Hello World in Silverlight is easy.  Hello World + bling is even easier.  But with real world applications comes real world problems.  The Silverlight (and similarily WPF) paradigm is very different and requires a different approach to designing an application



In this talk, we'll look at my Top 8 Silverlight gotchas that have raised their heads many times during application development.  These will be invaluable when looking at Silverlight as a platform for LOB applications.



As usual few slides, many demos!

Visual Studio ALM (formerly Visual Studio Team System (VSTS)) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) are the cornerstones of development on the Microsoft .NET platform. These are the best tools for a project manager to have successful projects and for the developers to have a focused and smooth software development process.

Come and see Martin Hinshelwood, Team System MVP and Solution Architect from SSW show you:

• How to successfully gather requirements with User stories


• The right way to use work items


• The way to complete a work item and send a "done"


• Use templates for your standard work items


• The extra work items that developers always forget


• What is good and bad about Excel and Project integration


• What you can use from the built in reporting as well as the Project portals available on from the SharePoint dashboard


• The important reports to give your Project Manager

Walk away knowing how to see the project health and progress. Visual Studio ALM is designed to help address many of these traditional problems faced by project managers. It does so by providing a set of integrated tools to help teams improve their software development activities and to help project managers better support the software development processes.

During this session we will cover the lifecycle of creating work items and tracking of releases using Visual Studio ALM and Team Foundation Server.

A fast paced introduction to jQuery and all it's cross-browser loveliness: Applying jQuery to your pages with Progressive Enhacement; the CSS-like selector syntax; binding and handling events; effects; plugins and ajax. Heck, then we'll do some more ajax. If needed we'll chat about closures, JSONP, cross-domain issues and solutions. Lots of code and demos along the way and avoiding boring slides!



A great session for those fairly new to jQuery or not fully aware of what it can do for you. We also dive into some advanced usage and best practices.

Castle Windsor offers more than an IoC container, offers a number offacilites that can reduce the amount of code required to implementthings like Logging, NHibernate integration, AOP and more.
In this session we will look at what Castle Windsor offers beyond the IoCcontainer and look at building an application from File - Newleveraging these tools.

So you've been developing web applications and web services, and have resigned yourself to complicated frameworks with little functionality.



Fear not, for there is a new kid on the block! OpenRasta, an open-source web development framework, helps you deliver better web apps, lets you leverage the http protocol without fuss and without getting in your way.



This session will start with a quick introduction to OpenRasta and ReST, a demonstration of the OpenWrap package management system and an overview of the new features that are part of the 2.1 release.

AppFabric Caching (neé Velocity) is Microsoft's new framework for distributed caching.

In this session we'll look at:

·         why you might want a distributed cache

·         how to configure your applications to use AppFabric

·         how to install AppFabric on a server

·         how to manage an AppFabric cluster

We'll also explore some of the other features of AppFabric Caching, including concurrency and locking, tagging, building a highly-available cache, and how to get away from sticky load balancing.

Webapplications have been growing in size and complexity with every new release.The addition of slightly more JavaScript, more HTML can lead to the sitebecoming sluggish without an obvious cause. Fortunately more organisations aretaking note of the correlation between site speed and profitability. Withoutsuitable tools, developers are left stabbing in the dark trying to resolveperformance issues, until the application feels faster. Luckily there are manytools out there including YSlow, which can help you through the process ofmeasuring the performance of your application. However gathering this datamanually can be time consuming, laborious and prone to human inconsistencies.

 This presentation covers theimplementation and integration of an automated framework that addresses theseissues by gathering performance data and presenting it in an accessibleformat.

 YSlow was set to auto run on eachpage load and send a beacon request to a collection page. By default, thebeacons did not contain any detailed size information, so the YSlow source wasmodified to include this.  As our development and test teams use Selenium toautomate our front-end testing, Selenium RC was chosen to help fully automatethe process.  Test scripts were written to visit each page and exercise the sitein a consistent manner, collecting YSlow score and page weight data as itwent.

 While testing this solution, it wasnoticed that the caching and Etag values were noticeable different to thosegathered using YSlow manually.  Some investigation revealed that the Selenium RCproxy blocks caching-related headers, so a custom version was compiled.  TheSelenium scripts were updated to record user experience data, by measuring pageload times and the time taken for typical user interactions.  This data wasstored alongside the YSlow data to allow it to becross-referenced.

 Ourcontinuous integration system was then updated to trigger this entire process anumber of times (to ensure consistency in the timing data) each time a numberedbuild compiled, passed all unit tests and was deployed.

 Theaggregate YSlow and timing data was made available in JSON format, allowing aninteractive reporting portal to be built using jQuery and flot.  The reports areinteractive and zoomable with tooltips to provide more information on each datanode.

 Theperformance data can also be accessed using a Testers Heads Up Display(T.H.U.D.), an in-house Jetpack plugin for FireFox which also uses the JSON webservice.  It has a overlay that shows the current data for each page as they arevisited, using sparklines to show the graphical data.  T.H.U.D is alsointegrated with our source control and bug tracking systems (Subversion andFogbugz respectively) to provide testers with quick access to all the relevantdata for a page.

Feedback from all areas regardingthis system has been overwhelmingly positive - it allows developers to pick offthe low-hanging performance issues and gives them targets to work against.Testers can quickly raise issues as soon as they surface, rather than waitinguntil they become more serious.  Management can keep abreast of improvementsthat have been made by the development team and use this information to allocatetime to future work.

 Thesystem has improved the awareness of web performance issues within the company,and provided the evidence required to instigate changes and measure theirimpact.  An average 75% reduction in primed page size has been achieved as adirect result of the system's introduction. 

Visual Studio ALM (formerly Visual Studio Team System (VSTS)) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) are the cornerstones of development on the Microsoft .NET platform. These are the best tools for a team to have successful projects and for the developers to have a focused and smooth software development process. For TFS 2010 Microsoft is heavily investing in Scrum and has already started moving some teams across to using it.



Martin will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even asses your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment.



Come and see Martin Hinshelwood, Visual Studio ALM MVP and Solution Architect from SSW show you:

• How to successfully gather requirements with User stories


• How to plan a project using TFS 2010 and Scrum


• How to work with a product backlog in TFS 2010


• The right way to plan a sprint with TFS 2010


• Tracking your progress


• The right way to use work items


• What you can use from the built in reporting as well as the Project portals available on from the SharePoint dashboard


• The important reports to give your Product Owner / Project Manager

Walk away knowing how to see the project health and progress. Visual Studio ALM is designed to help address many of these traditional problems faced by teams. It does so by providing a set of integrated tools to help teams improve their software development activities and to help managers better support the software development processes.



During this session we will cover the lifecycle of creating work items and how this fits into Scrum using Visual Studio ALM and Team Foundation Server.



If you want to know more about how to do Scrum with TFS then there is a new course that has been created in collaboration with Microsoft and Scrum.org that is going to be the official course for working with TFS 2010.

Ken Schwaber and and Sam Guckenheimer: Professional Scrum Development

Deep Zoom is a Silverlight adaptation of a technology for presenting vast amounts of pictorial data to users in a highly bandwidth efficient manner.  Deep Zoom allows you to programmatically manipulate the Deep Zoom Scene, associate metadata with each image. The Images can come from a database or be composed on the fly. I will show you have to take advantage of this technology and create some truly remarkable applications.

"If you're waiting around for users to tell you about problems with your website or application, you're only seeing a tiny fraction of all the problems that are actually occurring. The proverbial tip of the iceberg."

In this session we'll explore how to detect and hunt down exceptions in live applications. You'll learn about .NET and JavaScript exception handling and more about Exceptions than you'll have thought possible!

It'll be an ... Exceptional ... session. (Sorry).

Software has always needed to be tested manually, automation can help, but it is never going to replace the need for manual testing totally. How a team manages this requirement for manual testing can be key to a projects success or failure.



In the 2010 release of Visual Studio Microsoft have provided a whole new set of tools to aid in this process - Microsoft Test and Lab Manager. In this session I will show how MTLM can be used to assist a tester in creating detailed, acurate and repeatable testing that are a joy to use (well might be stretching a point there!). Also I will show how the tooling can allow these manual tests can become the basis for automated tests, and how the advanced logging features of the tools allow bugs to be acurately passed back to developers for speed the production of fixes.

This  session covers the base exam that is used for all .NET 2.0 and 3.5 Developer certifications. It goes through the objectives and looks at the ones you should focus on and what you should expect in this exam

A practical look at the Designer Extensibility Framework introduced in Silverlight 3. Covering the implementation of design-time support in the Blend 3 and Visual Studio 2010 designers for controls and components developed in Silverlight. Learn how to supply and configure metadata for the property browser and the design surface, Toolbox integration and control registration, intellisense for the code editor etc.

Continous Intergration and scheduled builds are an important part of any development process. To get the best out of these tools, as much testing as possible should be wired into the post build process.



In this session I will show how with Microsoft Test and Lab Manager an application can be built, unit tests run, a test environoment created, the product deployed to a intergration/coded UI test run.

So you’ve written your Silverlight application and you want it to work in another language ? Then this session is for you. World-Readiness is all of the work that a developer needs to do to globalize an application and make it localizable (i.e. capable of being localized). Whereas these concepts are well established in Windows Forms and ASP.NET, Silverlight is not only a cut-down version of the .NET Framework but also cross platform and client-side. In this session you will learn how to localize Silverlight applications using .resx files, download culture-specific resources on demand so that users only download resources for the culture they need, understand what System.Globalization types and properties Silverlight does not support and why, what globalization and font support you can expect on Windows and the Mac, what the Silverlight installation user experience is for non-English users and what language support you can expect from the Silverlight framework.

Robert Martin first brought together a number of existing OO principles
to create SOLID a few years ago.  Other platforms have been aware of
them for awhile, but it took a moron by the name of Joel Spolsky to
bring them the attention of the .Net masses.  Since then, many people
have been more maintainable software that reacts better to change on
the .Net platform by taking them into consideration.

In this session we will look into the advantages these guideline's
bring and take an in-depth look at the advantages and disadvantages
they can bring in a real world application.

Concurrent programming and multicore development



Why you need to understand this and what (new) tools exist to help developers in .net ( and new in .net 4.0, announced at PDC )



* new concurrency libraries

* functional languages

* task orientated design

PRISM is the latest incarnation of the the Patterns and Practices teams extensible client framework for WPF and Silverlight.  MEF is the Managed Extensibility Framework coming with .NET 4.0 and currently available on Codeplex.  They sound similar, do they do the same thing?  Or do they have different uses?  In this session we'll look at the two frameworks and how they can coexist in one application.

Convention over Configutation was made popular by Rails and a number of OSS .Net projects taken advantage of the idea.

In this session we will look at a number of these projects, and examine how you can take advantage of Convention over Configuration in your application

In May 2008 Microsoft finally released StyleCop (aka Source Analysis). StyleCop does for C# source code what FxCop does for assemblies – it applies ‘good practice’ rules to your source code. This means all those controversial code beauty issues like spaces, where to put curly braces, how and when to use blank lines and over 150 similar rules. This session gets you started using StyleCop, investigates a selection of rules, shows how to integrate StyleCop into Visual Studio and your build process and finally shows how to write your own custom rules. This is a low tech session on an essential tool that all C# developers should be using.

Learn the What , How and Why of Microsoft’s Windows Azure from Iain Angus, a specialist Azure Consultant at Black Marble.

Anyone looking at Azure needs to understand the implications of storing data in the cloud as Azure storage differs significantly from typical data storage.

Iain will cover in a demo led session how Windows Azure provides durable, scalable, available, secure, and performance-efficient storage services for the cloud.

Building mapping into your web applications is becoming a common requirement, and while it's easy to incorporate Google or Bing mapping, the existing technologies have been Javascript based. This brings several problems, among them performance. With Bing however, you have the opportunity to use a Silverlight control, which opens up huge opportunities. Not only does running in silverlight free you from Javascript performance restrictions, but also it's easy to customise the mapping experience; after all, it's just silverlight, so anything goes. In this session we'll look at integrating mapping into web applications, showing everything from simple pushpins to complex interactions, and examine some simple ideas for building a modular architectures.

Ruby has been a home for some great innovative frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Cucumber and Rake. IronRuby version 1.0 will soon be released, unleashing the power of Ruby to the .NET world. 

In this session you will get familiar with the Ruby language and its amazing ecosystem and you will learn to take advantage of it in your everyday development tasks. Come and see how this great new addition to the .NET family makes your development process faster, clearer and happier!

It's been almost 9 years since the agile manifesto was first drafted. There are thousands of signatories of the manifesto and the list is growing. Yet, at the same time there is growing disillusionment and criticism about agile practices coming from experienced agilists. Some have even announced the death of agile. Is agile really dead? If so, who or what killed it? Are we merely going through the motions of last decade's great software idea?

Alistair Cockburn, one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto, has put together a great non-formula for dysfunctional agile teams called "Crystal".

 

This talk discusses a few fundamental mistakes that are prevalent in "agile" software development environments; why these practices are killing agile and how Crystal can save it.

... the sequel to 'How To Start a Software Development Company for £5000'

There are three excellent ways to lose lots of money; open a restaurant, own a football club or start a software development company.

Liam will provide a personal and subjective view on some of the tactics that he has found useful when running a software development company, to ensure it enjoys a 1st birthday party.

Liam will be assuming that you can write code, work hard, have commercial ideas and have clients or sales leads.

We won’t focus on any particular technology or framework, instead topics will include; Support, Testing, Logging, Time/Cost Estimates, Paperwork and Sales Pitches.

The most famous Ruby-driven framework is, by far, Ruby on Rails. With IronRuby, .NET developers can now take advantage of this incredible web framework without leaving their comfort zone. In this session, Shay Friedman, the author of IronRuby Unleashed, will build an entire Web 2.0 site from scratch while using and explaining the key features of Ruby on Rails. 

Come and see what Ruby on Rails is all about and what's made it the success it is today. 

Windows Server 2008 R2 featuring Internet Information Services  (IIS) is a powerful Web application and services platform that delivers rich Web-based experiences. It offers improved administration and diagnostic tools to help achieve lower infrastructure costs on a variety of popular development platforms. With improved reliability and scalability, IT professionals and developers can manage the most demanding Web serving environments, from a single Web server to a large Web farm. 



IIS7.5 is the next version of IIS, and is included in both Windows 7 as well as Windows 2008 Server R2. It includes some new functionality, including some very rich integration with ASP.NET.  

Web services are so 90's. These days, everyone's talking about
event-driven, publish-subcribe integration architectures. Come and find
out how the open source message bus, MassTransit, can help. We'll be
looking at the nuts and bolts, with plenty of hands-on code.

Do you know the difference between XHTML5 and HTML5? The difference between URIs, URLs and IRIs? Or what can and cannot use xml namespaces?



Web technologies move fast, and we're in a situation where vendors, authors and standard bodies are all diverging in their work and needs. The resulting is a complex web of unrelated and sometimes incompatible specifications.



In this pub quizz session, we'll explore together what standards exist today, what they mean to your web development now and in the future, and we'll finish by giving wall of shame (virtual) trophies to the vendors that break standards the most.

Windows Virtual PC is a free virtualization download from Microsoft for Windows 7. It allows you to run and maintain multiple virtual machines running different Microsoft operating systems in different configurations. Virtual Machines allow you to test your software in different configurations without the need for buying and maintaining separate physical machines. Unlike previous versions of Virtual PC, Windows Virtual PC includes an API for programmatically controlling these virtual machines. This session describes this API and shows you how to use it to run automated tests on multiple platforms. Subjects covered include basic use of the API, logging on to virtual machines, various methods for copying tests to virtual machines, running processes on virtual machines and collecting test results.

Keeping it simple...

This demo driven session will look at how WCF, REST and LINQ come together to form Microsoft's latest data access technology.

Planning on doing this exam but dont know where to start then this session is for you. Going through the objectives and highlighting some of the key points that you should know before you hit this exam. This session is focused on developers who are looking to either get a feel for the exam or who are currently studying for it and want pointers and what they should focus on

Do you want a session which will give you latest and most relevant information to help you in your day-to-day work? Want to take back some nugget of information to your Boss to make his job easier and get into his good books?  If you do, don't bother attending this session, as it's of no value to you today or probably even in ten years time. 



If however, you want a completely different session, one which takes you to the edge of what is currently possible in science and in computing, one which pushes the limits of your comprehension, then this is definitely the session for you.



Dave will, without the aid of any demonstrations, 'cos there ain;t no such thing as a commercial quantum computer, explain what quantum computing is all about, give you some examples of quantum computations and why, SSL's days may be numbered ....



This session requires no prior knowledge of any kind, it will be an overview and suitable for any attendee at the event.

There’s been an increasing amount of hype about Domain-Specific Language (DSLs) over the past few years [*] but in this session I’ll bring us back to Earth to describe the practical application of DSLs, tooling options and give some guidance on when DSLs should be considered, and when not. Along the way we’ll contrast DSLs with general-purpose modelling languages and general-purpose programming languages.

This is an introductory-level talk and no previous experience of Domain-Specific Languages is assumed. Both DSL-sceptics and DSL-zealots welcome.

[*] I like to think I haven’t contributed to this hype but as organiser of the annual Code Generation conference and moderator of the Model Driven Software Network I may bear some responsibility. Note also that I expect the hype to rise again this year with imminent publication of a book on DSLs by Martin Fowler. You have been warned.

One of the lesser known new features of SharePoint 2010 is Visio Services.  Following on from the success of Excel Services in SharePoint 2007, another of Microsoft's Office suite hits the web, this time combined with the magic of Silverlight!  Visio Services offers the end user a new and exciting way to view his data, it offers the developer new and exciting ways to work with Visio.



Dave will cover by means of demo's a-plenty most of the features of Visio Services, including it's Architecture, it's Javascript API, it's WebPart Connections, Custom Data Source Provider and ability to create Custom Icons. 



Think Visio is for a few network diagrams? Think again, Visio Services will surprise you and excite you, as you begin to see new ways to visualise your data, and to give users an insightful and exciting visual experience!

Do you need a simpler way to describe, design, and verify the functionality of your software? Behaviour-Driven Development is a modern re-thinking of TDD that caters to humans first and computers second. At the forefront of this is a Ruby tool called Cucumber: its elegant “Given-When-Then” language can be learned in 5 minutes and then used by developers, business analysts, and usability experts to specify application features at whatever level of precision is appropriate at the time.

In this session we’ll design and build a simple ASP.NET MVC web application using BDD techniques, seeing how this overcomes certain limitations in traditional TDD/unit testing. We’ll explore your options for running Cucumber and compatible BDD tools on .NET (e.g., using IronRuby), and how– if you prefer – you can avoid Ruby and work purely in C#.

Cloud Coffee is the latest in a wide range of coffee shops on the high-street. What makes Cloud Coffee different is that they use latest “cloud” principles, keeping costs low by using utility based staffing, maintaining a decoupled working environment and ensuring good scalability to meet customer demand. Cloud Coffee has very quickly risen to high street fame.



This analogy will help you understand how things work in the cloud, specifically Windows Azure. During this talk Dominic will elaborate and expand upon on the concept of ‘Cloud Coffee’, sharing some of the lessons he learned, best practices and patterns that have emurged whilst developing one of the first production applications for the Windows Azure Platform.

With .Net 4.0 and the DLR, IronPython has been brought fully into the .Net family. Find out if a language that doesn't need braces and uses dynamic typing is right for you, by running though a few examples.

So you have heard all about Domain Driven Design, but you are not really sure how anybody uses it in practice. You may even have seens repositories, entities, and value types appearing in a code base near you. But is that what folks who are practicing DDD do? In this presentation Ian Cooper talks about his team's experiences
using DDD, particularly Distallation, Ubiquitous Language, Strategic
Context Mapping, and oh yes something on Aggregates, Repositories and Services

With the recent public release of the Microsoft Surface SDK, this session aims to introduce you, the developer, to this exciting new platform.



We will explore a little bit of history behind this platform before delving deep into the capabilities that exist under the hood of the device



We will then move on to explore the application development architecture and how you can leverage your existing skills with WPF or XNA to create compelling new user experiences on the device.



By the end of the session, I hope you will see how this platform offers limitless new opportunities that will provide something never experienced by end users...and that it really isn’t just a big coffee table :)  

Have a large WinForms application but want to start using WPF?  This session will look at how you can have both technologies within the same solution and how to retain a WinForms style look and feel to allow you to begin to migrate to WPF.  I will also look at some of the early "gotchas" that WPF introduces and how to overcome them.

For those new to virtualisation we'll provide an overview of virtualisation and the desktop products currently available for developers.

Then we'll explain the differences between those products and Hyper-V and examine the two products for running Hyper-V; Hyper-V Server R2 (free) and Windows Server 2008 R2 (semi-free).

Finally we'll demonstrate automation of Hyper-V using the PowerShell library available on CodePlex so that you can automate your testing and integrate Hyper-V in your continuous integration server.

At the end of the session you'll have a greater understanding of the Hyper-V architecture, how you can utilise it as a software developer and how to automate Hyper-V for common tasks.

Arguably the most innovative and forward thinking feature of Windows 7 is its multi-touch support. And it should be no surprise to see that WPF 4 boasts the same multi-touch support that utilizes this Windows 7 multi-touch support where available. In this session we will explore this new feature in WPF 4 and see what we get for free (i.e. without having to do any work), what you can get with only minimal additional work and what takes a bit more time and effort. Along the way we’ll discover the basic touch support together with support for rotation, manipulation and inertia. Please note: the presentation will show true multi-touch – this is not some trick with two mice simulating multi-touch.

T4 is the best kept secret in Visual Studio.  In this session I will look at how it can be used to generate any type of code be it a class, T-SQL or even XAML!

PRISM is the latest incarnation of the Composite Application Guidance from the MS Patterns and Practices team. The guidance allows you to build extensible application quickly and easily in either WPF or Silverlight. In this session I'll show you how easy it is to build a WPF application and then extend it with PRISM.

SharePoint 2010 is the next incarnation of Microsoft's Collaboration and Application platform for the Enterprise and the Web. It builds on the phenomenal success of SharePoint 2007 and adds a host of new and exciting features for the End User, IT Pro and Developer.



In this session Dave will take a whirlwind tour of just a few of the new features of SharePoint 2010, including some which will have the biggest impact for businesses like Business Connectivity Services, Service Applications and 'Sandboxed' Solutions.



If you haven't worked with SharePoint yet, this is a great taster session for things to come in 2010. If you've previously worked with SharePoint and haven't been able to check out 2010, this is definitely the session for you!

So you have drunk the kool aid and decided that
MVC applications are a better way to build your web applications,
kissed goodbye to a page based architecture and learned to love JQuery.
From here on everything is just gravy, right? As ever with would-be
silver bullets you have bought off one set of problems but are now at
risk from another set. In this presentation Ian Cooper will talk about
his experience from building MVC applications for the last 2 years,
discussing gotchas like the Fat Controller and God Service, and asking
what a Front Controller is and why it might mean you fall in love with
the command pattern.

Fed up with Flash? Sick of Silverlight? Here's Html5.



With Android, Palm, the iPhone and the latest versions of Chrome and FireFox starting to offer support for HTML5, here's a whirlwind tour of some of the new features, and why you should care. I will discuss the new language features by building a demo web app.

10 common security mistakes that developers make when developing web applications and how to avoid them.



Covers topics such as XSS, SQL injection, correct permissions and securing your web.config file

Want to be a Microsoft Certified developer but don't know where to start? This session is for you. If you are planning on getting microsoft certified this session will show the tracks, the exams you have to take and give an overview of the testing experience and common pitfalls that can happen when trying to get certified

Code Contracts is Microsoft's implementatoin of Programming by Contract for .NET (also known as Contract Programming, or Contract-First development).  Code Contracts are a way of adding executable specification documentation to your code; they can also work hand-in-hand with your unit tests.  All-in-all, the aim of Code Contracts is to improve the quality and reliability of your software.



With Code Contracts you can: specify a method's pre-requisites (pre-conditions) and what it guarantees to do for it's caller (post-conditions); you can also specify what conditions must always be in-place throughout the the lifetime of an object (object-invariants).  Code Contract conditions can be tested at runtime and, if you're using Team System, they can also be analysed and tested statically after your application has compiled. Using the features of code contracts in conjunction with your unit tests can help you find potential problems in your code sooner.



Code Contracts will be part of .NET 4.0 and are also available for .NET 3.5; they're language agnostic and integrate into Visual Studio (08 & 10).



The aim of this session is to show you how to write code contracts: method pre and post condtions along with object-invariants and we'll look at how Code Contracts work.  In addition, we'll also be looking at using Code Contracts with TDD and how to use Contracts with Interfaces.

Clojure is a new dynamic language that runs on both the Java Virtual Machine and the .Net CLR. It’s particularly interesting as it is a functional language drawing inspiration from the Lisp family of languages. In fact, it’s been described as Lisp reloaded.

This talk will outline the language’s key features with several short programming examples:

-         Functional Programming

-         Concurrency Approaches

-         Macros

Participants will get an insight into functional programming as it is realised in the Clojure language. The talk will give an overview of the language aiming to encourage participants to explore further. No previous experience of Clojure, functional programming or Lisp is assumed.

After years of hearing about just how cool the ruby on rails framework is and being typically cynical about the whole thing I decided to check it out.  The image I had of rails was that of a framework adopted by tree hugging, corduroy trouser wearing and long haired hippies.   Learning ruby was fun but not entirely dissimilar from C# 3.5 and it is obvious to see the influence that ruby has had on C# 3.5.

It is hard to describe how game changing discovering rails has been for me.  The ethos and methodology is expressed in a frictionless development environment that is articulated in each rails project.  Convention over configuration is a culture I thought I was practicing in .NET.How wrong I was....

I would like to share my findings and report back to the .NET community of what can be learned from rails and possibly to a lesser extent ruby.

So you've downloaded the tools and 'played around' with Windows Azure, looking for a project to pounce on and show off your as yet untapped Azure awesomeness.  But you know that if you pitch an idea, your boss is going to be counting out on his stubby fingers, like a three year old, all of the reasons why you should not be using Azure - security, vendor lock-in, service levels, data locality and backups.  You can picture him suggesting that you keep things as they are and you can almost see the mould starting to form on your daily legacy code and your career.  You need ideas and answers so that you can go into the office and start extending a finger or two of your own... maybe you can, maybe you can storm into the office on the first of February and use your newly gained DDD8 knowledge to make a pitch.

How to use Bing Maps to integrate them into your web application. This a quick and short talk that shows how easy it is to integrate bing maps into your web apps

An overview of what's possible using Monotouch, Novell's new tool, to
enable C# and .Net based applications for the iPhone and iPod touch.
Find out what you need to start using Monotouch and how to create a
sample application. If you have any questions on why you'd use this, what are the benefits and downsides of using Monotouch then this is your place!

An introduction to Mono and the ecosystem around it the Frameworks (.Net, Winforms, Asp.Net, GTK#), Platforms, Cross platform applications, IDEs and IDE support, Tools and Libraries

In light of some recent events, such as the man who was convicted of stealing
130 million credit card details through a SQL Injection attack, it is
imperative that developers understand what a SQL Injection Attack is, how they
are carried out, and most importantly, how to defend your code against
attack.

In this talk Colin Mackay will demonstrate a SQL Injection Attack on an
application in a controlled environment*. He’ll show you where the vulnerable
code lies and what you can do to harden it.

Although this talk uses C# as the application language and Microsoft SQL
Server 2008 as the database engine many of the concepts and prevention
mechanisms will apply to any application that accesses a database through
SQL.

* Demonstrating an attack on a system without the owner’s consent is a
breach of the 1990 Misuse of Computers Act, hence the controlled
environment.

In this session Ian Cooper will look at how we can use internal DSLs to
configure our system behaviour using scripting. The session will cover
concepts such as language oriented programming that position the use of
such ideas. It will include a discussion of Rhino DSL and using the Boo
programming language for scripting.

In this session we'll take a demo-based tour of what's coming in Silverlight 4. We'll look at how Silverlight 4 makes for a great platform for business applications with additional capabilities to step outside of the security sandbox and common capabilities like printing, copy-paste, clipboard access and many more. We'll also take a look at the improved data-binding capabilities and some of the additional core capabilities like access to the webcam and microphone. Vote for the session, come along and see what Silverlight 4 has to offer to rich, cross-platform web applications in 2010.

WF 4.0 was announced at PDC 08, and includes some very sexy new features.  We'll take a spin through some of those new features and see how WF has evolved.

Do you have sleepless nights worrying about the ranking of your site on Bing and Google?  Do you spend hours trawling through SEO guides and implementing changes to your site to grab an extra ranking place?  Constantly hounded by SEO experts offering their services?

If any of this sounds familiar or if you're interested in generating more traffic to your website, then let me introduce you to the IIS SEO Toolkit. 

The IIS Team has released the IIS SEO Toolkit, building on the great extensibility model built into IIS 7/7.5, to help you improve your site's search engine rankings.  In this session we'll look at how to generate reports highlighting issues with your sites based on SEO Best Practices, use built-in tools to generate Robots.txt and Sitemap files.

Also as the toolkit takes advantage of the Extensibility of IIS 7/7.5 the toolkit can also be exended.  We'll take a look at the options available and how to extend the toolkit.

‘Inheriting’ code you don’t really understand can be a painful experience. Whether it’s a big ball of mud, spaghetti or just plain weird we all will typically have to work on such code some time in our careers.

This session describes some practices for systematically approaching the task of reverse engineering such code to help reduce the pain of working with it.

Along the way we’ll pick the brains of audience members by way of group exercises looking at different aspects of the reverse engineering problem.



No specific experience of reverse engineering is assumed, the group exercises won't be too-demanding and I promise not to force anyone to speak who doesn't want to...