looks at how that premise expands beyond the server and desktop to mobile devices running Windows Mobile and the .NET Compact Framework “Whidbey.”  This code-heavy keynote will feature Chris writing lots of code, slinging lots of XML, and playing with lots of interesting gadgets, implants and tools – several of which will be seeing the light of day for the first time during this keynote.

Note:  Don Box has been replaced as the keynote speaker by Chris Anderson, an architect on the Windows Client Platform team working on the technologies code-named “Avalon”.  Don and Chris work together frequently and gave the first demo of Windows “Longhorn” at this year's PDC.  See them in action here. 

Metropolis: Trends in Information Technology

Pat Helland, Microsoft
Thursday, March 25
A new “bonus” keynote by Pat Helland of the .NET Enterprise Architecture Team examines changes in information technology as independent and largely disconnected IT shops have been rapidly connected by the internet causing dramatic shifts in standardization, structured data, and business process. Pat offers some interesting insight into where we are going in information technology and a framework to understand the current trend towards service oriented architectures and web services in our enterprise customers.

Using Business Intelligence in Your Applications for Fun and Profit

Bill Baker, General Manager, Business Intelligence, Microsoft SQL Server Business Group
Friday, March 26
During the past decade business intelligence has grown from being a specialized function used by a few experts into a disruptive technology that has changed how companies of all sizes run their business. Adding Business Intelligence improves applications, allowing them to help users make better decisions, faster. Microsoft has led this effort by changing how customers acquire, purchase, and use BI software. With the release of SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services, and the impending release of SQL Server “Yukon” Microsoft will continue to make it easier for you to incorporate BI functionality into your applications, thereby driving BI to the entire organization.

All About Visual Studio “Whidbey”
All Afternoon starting at 10:30 a.m.
Bringing all VSLive! attendees together for an insider’s look at the advancements Whidbey promises and how you can benefit today. Join the Microsoft Visual Studio development team on Wednesday afternoon, March 24.

Building and Deploying Windows Forms Applications
Visual Studio "Whidbey" and the Windows Forms classes empower developers with the full power of the Windows client PC. In this session, see how the Windows Forms designer and application deployment model will be radically enhanced. See how a host of new controls, components, control designers and tool windows will simplify data access, form layout and more.

Building ASP.NET Web Applications
Experience the most productive and powerful development environment for building ASP.NET Web applications. Visual Studio "Whidbey" combines simplified Web data access, rich site layout features, dynamic Web projects, and an array of additional features that enable rapid construction of dynamic Web applications. In this session, learn about enhancements to the visual designers and coding tools, as well as features that facilitate code reuse, visual consistency, and aesthetic appeal across your Web sites.

Data Access and XML From 2 to N-Tier
Visual Studio "Whidbey" leverages existing ADO.NET and XML investments, and enables developers to perform data access tasks in drastically fewer steps and fewer lines of code In this session, explore creating data access components complete with custom validation logic, consuming data from databases and the middle tier, and rapid integration of data with Windows Forms and Web Forms. Then see the new XML editor that enables enhanced validation against XSD and DTD schema, XSLT debugging, and more.

Advanced Language Feature
Visual Basic .NET introduced VB developers to a number of advanced language features from inheritance to multithreading. In this session you will discover how in “Whidbey” Visual Basic developers will have access to an even larger set of advanced features within the language and the development environment and learn the ins and outs of generics, operator overloading, XML Doc comments, partial types, and more!