Windows Azure is Microsoft's cloud offering, an operating system that hosts services in Microsoft data centers. It provides developers with on-demand compute and storage facilities to scale applications as necessary. In this one-day course we will present an overview of the Windows Azure platform, including the Web, Worker, and VM roles; Azure Storage; application development lifecycle; and an introduction to SQL Azure.

Since .NET 4 came out, we've seen many new technologies - new versions for ASP.NET MVC, improved jQuery plug-ins, and the new Razor view engine.
In this session we'll learn how to incorporate all these technologies to build the new generation of ASP.NET web applications.

Internet Explorer 9 makes your websites appear as if they were a native Windows application. You can use the full power of what your PC offers with support for HTML 5 and modern web standards. In this session, we'll discuss the new features of Internet Explorer 9 and describe how to take advantage of HTML 5, CSS 3, Canvas, and other standards -- today.

Currently, there are a number of messaging infrastructure options for the Windows/.NET platform available, such as BizTalk Server, WCF RoutingService, NServiceBus and more. In this session, we will demonstrate and compare the aforementioned messaging infrastructures from a perspective of content based routing and publish/subscribe. We will also discuss and demonstrate a light-weight WCF-based infrastructure, that allows for scalable and durable messaging, true content based routing and dynamic publish/subscribe, using a mix of technologies such as WCF, MSMQ, IIS, AppFabric Caching.

Data is a first-class element of every application. The Open Data Protocol (OData) applies web technologies such as HTTP, AtomPub and JSON to enable a wide range of data sources to be exposed over HTTP in a simple, secure and interoperable way. This session will cover explain what is the Open Data Protocol and how to create OData feeds using WCF Data Services.

Windows Phone 7 is the newest version of phone hardware and phone OS from Microsoft, and a very solid platform for application development. Microsoft enables 3rd party developers to use Visual Studio 2010 for Windows Phone 7 RAD, using Silverlight and the XNA Framework. Join this session to see how to get started with your Windows Phone 7 development, how to choose the right technology, and which tools are available right now.

Learn how to develop great Windows 7 WPF applications and how to port them to both Silverlight web applications, and Windows Phone 7 applications. See how to maintain a single code base for all the clients. Explore how to use Windows Azure Storage to share data between the different clients.

LEGO, consists of interlocking plastic bricks and various other parts. Lego bricks can be assembled and connected in many ways, to construct such objects as vehicles, buildings, and even working robots. Anything constructed can then be taken apart again, and used to make other objects. Thinking in terms of LEGO, MVVM are the bricks and MEF is the assembler. In this session you'll learn techniques to compose UI parts together much the same as with LEGO bricks..

In this session we will see how to host a Silverlight application in the cloud, discuss the flow of data from the cloud to the browser, and examine Silverlight's ability to run out of browser with elevated privileges to take better advantage of the surrounding operating system's features.

XNA Game Studio 4.0 is a programming environment that lets you create games for the PC, for Windows Phone 7 and the Xbox 360 console using Visual Studio and .NET. In this session we will see how to build real world computer games running on all platforms together, and even talking to each other!

The Parallel Programming framework in .NET 4.0 makes it much easier to exploit data-driven and task-driven parallelism that lies unused in your application's code and algorithms. In this session, we'll discuss the .NET 4.0 APIs for creating and managing tasks, and for parallelizing loops and LINQ queries; we'll also see how to choose among the different parallelization styles. Finally, we'll take a look at the pre-release C# 5 async methods support that bakes asynchrony and continuations straight into the language.

Entity Framework 4 brings many new opportunities for building complex data driven applications. Code First is a new EF capability that provides a code-centric experience for interacting with models and databases. The session will cover several new and future EF features such as Code First, and provide an overview for what to expect from EF in the future.

Service-Oriented-Architecture is a lot more than a buzzword, but more of a comprehensive theory aimed to create server applications that fit the requirements of today and attempt to be ready for the requirements of tomorrow. WCF 4, when integrated properly with WF 4 and AppFabric, may serve as the best implementation of SOA design, and is, therefore, a complete SOA solution. In this session we will present a problem to be solved, show how it can be solved using a SOA design, and implement it completely using WCF 4, WF 4, and AppFabric.

In this session, you'll learn how to use the Managed Extensibility Framework in real-life scenarios and applications, how an extendable application is constructed, and how MEF helps throughout the lifecycle -- from design through testing to debugging.

In this session we will demonstrate how to diagnose and improve the understanding of an existing application using such tools as: Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) and the Windows Performance Toolkit. The session will give you the tools to see the full picture about what goes on while the application is running: from your code via the CLR all the way down to the OS level.

Visual Studio 2010 offers a wide range of software testing capabilities: manual testing, automated UI testing, low-level unit testing, and even performance testing tools capable of simulating thousands or even millions of active users. But how do you know which tools to choose for your project? How do you apply common best practices from across the industry to the tools and techniques offered by Visual Studio 2010? In this session we'll attempt to send you home with a list of ways you can fine-tune your testing process to ensure you're making the most effective use of Visual Studio 2010's testing.

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is an agile practice that seeks to improve product quality. It is the next evolutionary step in the process that started with Test-Driven Development (TDD). In this session we will see how the core BDD concept of a 'specification' can further improve communication and cooperation for additional members of a team beyond developers.

Team Foundation Server is a multi-tier client/server application that Microsoft is currently porting onto the Azure platform. In this session, we'll review the engineering and architectural evolution that is making this possible, including moving from Windows users to Internet identities, rewriting stored procedures to use the subset of T-SQL that SQL Azure supports, and moving BLOBs out of the database to minimize Azure platform costs. Come learn about the trials and tribulations of porting a complex multi-tier server application onto the Windows Azure and SQL Azure platforms. [This is an adaptation of the Microsoft PDC 2010 session by RemiLemarchand.]

In this interactive session, Microsoft MVPs Alex Golesh, Sasha Goldshtein, Shai Raiten, and Gil Fink, will discuss a variety of Microsoft technologies and some of the announcements from the PDC 2010, including Windows Azure, Windows Server AppFabric, Silverlight 5.0, Entity Framework 4.0, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio Team System 2010 and other topics. This session will be a hosted panel and the MVPs will take questions from the audience as well as bring their own agenda and argue to their hearts' content.

In this interactive session, Microsoft MVPs Alex Golesh, Sasha Goldshtein, Shai Raiten, and Gil Fink, will discuss a variety of Microsoft technologies and some of the announcements from the PDC 2010, including Windows Azure, Windows Server AppFabric, Silverlight 5.0, Entity Framework 4.0, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio Team System 2010 and other topics. This session will be a hosted panel and the MVPs will take questions from the audience as well as bring their own agenda and argue to their hearts' content.

Cloud Computing is "the next big thing" in the evolution of the computer industry. One important aspect of this change is the rise of Windows Azure Platform (WAP) that let developers create or upgrade applications for the cloud. This session takes a broad look at the Windows Azure Service Platform and offers some architectural guidance on when and how this platform may came in handy.

A new decade of development bears advances to the mainstream programming languages, C# and C++, as well as the advent of new dynamic languages for certain goals. In this session, we'll review and highlight the major shifts in programming languages and frameworks, and how they affect the development process. Among the things we'll discuss: dynamic language trends, baking concurrency into the language, the rise of declarative constructs, and other issues.

Creating a good User Experience is one of the most sought-after goals of software development. However, it's surprisingly difficult. In this session we will explore MVVM, the most modern UI Architecture designed specifically to exploit WPF and Silverlight features. We will see how MVVM helps us with creating good UI & UX with ease, while reducing development time and costs.

Advance into the new world, take your existing application and make the transition to .NET technology or even the cloud the right way, just from the start. In this session we will present real life scenarios on how we can advance to new technologies, offer tricks and shortcuts from our own real life experience, and guide you around the existing potholes.