Intensive, Full-Day Workshops
Roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty with practical seminars on your top technology concerns
Add one to your a la carte registration for just $395.
Choose from a broad range of content of topics by expert presenters. VSLive!’s pre- and post-conference workshops give you more technical content than most development conferences’ entire programs.
VSTS for Everyone: Best Practices for the Whole Team 
Martin L. Shoemaker, Richard Hale Shaw Group
With the release of Visual Studio Team System, Visual Studio isn't just for developers any more. It's now a power tool that integrates with MS Office and other tools to support the work of all participants in the development process. In this tutorial, we'll look at each major role in the development process, and we'll see what tools are used in each role, how those tools integrate with VSTS, and how the role is carried out. And then we'll see how the workflow capabilities in VSTS tie all of these roles together into a larger process. And finally, we'll see how to customize the process and the tools to fit your project and your team.
Build Object-Oriented Apps with .NET 2.0
Rocky Lhotka, Magenic Technologies
Get an in-depth look at the concepts and techniques on distributed business object programming. You’ll 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. You will also learn how Web Services, remoting, object serialization, Enterprise Services, no-touch deployment, and other .NET technologies come together to create these applications.
Professional VB Development
Ken Getz, MCW Technologies
Once you’ve spent some time with .NET, you’ll want to dig into some of the more advanced topics. This workshop, aimed at intermediate-level VB.NET developers, jumps head-first into some important issues facing .NET developers, including working with delegates and events in Visual Basic .NET; asynchronous programming in Windows applications; reading and writing XML using the XmlDocument class, and using attributes and reflection. This workshop covers a great deal of material, but at the end of it you’ll have been exposed to a large number of important .NET topics. Don’t miss this chance to get a lot of .NET training in a single day!
Agile Management
David Anderson, Microsoft
What is the essence of an agile management? Light touch, empowerment, delegation, trust, and focusing on the correct leverage point to drive maximum advantage. Learn the Zen of agile management techniques embedded in to MSF v4.0 and the support offered through the Team Foundation Server work item tracking and reporting systems. This full-day workshop dives into the heart of how to manage with queues using cumulative flow diagrams and how to apply management science ideas to application development management.
Advanced C#: Patterns and Practices in .NET Framework 2.0
Richard Hale Shaw, Richard Hale Shaw Group
The arrival of .NET Framework 2.0 brings with it a whole host of best practices and patterns you should utilize and take advantage of: what classes and members have been made obsolete or deprecated in favor of newer, more powerful ones in .NET 2.0? Which practices and patterns have now been obviated by more elegant solutions found in C# 2.0 and VS2005? How can you best leverage new C# 2.0 features like Generics, Iterators and Nullable Types? And how does Enterprise Library change as .NET absorbs features that originated in the former? In this full-day tutorial, we'll dig into and get answers to these questions, all while using VS2005 to build live code examples.
Pre-requisites: you must already have 1 year of C# development experience with VS.NET 2003 and .NET Framework 1.x: no hand-holding if you don't. While .NET 2.0/C# 2.0 experience is not required, you may find it useful to bring a laptop with VS2005 pre-installed.
Advanced Windows Forms
Keith Pleas, Guided Design and Billy Hollis, DotNetMasters
Ready to move beyond the basics of forms-based applications? Learn advanced techniques with real-world examples in this Black Belt session on Windows Forms. You’ll discover capabilities you never knew existed, learn to use advanced OO capabilities in Windows Forms, find out how to build large, complex Windows Forms applications, and get an advanced look at the changes in Windows Forms 2.0 for Visual Studio 2005. The workshop will include several production-ready components and examples for you to use in your own projects.
Building Data Driven Solutions: Developing with ADO.NET 2.0
John Papa, ASPSOFT
Data access using ADO.NET is at the core of most .NET enterprise applications. While ADO.NET 1.x is powerful, its successor ADO.NET 2.0 contains several new features that can benefit an application. In this workshop we will review the ADO.NET 2.0 model and discuss its how its integral parts work together and where they can benefit an application. We’ll address:
ADO.NET’s connected and disconnected objects
Performance and maintenance in your enterprise solutions
Detection and handling of concurrency violations using ADO.NET and SQL Server
SQL Server 2005 and data access strategy improvements
Building a solid Data Access Layer (DAL), how to choose the right one for an application, and how the Enterprise Library’s DAAB wraps ADO.NET 2.0
Increase Your Predictability of Success with Team System
Brian Randell, MCW Technologies
Creating good software solutions is hard. From design, to code cutting, testing, deployment and project management, a software project’s success requires effective team communication and tools the help, not hinder your process. In this workshop, you’ll learn how Visual Studio Team System can help you increase the predictability of success of your software projects. In this workshop you’ll quickly learn what Team System is all about—what you need to run it and what’s included “in-the-box”. Moving forward, you’ll dive deep and learn how to use the various components—SOA designers, Unit Testing, Work Item Tracking, enterprise source code control and Office integration--to build a software solution. You’ll also learn about security, process methodology templates, reporting and very important to most shops—how to customize Team System to work the way you work. At the end of the workshop, you’ll be ready to start your own projects with Team System.
