 ASP Live! C# Live! SQL Live! SA Summit Indigo Day
Session Descriptions
VBITS is the place to hear about the most successful Visual Basic .NET strategies and techniques from key experts in our industry.
Tuesday, February 8
Visual Studio 2005: Building Robust and Reliable Software
Microsoft
10:30 a.m.
Visual Studio 2005 will provide Microsoft best practices and development tools that used to be available only internally, including: the profiler used by the Windows and SQL teams; the integration of the Application Verifier into Visual Studio; and the source code analyzers used to check the reliability of Windows source code. Learn how these tools, together with unit testing and other enterprise tools, will empower development teams to write reliable and performant code in Visual Studio 2005.
Smart Client: Real-World Lessons Learned
Billy Hollis, DotNetMasters
10:30 a.m.
After developing a number of smart client systems in .NET, Billy Hollis presents his most valuable lessons for real world smart client development. He will present several useful components for typical smart client tasks, and discuss creation of an “application portal” as a single entry point for a smart client system. He’ll show some helpful extensions to standard Windows Forms controls, and give recommendations on security and deployment of smart client apps.
Maximize the Performance of your .NET Applications
Brian Randell, MCW Technologies
11:45 a.m.
Make it go faster! We'll show you how you can. Understanding there is no magic bullet is the first step to maximizing the performance of your applications. After that, it's all about incremental improvements that you make to your application design and code. Learn how to refactor your code for better performance. Topics covered will include Visual Basic .NET, C#, SQL, Windows Forms, and ASP.NET.
Application and User Configuration
Rocky Lhotka, Magenic Technologies
11:45 a.m.
Learn how to use the Microsoft Configuration Application Block to help manage application configuration settings in both Windows and Web applications. This block includes support for encryption of data, as well as writing data back into your Web.config or App.config files. Then learn how to use similar concepts to manage user-specific settings for your Windows Forms applications. The App.config file stores global settings, but not per-user settings. You’ll learn techniques to conveniently manage and store per-user settings using XML, Isolated Storage, or the Windows Registry. These are concepts you can immediately apply to your Windows development.
The "My" Namespace in VB.NET 2005
Paul Sheriff, PDSA Inc.
2 p.m.
A whole new namespace is introduced in VB.NET 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, getting resources and application settings, and many other topics.
Data Access Strategies and Tactics
Jackie Goldstein, Renaissance Computer Systems Ltd.
2 p.m.
Listen to alternatives and considerations for developing the data access portions of your applications, including numerous techniques for passing data through the tiers of your application. The pros and cons of such common approaches such as Datasets, XML, custom classes, and scalar values will be demoed and evaluated. The techniques described are based on the best practices defined by Microsoft. The principles discussed here apply to VS 2003 as well as VS 2005 (and even other platforms!)
VB 2005 Application Framework
Joe Binder, Microsoft
3:15 p.m.
Visual Basic 2005 includes a new, highly customizable application framework that makes it easier than ever to develop powerful Windows smart client applications. Visual Basic programmers now have application level Startup and Shutdown events, as well as the long-awaited Unhandled Exception event. With a few clicks of the mouse you can add a splash screen to your application, or turn it into a single-instance app. Come learn about the new application logging and deployment features available through the My Object, and how to write custom extensions for My that you can use in your own solutions.
Creating User Controls — The Basics
Walt Ritscher, Scandiasoft
3:15 p.m.
The .NET Windows Forms engine provides a rich and varied collection of built-in controls. But as powerful as these controls are developers will want to create their own UI controls. .NET provides an attractive framework on which to build custom controls. You will learn the basics of building custom controls and hooking up events. Find out how to interact with the control host and influence the Visual Studio design time environment. We will discuss the design decisions that clarify whether to use control inheritance or to create a composite control. Finally, we will look at using GDI+ to create custom drawn controls.
Generics, Operator Overloading, and More
Ken Getz, MCW Technologies
4:30 p.m.
Visual Basic 2005 adds a number of new language features, and we’ll explain the how's and why's of many of them. Not sure what a generic is, or why you'd want to use one? Never considered overloading an operator, and aren't sure why you should care? Tried to create asynchronous behavior in Windows form, but never quite got it to work? We’ll discuss all these features and more, showing off many of the new language features in VB.NET 2005.
Deploying and Maintaining Smart Client Applications Using ClickOnce
Cathi Gero, Prenia Corp.
4:30 p.m.
Imagine all the benefits of the Web application deployment model brought to the Windows smart client applications. ClickOnce, part of version 2.0 of the.NET Framework, allows the deployment of Windows-based rich client apps by placing the application files on a Web or file server accessible to the client and providing the user with a link. This session covers Visual Studio 2005 deployment capabilities for online and offline application support, rolling back to previous versions of an application, listing an application in the Start Menu and control panel, .NET Framework redistribution, and zone-based debugging. Learn how to configure security to allow smart client applications to safely download and run.
patterns & practices: Enterprise Library
Ron Jacobs, Microsoft
5:45 p.m.
Enterprise Library is the next generation of the patterns & practices Application Blocks. This guidance is designed to assist developers with common enterprise development challenges. Our first release will deliver the most widely used blocks into a single integrated package. Our vision is to build a broad community of customers and partners using, sharing and extending their own Application Blocks that are consistent with and integrate into the patterns & practices Enterprise Library.
Writing Secure Code
Microsoft
5:45 p.m.
An application can use the very best encryption algorithms, authentication mechanisms, and other security technologies, but if the developers writing the code don't take some basic precautions, the resulting application will be riddled with security vulnerabilities. Learn how to protect yourself against attacks by tracking and validating untrusted input and keeping the attacker out of the control channel.
Wednesday, February 9
Morphing from ADO Classic to ADO.NET
Bill Vaughn, Beta V Corp.
10:30 a.m.
Take a walk through a typical conversion process, showing what ADO “classic” (ADOc) code can port, what needs rewriting, and what needs to go. While it’s true there is a Visual Basic conversion wizard, it simply recodes the ADOc code to run almost as-is in a Visual Basic .NET application. It makes no attempt to convert ADOc to ADO.NET. That’s because ADO.NET is an entirely new data access interface. We’ll discuss what current Visual Basic 6.0 coding practices are easiest to convert without hurting your current application’s performance and address both the benefits and potential pitfalls of the ADO .NET paradigm and .NET data access technology.
Team-Based Development
Rocky Lhotka, Magenic Technologies
10:30 a.m.
Team-based development is more than just application design and coding. We need to deal with issues such as team communication, issue tracking, configuration management, unit testing, run-time logging, exception handling, security integration and many others. See how we can use various Microsoft Application Blocks, open source software, and other tools and processes to help address many of these key issues.
Managing Relations and Expressions in ADO.NET
Steven Borg, Accentient
11:45 a.m.
VB Worst Practices
Jackie Goldstein, Renaissance Computer Systems Ltd.
11:45 a.m.
The goal here is to show you that writing code that is syntactically correct is just the beginning of writing good VB code. This session is made up of a series of real code snippets that have bugs, performance issues, or best practice violations. For each snippet, we will disclose the problem and explain how to avoid the issue.
RAD Data, Common & Advanced Features
Steve Lasker, Microsoft
3:15 p.m.
How does Visual Studio 2005 scale from RAD Data to more advanced scenarios? We’ll discuss how the new Data Features build upon, not change, the features we shipped in Visual Studio .NET 2003. We’ll demonstrate how you can leverage the designer to scale your initial prototypes to full-scale applications. We’ll drill into the new typed DataAdapter features of the Data Set Designer and some common ways to extend these classes with partial classes for advanced scenarios such as transactional updates.
Fit & Finish for Professional Applications
Brian Randell, MCW Technologies
3:15 p.m.
Often it's the little things that get overlooked when finishing your rich Windows applications. Learn how you can build client applications that are both smart looking and behave intelligently. Acquire tips and tricks for storing user and application settings, learn how to gather system information to make your client smart in the connected/disconnected world, discover how data caching can improve application performance, and see how using multi-threading correctly can make your application stand out from the rest. Plus, we'll look to the future and see what new features in Visual Studio .NET 2005 make it even easier!
DataBinding with Objects in Visual Studio 2005
Steve Lasker, Microsoft
4:30 p.m.
Visual Studio 2005 now provides rich DataBinding support with your own custom business objects. We’ll drill down into the new, lower bar to participate design time object DataBinding. Another important aspect of DataBinding is the support for data that just happens to be null. We’ll cover new support for DBNull within DataBinding as well as support for Nullable (Of T), which enables developers to express a DateTime datatype without a known value. Finally, we’ll cover creating custom controls that can leverage the new Drag Once DataBinding features of Visual Studio 2005.
Best Kept Secrets in Visual Studio and the .NET Framework
Deborah Kurata, InStep Technologies
4:30 p.m.
Uncover the hidden treasures in Visual Studio, see tips for building Windows applications, learn VB and C# coding tricks, and discover secrets for working with data in .NET. Examine some of the very useful, but lesser known features of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. Did you know that you can define separate build configurations in Visual Studio? Have you used the ErrorProvider control? Do you know how to deprecate your methods? Have you tried expanding the capabilities of a dataset using Extended Properties? How about using a data project to get your stored procedures under source code control? Learn about these topics and much more!
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