ASP Live! Sessions
Monday, September 11
CSS, Skins and Themes for the ASP.NET Developer
Paul Sheriff, PDSA, Inc.
10:30 a.m.
Want to make your HTML efficient and easy to maintain? Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS) are the answer. Many developers use an HTML Table structure to layout their data input pages. While this works, it is not the most efficient way and is not very flexible. Learn how to use CSS to build input pages that can change without modifying every page and every table in your ASPX pages. Also, learn the difference between Themes/Skins and CSS. You will learn:
1. Why using CSS will make your applications faster
2. How to use CSS the best way
3. How to eliminate Tables in HTML with CSS
4. How to create Skins and Themes
5. How to use Skins and Themes and CSS together
Best Kept Secrets in .NET
Deborah Kurata, InStep Technologies
10:30 a.m.
There are many new features in VS 2005, some of which have gotten great publicity (like generics) while others have been left lurking in the shadows. This session will shed some light on these lesser-known features to help you make the most of Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0. Did you know you could set Application-level events? That there is now a true global error handler? There is a better way to manage connection strings? That you can now automatically retain user’s settings? This session will cover these topics and much, much more.
Introduction to ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts
Russ Nemhauser, Nemhauser Media
11:45 a.m.
Web Parts offer ASP.NET 2.0 applications the ability to provide powerful personalization functionality. In this session, you'll learn how Web Parts are implemented in ASP.NET 2.0, how to get up and running with Web Parts quickly, and how to extend the Web Parts framework. You will also learn how Web Parts functionality ties into the built-in membership features.
Everyday Use of Generics
Deborah Kurata, InStep Technologies
11:45 a.m.
You may think of generics as a Ferrari that you only take out for special occasions and when the conditions are just right. But they are better compared to your trusty pickup, perfectly suited for everyday use. This session covers the generic structures provided in .NET such as the List and Dictionary. It details how to leverage these structures to simplify your code and make it more generalized – or should I say “generic”?
ASP.NET 2.0's Data Binding Features
Ken Getz, MCW Technologies
2 p.m.
ASP.NET 2.0 makes it incredibly easy to bind user interface to data. Thanks to the new SqlDataSource, ObjectDataSource, XmlDataSource (and more) data source controls, you can easily display and modify data without writing a single line of code. If you need to modify the built-in behavior, of course, you can react to any of the many events these data sources provide. This session focuses on introducing the data source controls, along with the new data-bound controls, including the GridView, DetailsView and FormView.
Understanding and Using My and the VB Application Framework
Jackie Goldstein, Renaissance Computer Systems
2 p.m.
This presentation will spend most of its time showing the new VB My Classes and the VB Application Framework in action – that means this session is mostly demos! The My classes provide easier access to the underlying .NET Framework classes. You will see how much easier it is and then take advantage of it to explore coding various aspects of the .NET Framework. You will then learn how to extend the My classes for your own application-specific needs. Finally, you will learn how to use the time-saving, but often overlooked features of the VB Application Framework.
Membership Features in ASP.NET 2.0
Chris Kinsman, Vertafore
3:15 p.m.
ASP.NET 2.0 provides a rich set of controls and the backend to allow no-code solutions to managing users and roles. In this session we will take a look at how ASP.NET 2.0 significantly reduces the effort on the part of the developer to add user or role based authentication to their code. Learn how to set up membership and roles, use the built-in controls and write code to interact with the membership APIs.
Best Practices for Writing Reusable Managed Code Libraries
Richard Hale Shaw, Richard Hale Shaw Group
3:15 p.m.
How do you design good quality APIs and class libraries to run on the .NET Framework? Which type of design principles are sound and which aren't? When should an operation be encapsulated as a method vs. a property, and when should it be virtual? How do you design for security and where do performance issues fit in? How should common Framework Patterns be implemented? Which interfaces should be implemented and collection types exposed and which should not? Which naming conventions work and why? In this session, we’ll explore the nature of good class library design. Find out how you can best leverage these ideas in your own libraries, errors to beware of, and how you can establish criteria for conventions your entire team can follow.
ASP.NET Personalization
Chris Kinsman, Vertafore
4:30 p.m.
How do you store information about your users? Session? Database? Come to this session and check out the new features in ASP.NET 2.0 that provide strongly typed access to information you have defined about your users.
Inside C# 3.0: Extension Methods, Query Expressions & Expression Trees
Richard Hale Shaw, Richard Hale Shaw Group
4:30 p.m.
LINQ, DLINQ, XLINQ – what the heck? Just what we need: more TLAs and FFLAs (fancy, four-letter acronyms). Forget all that. What you need to know is this: C# 2.0 anonymous methods are incredibly useful but require a bit of plumbing to be effective. In C# 3.0, you get an elegant, expressive syntax for generating anonymous methods called lambda expressions. Another C# 3.0 feature, extension methods, let you define a static method in one class, but use it as an instance method in some other class, all without deriving or modifying the latter. Combine the two and you can create query expressions to perform SQL-like and XQuery-like searches on collections. You can store the queries – not the results, but the query itself – in an expression tree data structures for re-use. Combined with simpler variable initialization syntax, elegant object initialization, and the ability to define types on-the-fly (anonymous types), C# 3.0 will transform your day-to-day C# development into elegant, high-level expressions. In this session, Richard will wipe away the techno-speak and show you how to leverage these new features.
Tuesday, September 12
Webcontrol Development Enhancements in ASP.NET 2.0
Miguel Castro, Infotek Consulting Group, Inc.
10:30 a.m.
ASP.NET 2.0 brought to the table many great enhancements to increase productivity in the development of web applications. Accompanying these great new features that mainstream web developers are already familiar with, are some incredible improvements to the infrastructure for developing custom server controls. As in ASP.NET 1.1, server controls or webcontrols, as they are also known, are not additions to ASP.NET’s infrastructure; they are at the very heart of its architecture. Becoming intimate with this technology gets you closer than ever to understanding exactly how ASP.NET really works. The development of custom webcontrols has not been a technology embraced by all ASP.NET developers. With the great new enhancements you’ll learn here, maybe you too will get as hooked as I have. Learn about Template Editing, SmartTags, AutoFormatting, WebResources and the AJAX-based Callbacks, and how easy it is to integrate all of this into Webcontrols of your own. This presentation expects established knowledge of custom control development and provides a fast-paced tour through the most exciting control development features in ASP.NET 2.0.
Large Scale ASP.NET Rendering and Enterprise Control Development
Mark D'Urso, Microsoft
10:30 a.m.
ASP.NET 2.0 has a variety of new features available for quickly creating robust Web sites. Master Pages allows HTML layout and server controls to be factored into a reusable set of components that can be recombined at runtime into device specific presentation modes. The Virtual Path Provider allows developers to hook in to the HTTP response life cycle in ways that were previously only available to ASP.NET itself. Join us for this talk and learn how MSDN and Tech Net have leveraged these and other technologies to create a scaleable, high performance Web site.
CSS Control Adapters for ASP.NET 2.0
Fritz Onion, Pluralsight
11:45 a.m.
ASP.NET 2.0 has a flexible architecture for controlling exactly how controls render their content called “Control Adapters.” By creating a control adapter and registering it in a .browser file in your site, you can completely alter the output of a control without making any modifications to the pages that use that control. You can also specify which browsers should see which rendering of a control if you want to customize it further. To show the power of these adapters, the ASP.NET team has released a set of CSS control adapters that change the output of controls like the Menu, TreeView, FormView and others to render with pure CSS styling instead of using tables. This session will present how to use these adapters to create CSS styled pages, as well as how to build your own control adapters for controls whose rendering you want to change.
Dig Into the Testing Tools in Visual Studio 2005
Russ Nemhauser, Nemhauser Media
11:45 a.m.
Visual Studio 2005 brings powerful testing and quality assurance tools to Visual Studio 2005. In this session, you will learn how to create and use unit tests and web tests. You'll learn how load tests can help you scrutinize your own code and how powerful new features can help you locate performance bottlenecks quickly, even without any prior knowledge of performance monitoring. Attendees who come to this session will see just how easy it is to set up and implement a reliable framework to ensure that the highest quality web applications are deployed.
Creating Custom ASP.NET Providers
Paul Sheriff, PDSA, Inc.
2 p.m.
ASP.NET 2.0 introduced the concept of a "Provider." A provider is what underlies many of the services in ASP.NET. A provider allows you to change where the storage is located for the various services such as the Profile object and the Membership system. In this seminar, you will learn how to create an Xml storage system for your Profile and Membership data. This will illustrate which methods you need to override in order to store and retrieve Profile and Membership data. You will learn:
1. How the Provider model works in ASP.NET
2. Which class you need to inherit from to create a Profile Provider
3. Which methods you need to override
4. How to store data in an Xml File
5. How to retrieve data from an Xml File
Programming SharePoint 2007
Bill Wolff, Agility Systems
2 p.m.
SharePoint 2007 radically changes how a developer works with SharePoint technologies. Sites now make full use of ASP.NET 2.0. Customizable site starter templates enable users to build their own sites. Pluggable service-provider models for personalization, membership, navigation and enhanced security improve extranet support. Document management with content types and enhanced policies target compliance needs. Users can configure and manage workflows without coding. Blogs, Wikis and RSS feeds are now standard lists. Lists can work in offline mode with rich synchronization. There is deeper integration with Office 2007. Managed code extensions in all new Office products enable rich extensions and custom solutions. There is also integration with the new Groove Server for offline collaboration. FrontPage has morphed into SharePoint Designer which knows ASP.NET 2.0, CSS, WWF, XSLT and XHTML standards. This talk will cover all of these features from a developer's perspective and give insight into where coding is added to visual designers and templates.
Asynchronous Pages and Tasks in ASP.NET 2.0
Fritz Onion, Pluralsight
3:15 p.m.
There is an alluring new attribute on the @Page directive in ASP.NET 2.0 called “async.” Setting it to true means that you want to service that page on a different thread—and that's where the fun begins...This talk looks at when and where you might consider introducing asynchronous pages in your applications, and then how to subscribe to necessary delegates to perform work asynchronous to the request thread. We will cover various techniques for actually servicing requests in secondary threads, including the common scenario of making asynchronous Web service invocations from a page. This talk also covers the new asynchronous tasks introduced in 2.0, along with some compelling examples of combining these features with the new asynchronous features of ADO.NET 2.0.
Ajax-Style Web Development with ASP.NET and Atlas
Vishwas Lele, Applied Information Sciences
3:15 p.m.
Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript and XML)-style Web applications are growing in popularity because of the demand for richer user experience in browsers. A number of high profile sites including Google maps and Gmail, as well as sites like A9 and Flickr, are based on the Ajax-style. We’ll look at how ASP.NET 2.0 makes it easier to develop Ajax-style Web applications using asynchronous callbacks. Learn how asynchronous callbacks are integrated into the ASP.NET HTTP Pipeline. We’ll also include code demos to illustrate how async callbacks can be integrated into a custom ASP.NET control.
Diagnostics and Health Monitoring in ASP.NET 2.0
Fritz Onion, Pluralsight
4:30 p.m.
ASP.NET 2.0 has more extensive support for diagnostics and health monitoring than any Web development environment to date. This session looks at the many new features in this area including trace logging, runtime instrumentation, building custom performance counters, and how to effectively use the new Web events model for health monitoring your applications.
Build Distributed Object-Oriented Apps in .NET 2.0
Rockford Lhotka, Magenic Technologies
4:30 p.m.
Get an in-depth look at the concepts and techniques from Rockford Lhotka's Expert VB 2005 and C# 2005 Business Objects books on distributed business object programming updated for .NET 2.0. You will learn how to design Windows and Web-based applications based on distributed business objects, achieving high levels of reuse, scalability, long-term maintainability, and other benefits. Learn how to apply System.Transactions, generics, new ADO.NET features, data binding and WinFX when building distributed applications on .NET 2.0.
