Track: .NET

The .NET Framework has grown up to be a lean mean productivity machine. As well as many products from Microsoft there's also a blooming open source community that provides developers with more options than they could dream of. All this combined with the upcoming release of C# 5.0 are giving us access to built-in asynchronous awesomeness that enable us to develop products that are taking full advantage of the multicore paradigm shift.  What all this means is that there's a lot to look forward to and there's a lot to learn. This years .NET track will provide insights into what we consider to be the next "big things" in the .NET universe. Insights that will help you navigate your way through the labyrinth and give your imagination the tools to best solve today's challenges.

Thursday

10:00-10:50

Web Performance Triage

We all know the common tricks for improving perceived performance, but often far too little emphasis is given on making the servers do their work more efficiently - otherwise all you achieve by scaling-out is distributed slowness. Here we take a hands-on look at some pragmatic ways to measure and improve the performance of your server-side code. The examples focus on ASP.NET MVC, but the themes should apply to most .NET web development, and beyond.

Marc Gravell

Marc is part of the development team for Stack Exchange (and a self-confessed Stack Overflow junkie), and has been a C# MVP for the last 4 years. He has a long history of open source projects, and tries to focus on high-performance, low-impact libraries (hiding all the "ugly" from app developers). Before his transition to Stack Exchange, his history is coprorate / line-of-business (mainly on the Microsoft / .NET stack).

11:10-12:00

NuGet In Depth: Empowering Open Source on the .NET Platform

NuGet makes the integration between your apps and 3rd party components easy as pie by providing a simple and extensible process. In this session we'll cover how you can create, consume and publish your libraries (packages) and fully leverage external components while at the same time contributing to the .NET OSS community.

Phil Haack

Phil Haack works for Microsoft as a Senior Program Manager on the Web Platform and Tools team aiming to build great products for developers. While he delves in many areas of ASP.NET, his primary projects are ASP.NET MVC and NuGet Package Manager, both released under an OSS license. In his spare time, he writes about software on his blog, http://haacked.com/ and works on the Subtext open source blog engine.

13:00-13:50

Making your Application Cloud-ready

Do you have a feeling that the applications you write won't run and scale in the cloud? Standard development practices include many vices that make applications cloud-incompatible. Machines fail in the cloud and the local filesystem is not be trusted. A request may be served by any of a group of instances, so even caching session-data in memory is suspect. This session will show you how to take a web application and convert it into a stateless, cloud-ready and super-scalable monster.

Troels Thomsen

Troels has been programming since he was eleven and asked his father for an advice on how to kill time, so even though he dropped out of Computer Science from the University of Copenhagen a year early, he immediately pursued senior engineering and architect roles in Danish startups. He is now involved as a co-founder and technical lead in AppHarbor, a .NET Platform-as-a-Service.

14:20-15:10

Creating a Top 500 Internet Website in C# for Dummies

Do you have what it takes to build a web-scale service? Is your puny web tier enterprisey enough to handle thousands of requests per second? You want the traffic? You can't handle the traffic! Jeff Atwood shares some key lessons in scaling and growing a large, public website on the .NET stack.

Jeff Atwood

I was weaned as a software developer on various implementations of Microsoft's BASIC in the 80's, starting with my first microcomputer, the Texas Instruments TI-99/4a. I continued on the PC with Visual Basic 3.0 and Windows 3.1 in the early 90's, although I also spent significant time writing Pascal code in the first versions of Delphi. I am now quite comfortable in VB.NET or C#, despite the evils of case sensitivity. I currently work full time on my blog while building stackoverflow.com.

15:40-16:30

Actor Model Programming in C#

With multi-core processors in all desktop computers and nearly every mobile device, developers must use asynchronous operations and concurrency to create responsive applications. The Actor programming model is an increasingly popular method of achieving the scalability without the impact to productivity that is inherent using traditional concurrency approaches. Stact is a library that enables C# developers to leverage the power of Actors, bringing the simplified concurrent programming to .NET.

Chris Patterson

Chris is an architect for RelayHealth, the connectivity business of the leading healthcare services company in the US. There he is responsible for the architecture and development of applications and services that accelerate care delivery by connecting patients, providers, pharmacies, and financial institutions. As an open-source contributor, Chris is an author of MassTransit, a .NET service bus framework, and Topshelf, a Windows service framework.

17:00-17:50

Phone Apps Unlimited

Writing apps for mobile devices can be reminiscent of coding 20 years ago; there are limited resources and often limited APIs. But unlike 20 years ago, we have access to unlimited resources through the internet. In this .NET-based talk, I’ll look at how to bridge that gap between phones or tablets and the Azure cloud, to store data, run “background” processes, and do things not permitted by phone APIs or the dreaded Terms & Conditions.

Mark Rendle

Mark’s career in software design and development spans three decades and more programming languages than he cares to remember. He is currently employed as Principal Architect at Dot Net Solutions, creating software with ASP.NET MVC, WPF, Silverlight and Windows Azure. He is a Windows Azure MVP. In his spare time, he enjoys learning new programming languages and paradigms (2011 is the year of CoffeeScript and F#), and works on the Simple.Data project, and Pocket C# for Windows Phone 7.