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.

Wednesday

10:00-10:50

Async 101

In this session we will discuss what asynchrony is all about and why we need to use asynchronous calls at all. We'll look at why the existing approaches are messy, and how C# 5 addresses this with async methods. We'll discuss how they're applicable to both server and client code, and take a peek under the covers to see where the magic comes from.

Jon Skeet

Jon is a software engineer working in the Mobile team at Google. While his day job primarily involves Java code, Jon is a huge C# enthusiast. His book on the language, “C# in Depth” is now in its second edition. He is probably best known for his contributions to Stack Overflow, the developer Q&A web site – although before Stack Overflow he was a prolific newsgroup poster. Although Jon is employed by Google, his talks are his personal opinions; he is not speaking on behalf of Google.

11:10-12:00

.NET Collections Deep Dive

The .Net framework provides a rich set of collection classes, but how much do you really know about them? In this presentation we’ll take a deep dive into the .Net 4.0 collection classes and examine which are best for what scenario and why. By the end of the presentation, you’ll no longer be happy just reaching for the same old collection you always have before, but you’ll be armed with the information required to pick the best collection for your needs.

Gary Short

Gary Short has over 20 years of experience in software development and has been involved with such industry powerhouses as American Express and IBM. Currently with Developer Express, Gary works alongside the frameworks division as their Technical Evangelist. He has a deep interest in technical architecture, focusing particularly on how architectural design can affect the delivery of development solutions. Gary’s core areas of interest are in technical debt and refactoring. Gary has been recognised as a Microsoft MVP for four consecutive years, and gives back to the developer community through his involvement with both community events, and national and international conferences throughout the UK, Europe and the United States.

13:00-13:50

Building ReSTful APIs, and how learning the word hypermedia will make you look smarter

Hypermedia is the most powerful aspect of the web, a tried and tested technology that lets you link things with other things. This session will start from a poorly designed, RPC-style API and evolve it by introducing links and forms, resulting in decreased coupling, leaner clients and happier users.

Sebastien Lambla

Sebastien Lambla runs Caffeine IT, a .net consultancy / contracting company helping the good people of London adopt new technologies, new processes, new methodologies and in general anything that's new and shiny. Specializing in cutting-edge tools, from REST architectures to occasionally connected rich clients, Sebastien has been developing with .net since 2000, and has a secret love affair with javascript. In his spare time he’s working on OpenRasta, a resource-oriented MVC framework for .NET.

14:10-15:00

Building mobile web applications using ASP.NET MVC 4, HTML 5, and jQuery Mobile

There are over a billion mobile devices with rich Web capabilities, yet many Websites look terrible on such devices. As mobile devices become the primary way that most people access the Web, having a site that fails to deliver a rich experience on the Web using HTML5, JavaScript and jQuery Mobile is missing out. In this session, learn how ASP.NET MVC 4 leverages these technologies enabling developers to build a single solution that targets multiple platforms and form factors.

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.

15:40-16:30

Facebook Application Development

Come learn how you can build Facebook applications using familiar tools and languages. We will discuss some common tasks and problems developers face when building Facebook apps such as authentication, scale, error handling, and high-availability. You will learn about the core components such as the Graph API, FQL, and XFBML. We will walk through different scenarios such as canvas apps, websites, and mobile apps and how the Facebook C# SDK and Facebook JS SDK makes building these apps easier.

Nathan Totten

Nathan Totten is a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft, he is also the creator and lead developer of the Facebook C# SDK. Before Microsoft, Nathan was a Senior Software Engineer at Thuzi where he worked on social media applications and analytics tools. He has experience building Windows Azure applications that handle large traffic spikes and maintain high availability and performance. He is also actively involved in open source development and the developer community.

16:45-17:35

Kinect SDK for Windows - A new way to interface with applications

With the Kinect SDK the Kinect is introduced in the PC world, and this time it goes way beyond gaming and ideas for Kinect use business and non-game applications are already plentiful. In this session we will look at a few of those ideas and look at some demos that will hopefully inspire you and jumpstart your Kinect development. Sure, we'll look at a bit of code, but mostly this will be an inspiration session and a discussion around what you should think about when designing for Kinect.

Tess Ferrandez

Tess is a developer evangelist at Microsoft and her job is to inspire developers and help them use the Microsoft products to their full potential. Right now the focus is on Windows Phone, Kinect, HTML5 and web apps, and she has a long history as a ASP.net developer and debugger. She runs a popular blog about debugging and development at http://blogs.msdn.com/Tess and you can reach her through the twitter handle @tessferrandez.