2012.1

MongoDb is a mature, stable cross-platform document database that plays quite nicely with Windows and .NET. Come and learn from the ground up why you'd want to use a document database, why Mongo is a great choice, and how to put it to use immediately in your enviornment. We will cover the basics of "document" databases, the basics of MongoDb, and get into the intermediate to more advanced topics such as indexing, in-place updates, and if time permits even replication.

Joel Cochran is an Expression Blend MVP, an INETA Community Champion, and a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) in Windows Forms and WPF. He is the founder of BlendSIG, a virtual Special Interest Group focused on Expression Blend and author of "Expression Blend in Action" by Manning Publications. He is also the author of "The Practical MVVM Manifesto" (http://practicalmvvm.com). He has been developing for Windows since 2003 and is a self-proclaimed "Blend Evangelist". A frequent speaker at User Groups and Code Camps, he enjoys teaching and writing about .NET and other topics. You can find him online at http://www.developingfor.net or on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joelcochran. Joel has served as the Director of Operations for Stonewall Technologies, Inc., an ISV, in Staunton, VA, since 2000.

Azure, Microsoft's Cloud Computing Platform, promises a lot of value for little investment. There are hundreds of "Hello Azure" resources available online, free trials, SDKs, and more to help you get started, but they don't offer much beyond that. In this session we'll take a walk through a real world Azure solution. We'll take a look at the various aspects of Azure and discuss how you can leverage its incredible power and elasticity. We'll tour a live development project and discuss the different choices and architecture used to solve cloud related problems. Topics will include SQL Azure, Azure Storage, and account configuration and management.

Joel Cochran is an Expression Blend MVP, an INETA Community Champion, and a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) in Windows Forms and WPF. He is the founder of BlendSIG, a virtual Special Interest Group focused on Expression Blend and author of "Expression Blend in Action" by Manning Publications. He is also the author of "The Practical MVVM Manifesto" (http://practicalmvvm.com). He has been developing for Windows since 2003 and is a self-proclaimed "Blend Evangelist". A frequent speaker at User Groups and Code Camps, he enjoys teaching and writing about .NET and other topics. You can find him online at http://www.developingfor.net or on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joelcochran. Joel has served as the Director of Operations for Stonewall Technologies, Inc., an ISV, in Staunton, VA, since 2000.

KnockoutJS is a framework for implementing MVVM architecture in client side JavaScript. Purely JavaScipt, it leverages HTML5 features to provide robust data binding and UI support. In this session we'll discuss the basics of the Knockout framework. We'll specifically examine it from the perspective of an ASP.NET MVC application. We'll cover different strategies for integrating data, creating Knockout ViewModels from ASP.NET MVC ViewModels, and other tricks for improving your experience with Knockout and MVC.

Chris has been writing software for Windows for 18 years. His previous day jobs include retail kiosks at theme parks to web based loan portfolio analytics to electronic health record exchange. But his hobby is game development and Chris has been working on small games since he was moving around ASCII characters in BASICA. You'll often find him playing the latest games on his Xbox or Windows Phone.

Windows 8 opens its doors to the independent developer with an app store that lets you self-publish games. Games account for over 50% of apps in all app stores today and Windows 8 is going to be in the hands of millions. Find out what your options are to publish games for the Windows 8 App Store. You have choices ranging from new web standards in Metro Style Apps to going for full throttle DirectX performance!

Joel Cochran is an Expression Blend MVP, an INETA Community Champion, and a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) in Windows Forms and WPF. He is the founder of BlendSIG, a virtual Special Interest Group focused on Expression Blend and author of "Expression Blend in Action" by Manning Publications. He is also the author of "The Practical MVVM Manifesto" (http://practicalmvvm.com). He has been developing for Windows since 2003 and is a self-proclaimed "Blend Evangelist". A frequent speaker at User Groups and Code Camps, he enjoys teaching and writing about .NET and other topics. You can find him online at http://www.developingfor.net or on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joelcochran. Joel has served as the Director of Operations for Stonewall Technologies, Inc., an ISV, in Staunton, VA, since 2000.

Behaviors allow you to encapsulate code and attach it to XAML UI elements. In this session we will discuss the use case for Behaviors and take a quick tour of the default behaviors that ship with Expression Blend. Then we'll dig into some code and learn how to create custom behaviors. We'll discuss different approaches to behavior development and how to select the correct base class for the behavior.

Dave Isbitski is a Sr. Developer Evangelist with Microsoft covering Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox. He enjoys talking about technology and has taught full-day courses on numerous Microsoft topics as well as being a presenter at VSLive!,ReMix, XAMLFest, CodeCamps and other community events. Dave can be found on Twitter at @TheDaveDev and his blog http://blogs.msdn.com/davedev.

Space Cadet is a Windows 8 Metro Style App developed using HTML and JavaScript you can freely re-use in your own apps.  The intent of this session demo is to help developers (Web, XAML and XNA focused) with writing their first Metro Style App in a fun, immersive way.  Space Cadet starts out as small game with a functional Game Loop.  After each Windows 8 topic is introduced new functionality is added to the game.  The following topics will be covered:

• Web/IE10
  o HTML5 Canvas
  o HTML5 Audio
  o CSS3
        § Styling
        § Custom Fonts
  o Implementing a Game Loop with JavaScript
       § msRequestAnimationFrame
  o Third Party Frameworks
       § SoundJS for use of HTML5 Audio Element
• Touch
  o MSPointer
• Camera Access
• Accelerometer
• WinJS Controls
   o AppBar and AppBarCommand
   o FlyOut
   o ViewPort
 
The session ends with app developers having a baseline of knowledge to build their own games Windows 8 games.

Perry Neal has been developing software for 13 years. He's worked on everything from Visual Basic 6 desktop applications to ASP.NET enterprise websites. He currently works for a mid-size motor repair company replacing all of their Access databases and applications with .NET applications and Crystal Reports. Yes, feel his pain. Perry speaks at user groups and Code Camps throughout the mid-Atlantic region. You can find him at http://www.twitter.com/perryneal.

Commonly thought to be the domain of the "cool kids" and uber-geek programmers, dependency injection (DI) and inversion of control (IoC) are actually very simple and easy - and something you're probably doing right now but didn't know it! In this presentation we'll take a look at what DI and IoC are, why they're good things, the problems they solve, and how to grow your very own!

Find out how to make the most of the new IDE features in Visual Studio 11. New features include: Search enhancements. Improved window/tab management Revamped Solution Explorer Quick Launch New image editor This session will focus heavily on demos.

We will take a look at how we can enhance the UI simply by introducing jQuery and jQuery.UI into our templates. Whether HTML, MVC or Webforms jQuery can aid in clientside development.

At the end of 2012 we built a proof-of-concept application using jQuery Mobile (jQM) and WCF Data Services running on top of the Windows Azure cloud. This application was accessible from iOS and Android devices over the Web, and locally installable using PhoneGap. In this session we'll share our experiences building this application so that you can avoid some of the pain points we hit along the way.

Experience: For over a decade, André has led agile adoptions, providing guidance to teams and organizations seeking shorter development cycles, higher quality, and more effective discovery of customer value. Playing various roles, from developer, manager, product owner and scrum master, he's done everything from hiring and building teams in startup environments to coaching teams for an organization with over 100k employees. Some of his teams have seen 50% reduced cycle time, practically bug-free code with daily deployments, and improved employee morale. He's also active in the community, providing leadership to groups such as: Agile Philly, Technically Philly Groups and Agile Tour. Education: After graduating from college and receiving an M.S. in Information Science from Drexel University, André has continued his lifelong committment to learning by reading about software teams and by organizing and facilitating discussions amongst local practitioners. To get community feedback on his ideas, he presents regularly at conferences, including: Agile 2011, XP 2010-2011, Agile Tour 2008-2010, and Agile France. Personal: André lives with his spouse and 3 children in Philadelphia, returning after two years spent abroad, where he used his fluent French to help a French team. He's a runner (clocking 5Ks in ~22 minutes), and loves club/pop music, and swing/bop/contra dancing.

Runners find that they can go faster with a lower perceived effort when they exercise in a pack. The same thing happens when coders pair program, and when colleagues gel. What do we need to do to so we can get code out the door sooner? It's not just continuous code integration--it's high bandwidth communication! Find out what companies of all sizes, like Comcast (100k employees), ING Direct (2500 employees), and SmarTesting (30 employees) are doing to successfully adopt and improve Agile development! Paraphrasing from Margaret Mead: "never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed [employees] can change the [company]". This talk is based on personal experience as well as the work of Seth Godin, Jim Collins, Christopher McDougall, Dan Mezick, Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jethá, Katherine Kirk, Daniel Goleman, and others.

One of the most memorable scenes in the hit movie The Social Network showed five people furiously programming on laptops in the middle of a dark and crowded room. They are taking shots of alcohol at regular intervals while trying to hack into a server as the crowd cheers them on. Two of the programmers raise their hands, and Mark Zuckerberg walks over to inspect their code. He turns to one and says, “Welcome to Facebook,” ending a rather unique internship application process. One interesting thing about this scene is that none of the programmers (nor anyone else in the room) are black or Latino. Cleavon Blair aims to change that in the real world by creating programming conferences to encourage African Americans and Latinos to consider a career writing code. Known as the co-founder of job hunting website TechPloyr, Blair’s journey to becoming a Tastemaker was a fascinating one. I had the opportunity to interview Blair and learn about his start as a technologist, the creation of TechPloyr, his plans for nurturing minority programmers, and what technological trends to watch in 2011. An Indirect Path to Technology Unlike others who have Blair’s level of technical skill, he was not fascinated by technology as a child. In fact, the opposite was true. “I didn’t have the typical “first experience” with technology,” Blair explains. “As a child, we had a computer in the home, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I just had no interest in computers, technology, etc. “ However, after entering college with a goal to become a psychiatrist by studying psychology and biology, Blair was uninterested in his classes. “After my first two Psychology classes, I knew there was no way I could continue studying that curriculum, it was just too dry. So, at the end of my freshman year in college, I spent a fair amount of time and energy trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up,” Blair says. Blair accidentally registered for an introduction to programming course during his sophomore year. He didn’t realize his mistake until the first day of the class. “I thought I had registered for a class about spreadsheets, etc. So you can imagine my shock on the first day of class with the professor talking about Pascal, programming and a bunch of other stuff that I absolutely did not understand,” Blair recounts. “The only thing that kept me from dropping the class was the fact the professor was so passionate about programming. I mean, I could see that he thoroughly enjoyed programming and teaching it, so I had to stay to see what was keeping this man so hyped about this stuff.” The passion of his professor inspired Blair to dedicate himself to mastering the challenge of programming. He spent late nights learning the Pascal language until he began to understand how it worked. “Something just kind of clicked for me, it was like I had found my calling. It was the most fun thing I had done in my life, at that point. I just got hooked and wanted more…,” Blair says. Creating TechPloyr.com Blair took his growing mastery of programming and applied it to the challenge of learning an increasingly popular language: Ruby on Rails. He took the approach of training himself in Ruby as if he was given a work assignment to create a job board application. As the economy entered the current recession, Blair began thinking about the requirements his application would need to help the growing number of unemployed workers. He implemented features to meet these requirements and realized the flexibility of Rails. Blair also came to understand that he had a tool that could help people searching for work. “I just felt like I wanted to help in some way, and my mind immediately shifted towards this training application I had written. After that I asked a number of people that I’ve worked with during my career if they would like to start a company, and the rest is history. The product has only been up and running a couple of months and we’ve received great feedback and usage in that amount of time,” Blair says. Helping Young Minorities Get into Tech Recognizing that media portrayals of African Americans as rappers, athletes, etc., limit the ability of young black people to consider careers in technology, Blair wants to change how technologists are viewed. “One thing that I’m exploring is having an annual programming conference for African-American and Latinos,” Blair explains. “If I can get that off the ground in the next year, I want to do sort of traveling shows to universities around the country to share programming with African American and Latino students where you can give them a real picture of what it’s like to be in this industry.” Electric Vehicles: A Tech Trend to Watch Blair shared several technology trends to watch in 2011. One was the growth of electric vehicle (EV) technology. “EV technology is a great opportunity for the country to do something “different”, but at the same time help to move the country forward. It is something that the country will have to “come together” on, and I’m interested in seeing if the country can put petty differences aside and move the country forward in some individual areas,” Blair says. What’s Next for Blair In addition to planning a programming conference for African Americans and Latinos, Blair has another online project in the near future. “I’m currently working on a project with a partner organization to bring the first true online network to the internet. I cannot give any more information than that at the moment, but it should be online early January 2011,” Blair says. On Being a Tastemaker “I feel honored!! I mean, you do things in life and you never really expect people to take notice, but to have some recognition isn’t a bad thing, especially if it is something that can help someone else in their life somehow. I mean, now more African Americans can see that there are lots of African-Americans in technology. This is very important to me because every person who has ever been on Black Web 2.0 whether it is a small article, comments, etc., can be the vehicle to help an African-American kid to step towards technology. If they see all of these people on the site, who weren’t afraid to step in the technical direction, it helps to give a young person courage to walk towards their own dreams. So, I am honored to be selected as a Black Web 2.0 Tastemaker,” Blair says. http://www.blackweb20.com/2010/11/22/tastemaker-cleavon-blair-the-programmer-entrepreneur/#.Txue2WNSTEU

I'd like to speak with .NET engineers and architects about the importance of them continually learning and creating with the toolset. Working hard with the toolset allows engineers to see new product opportunities, which lead to either new start-ups or innovation at existing companies, but also provides the developer a sense of professional "freedom".

Jenkins IS the build automation tool now a days. Besides being free, it is very simple to setup and use and provides large number of plug-ins. We will learn how to setup Jenkins and automate a Visual Studio build; and also look at some cool plug-ins

use bio on file.

February 2011 marked the 10th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto but after all these years there are still plenty of people that haven’t embraced Agile and still have plenty of questions about it. What is Agile and what does it mean for me? How do I “become Agile”? Is it right for myself and my organization? In this session, we will explore the underpinnings of the Agile software movement, discuss the management and technical practices that can lead to successful Agile projects, and understand how they are all interdependent and co-reinforcing. Attendees will better understand how Iterations, Test-Driven Development, Continuous Integration, and other practices can be used to provide a constant stream of timely and immediate feedback to the project development team, permitting rapid response to change over time. The ideal attendee will have several years of experience in traditional, non-Agile projects and an interest in better understanding how Agile attempts to address the short-comings and invalid assumptions of tradition software engineering approaches.

use bio on file.

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone with any real-world software development experience that Object-Oriented inheritance modeling can’t cleanly solve every class of problem we face as software engineers. AOP (Aspect-Oriented Programming) provides us with an alternative perspective on our objects and their behaviors that can be leveraged to powerfully and flexibly solve whole classes of recurring software engineering challenges that OO systems routinely face. In this talk we will both illuminate the fundamental principles and patterns of AOP as well as demystify the different available techniques for adding AOP to the design of OO systems in .NET. We’ll explore techniques like compile-time and load-time IL-Weaving, Static and Dynamic Proxying, and others. We’ll also examine several tools and frameworks (both Open-Source/free and commercial options) that make it easier for for the .NET developer to add AOP techniques to their toolbox for their everyday work. Attendees should possess good intermediate C# language skills and understand core OO design principles.

I am a Microsoft Certified SharePoint Solution Developer (MCSD) & SharePoint IT Professional (MCITP) with 4+ years of combined SharePoint experience. Currently working as a Senior SharePoint Consultant with Portal Solutions specializing in the Architecture & Development of complex custom solutions. I have worked with clients such as GirlScouts of USA, Conservation International, ECS & Fraunhofer. Until recently, I was a consulting analyst with Accenture Technology Consulting where I worked with clients such as Philip Morris and the US Postal Service. I am an alumni of the University of Maryland with degrees in Computer Engineering and Business Management.

This session will cover the ins and outs of SPMetal, a tool which ships with SharePoint 2010. SPMetal allows developers compile-time access to SharePoint lists and content types. Additionally, developers can write LINQ queries against these lists using SPMetal. This session will also briefly touch upon performance considerations and other best practices.

Saranyan is a technologist and a developer evangelist with X.commerce. He has a PhD in Computer Science. He has published in peer reviewed journals and conferences. He is passionate about simple ideas with big impact and believes that code is a great way to accomplish that.

We have integrated PayPal buttons into WebMatrix. This integration makes it extremely simple for WebMatrix users to integrate different PayPal payment options into their websites. This session will present an overview of PayPal's payment libraries, and how it was integrated with WebMatrix using Visual Studio. The entire code for this project has been released as open source.

It is easy as a SharePoint developer to limit your toolbox to just the items in the Microsoft.SharePoint namespace.  Using these tools requires a specialized skillset in understanding the abilities and limitations of these objects.  However, as a developer, it is important to have a wide range of tools available to you even if you only build SharePoint solutions. 
SharePoint is based on the .net Framework (3.5 in the case of version 2010) and IIS web applications, so your solutions can include many of the tools supported by these technologies.  If you have only developed SharePoint solutions, you may not be aware of other technologies available to your projects.  In this session, I will show some examples of solving complex business scenarios by working outside of the Microsoft.SharePoint namespace and still provide a SharePoint based solution.
The list of topics is still under development and currently includes the following:

• Integrating third party web controls into your application.
• Accessing .net Framework to go beyond what you can do with SPList and SPQuery objects.
• Using jQuery to enhance the functionality of your webpages.
• And at least one more thing (maybe two depending on the time).
  

Eric Kepes is an in-the-trenches software architect specializing in developing distributed systems using agile methods. He enjoys sharing his experiences using technology with the.Net community at user group meetings and Code Camps. He is the Communications Director for the Pittsburgh .Net User Group and the Pittsburgh Code Camps. Having spent nearly 18 years in software development wearing many different hats, he currently works for McKesson Automation as a software architect. He is a reformed certification junkie. When he’s not playing with computers or studying the latest fads in agile engineering and process, he enjoys spending time with his wife and two daughters. Visit Eric’s blog at http://erickepes.com or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ekepes.

Developers like the reduced complexity and increased productivity that an ORM can bring, but the data models they require often make your DBA mad. And using an ORM with an existing data model is often a nightmare. But writing all of that data mapping code is such a pain! What if we could have a solution that gave us the best of both worlds and made the developers AND the DBAs happy? MicroORMs might be the answer. In this session, we’ll explore PetaPOCO, a MicroORM.

Design patterns are essential for developing clean code. Knowing them provides us with a common vocabulary and allows us to quickly identitfy how a problem was solved. In this session we will introduce the more common design patterns introduced by the Gang of Four (GoF) and were they are used in the BCL.

A discussion of how to utilize the new offline capabilities of HTML5 to make Chrome, Firefox, and even your mobile browser continue to work with your website when disconnected from the Internet

A discussion of ORM approaches compared to the CQRS architecture to assist in determining how you should architect and design your next project. Examples of entity framework, nHibernate, MassTransit, MongoDb techniques will be featured in this talk

Boulos Dib is principal consultant and founder of Napeague Inc., a New York City based consulting company with emphasis on Microsoft technologies. Boulos has over 25 year experience in the software and technology industry. Boulos specializes in architecture and development of custom applications, infrastructure solutions & services and has worked with clients in a variety of domains including financial, legal, media, security, and e-commerce. He is an architect, developer, trainer, and frequent speaker at community events and local user groups. You can contact Boulos on his blog at http://blog.boulosdib.com.

LightSwitch, the latest addition to the Microsoft Visual Studio family, is designed to be the simplest way to build custom business applications, also known as Line of Business Applications (LOB). Using Microsoft’s wizards is usually a good starting point for developing applications, but most developers are never satisfied with wizard generated and out-of-the-box functionality. In addition, many organizations have their own in-house code libraries they would like to re-use and make available to their LightSwitch application developers. LightSwitch customizations and extensions to the rescue. In this session, we will provide an overview and an introduction to LightSwitch application development. We will then introduce and showcase various customization options available for enhancing the out-of-the-box application experience provided by LightSwitch. By the end of the session, you should walk away with a good understanding of the options available to enhance your LightSwitch application including building an application that re-uses existing Silverlight controls

Developers are notoriously lax with including security in their applications. In an age of hacking, this talk aims to arm the developer with an arsenal of protections to use while developing. This presentation explores the most common attacks on web applications, how they work to exploit your app, and most importantly, how to protect against them. Techniques such as Cross Site Scripting, SQL Injection, Session Hijacking, and Cross Site Request Forgery will be covered. ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC will be covered, as both have pros and cons that will be explored. We will start with a 'broken' application and secure it throughout the presentation. Leave this presentation empowered to immediately start protecting your applications!

Basic MVC applications are easy to create and usually are just that - basic. In the age of complex and user friendly applications we need to take a step beyond the basic application to make a powerful application. This session will showcase some of my favorite pieces of code to easily create implementations of full featured ajax dialogs that work with validation and repeated postings, exceptional status message handling, View Models and view model mapping, service side error logging, cache alternatives to view state, html helper extension methods, ajax login functionality, and very importantly, mvc/json/ajax error handling to handle errors, success, redirects, and logging to the server from the client.

Paul Betts is a software developer and Hubbernaut at GitHub, where he works on bringing the joy of Git and GitHub to the world of .NET and Windows. Paul previously worked at Microsoft in the Windows and Office organizations. His blog can be found at http://blog.paulbetts.org. Follow him on Twitter at @xpaulbettsx.

Creating a successful open-source project involves far more than simply writing some code and putting it up on (GitHub|CodePlex|SourceForge|star) - learn how to make sure that others discover your open-source code and use it in their projects. This talk will cover some of the basics of marketing an open-source project. I'll talk about what I mean by "marketing" as well as give plenty of practical how-to's about the difference between a great project that nobody uses, and a great project that takes off and forms a community around it. Everything from good documentation, to mailing lists, to optimizing for contributions, we'll go over what makes a successful open-source project.

Jason Follas is a Technical Architect for Perficient, serving clients primarily located in the greater Detroit region (including Toledo, where he lives and serves as a leader of the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group). Since 1994, he has developed many interesting solutions on the Microsoft platform, including an aircraft loadplanning system used by an air freight company, ecommerce sites, geospatial web applications, and blend optimization software. Jason is also a Microsoft MVP Alumni.

In physics, two particles can act together in order to behave as one system so that a change made to one particle instantly affects the other - even if they are separated by great distances. This is known as Quantum Entanglement, which Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." The closest analogy to this for web development would be to observe a web page instantly update in response to a user entering data in a different web browser. Believe it or not, this is not only possible today, but relatively easy by using two open source libraries together: SignalR and Knockout. SignalR is an asynchronous signaling library for .NET that helps to build real-time, multi-user systems. Knockout is a JavaScript library that brings MVVM pattern to the web page, providing observable data, templates, and automatic data binding. This session will demonstrate how to use this new paradigm to build highly interactive web applications.

Michael Eaton is the founder of Validus Solutions, a custom software development and coaching company that specializes in leveraging client-based technologies. Validus has been developing solutions using Microsoft tools and technologies since 2001 and serves clients throughout the mid-west. Michael speaks throughout the United States at various regional events, user groups and conferences sharing his love of client development to other developers. He also spends time coaching and mentoring other developers. Michael runs the Kalamazoo X Conference and is a C# MVP. When not working on projects or spending time with his family, he treats his World of Warcraft addiction with ample doses of…World of Warcraft.

You're an application developer, not a plumber (or carpenter), so why are you
writing your own MVVM framework? Worse yet, maybe you're jamming all sorts of
code in the code-behind!  Put down the pipe wrench (or hammer) and pick up one
of the best MVVM frameworks for WPF/Silverlight/WP7. Caliburn.Micro makes it
extremely simple to create solid, testable applications, while also reducing
the amount of code you have to write.

Michael Eaton is the founder of Validus Solutions, a custom software development and coaching company that specializes in leveraging client-based technologies. Validus has been developing solutions using Microsoft tools and technologies since 2001 and serves clients throughout the mid-west. Michael speaks throughout the United States at various regional events, user groups and conferences sharing his love of client development to other developers. He also spends time coaching and mentoring other developers. Michael runs the Kalamazoo X Conference and is a C# MVP. When not working on projects or spending time with his family, he treats his World of Warcraft addiction with ample doses of…World of Warcraft.

You're a developer, not a designer, but with no designer on the team, it's your job to make your WPF or Silverlight application look good.
With a little effort and an understanding of styles and templates, you can impress your users with a compelling, easy-to-use application.
You'll learn the ins and outs of styles, understand when and where to use templates and much more from a developer experienced in
not only writing WPF and Silverlight apps, but in making them look good too!

Michael Collier is a Windows Azure MVP and serves as a National Architect for Neudesic, a Microsoft SI partner that specializes in Windows Azure.  He has nearly 11 years of experience building Microsoft-based applications for a wide range of clients. Michael spends his days serving as a developer or architect – helping clients succeed with the Microsoft development platform. He also enjoys speaking about Windows Azure at local user groups, as well as regional and national conferences.  You can follow Michael on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MichaelCollier and on his blog at www.MichaelSCollier.com.

Technology providers move at “cloud speed”.  Cloud computing platforms such as Windows Azure are updated more frequently than other technology platforms.  The rapid pace of innovation makes it difficult to understand what features are available, and how to best utilize them in our applications. The positive aspect to the rapid updates is being able to quickly take advantage of new features and innovations.  The Windows Azure platform is constantly growing and evolving.  In this session we will take a quick look back at major milestones in Windows Azure’s relatively brief history, and then proceed into reviewing recent platform updates and new features now available.  Coming away you will have a solid understanding of Windows Azure platform features available for you to use in your applications today.

Michael Collier is a Windows Azure MVP and serves as a National Architect for Neudesic, a Microsoft SI partner that specializes in Windows Azure.  He has nearly 11 years of experience building Microsoft-based applications for a wide range of clients. Michael spends his days serving as a developer or architect – helping clients succeed with the Microsoft development platform. He also enjoys speaking about Windows Azure at local user groups, as well as regional and national conferences.  You can follow Michael on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MichaelCollier and on his blog at www.MichaelSCollier.com.

One of the often-heard promises of running your solution on a platform such as Windows Azure is that you’ll be able to easily scale your application whenever the need arises.  However, there is no “autoscaling” service currently available as part of the platform.  Autoscaling is not as simple of a problem as it often sounds.  What is “busy” for one application may not be “busy” for another.  There are costs associated with scaling.  How much should an application scale before getting a human involved?  So how do we achieve solution elasticity that can match ever-changing demands?  We will discuss some of the considerations one must look at when developing a scaling solution for Windows Azure.  We will explore options such as using PowerShell, custom development and the Windows Azure service management API, and the Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block.

There is a lot of hype over web UI these days. jQuery UI has laid a great foundation for implementing a rich collection of UI widgets that make our sites easier to use with less effort on our part. This session will start where jQuery UI left off and where control vendors picked it up. We’ll look at ComponentOne’s Wijmo “UI for the web” which is a collection of UI widgets and themes all building on the jQuery UI foundation. We’ll also look at Kendo UI from Telerik billed as a “complete framework for HTML 5 apps.” By the end of this session you should have an idea of why you might want to use something beyond jQuery UI and what other vendors have to offer.

jQuery Mobile takes the same great principals that make jQuery so powerful and easy to use and applies them to mobile development. This new framework takes all the jQuery goodness and combines it with HTML5 to give you the ability to develop web sites with a collection of mobile-specific components such as pages, dialogs and buttons as well as events such as tap, tap-and-hold, and swipe. After we look at what jQuery Mobile is – and how easy it is to use – we’ll discuss Why, When and Where you should (or shouldn’t) use it. jQuery Mobile is built with “progressive enhancement” which means that it should work just fine on less capable devices, but it will add more robust behaviors on more advanced devices. We’ll look at some examples of how jQuery Mobile does this using HTML5 and JavaScript. We’ll also explore the concepts of progressive enhancement, graceful degradation and adaptive and responsive web design so you can better understand where jQeury Mobile fits as a solution for developing mobile web sites.

Many programmers-turned-web-developers have a basic understanding of Cascading Style Sheets or CSS. As with good programming practices, CSS provides a way to separate our concerns – a way to have the content on a web site live independently from the way it is rendered on a web site. This session will introduce the concepts required to create website where content and presentation are treated as separate concerns. An in-depth understanding of CSS will allow us to create better looking pages, web sites that are more easily maintained, and web sites that render properly on a variety of devices. Another compelling argument for diving into CSS is so that a developer can implement jQuery properly and really achieve a high quality, user-friendly site. This session will provide a thorough introduction to CSS covering such topics as selectors, classes, IDs and how they work with HTML tags; colors and backgrounds; fonts; grouping with span and div; “the box model” (margins, borders and padding); height and width; floats; positioning and maybe even layering. We’ll move quickly through each topic as this is only an introduction, but you should walk away with a solid understanding of what CSS can do for you, as well as a variety of resources for digging deeper on your own.

David Hoerster, a C# MVP, is a recovering corporate financial analyst and has been working with the Microsoft .NET Framework since the early 1.0 betas. He is the co-founder of BrainCredits (www.braincredits.com), a recent start-up that is hoping to change the way people learn on the web. David is the co-chair of the Pittsburgh .NET User’s Group (PGHDOTNET), organizer of several recent Pittsburgh Code Camps and is also an occasional speaker at Pittsburgh and regional user group and code camp events. David can be found rarely blogging at http://geekswithblogs.net/DavidHoerster and also is an occasional Tweeter (@DavidHoerster).

It's probably a safe assumption that we've all worked on applications which we didn't initially build and we've all been hesitant to make changes to those applications because we're unsure about what our change will affect. Michael Feathers considers legacy code any code without a test, and in this case, he's right. But how do you deal with legacy code in order to make you feel confident that it's testable and that your changes will not affect other parts of the application? It's a tough task, but this talk will show some practices and techniques to make you more confident with your experiences with working on legacy code. We'll look at injection patterns, how to take advantage of mocking, and how to apply some simple design enhancements to your code to make it more testable.

David Hoerster, a C# MVP, is a recovering corporate financial analyst and has been working with the Microsoft .NET Framework since the early 1.0 betas. He is the co-founder of BrainCredits (www.braincredits.com), a recent start-up that is hoping to change the way people learn on the web. David is the co-chair of the Pittsburgh .NET User’s Group (PGHDOTNET), organizer of several recent Pittsburgh Code Camps and is also an occasional speaker at Pittsburgh and regional user group and code camp events. David can be found rarely blogging at http://geekswithblogs.net/DavidHoerster and also is an occasional Tweeter (@DavidHoerster).

It's rare that you get a chance to build an applicaton the way you want to, from the ground up. If you did, what architectural choices would you make and why? Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) is a hot topic and has been described as crack for architecture addicts. This talk will look at why CQRS may be a good architectural choice for your project and how this framework can be incorporated with ASP.NET MVC on the front-end and Azure on the back-end. This talk will also focus on the learning curve experienced when implementing an architectural style that bends the curve and is out of the mainstream of traditional application development.

Devin Rader spends his day’s extoling the virtues of Twilio (www.twilio.com), the amazingly simple cloud telephony platform. Before that he worked at Infragistics where he focused on delivering great user experiences to developers using their controls. He's done work on all of the .NET platforms, but most recently has been focused on ASP.NET and Silverlight. As a co-founder of the St. Louis .NET User Group, a current board member of the Central New Jersey .NET User Group and a former INETA board member, he's an active supporter of the .NET developer community. He's also the co-author or technical editor of numerous books on .NET including Wrox's Professional Silverlight 4 and Wrox's Professional ASP.NET 4. Follow Devin on Twitter @devinrader

In this talk we will introduce the REST architectural style and look at what goes into designing a good REST API and what you should expect when consuming a REST API. We will also look at the new ASP.NET Web API stack that is part of ASP.NET MVC 4 and how it can be used to create REST API's.

Stephen Ritchie is the author of Pro .NET Best Practices (Apress, 2011). He has been writing software professionally for over 20 years. He is the .NET best practices steward at Excella, working together with .NET project teams to facilitate and to implement new and better development practices. He is often called upon to setup the continuous integration server, perform code analysis, and automate the testing, packaging and deployment of software.

Have you ever bumped into the database-in-unexpected-state wall when coding and running automated integration tests? The database is all too often in the wrong state when the test code runs. NDbUnit is a .NET library for managing database state for unit and integration testing. As a database testing framework, it provides the capability to arrange the data in the database before and after a test method runs, which ensures that the database’s state is consistent for the execution of each test. In this session, you learn ... How to unit test a stored procedure with NDbUnit How to automate the integration testing of the data access layer How to enable refactoring through automated integration testing How to improve automated UI testing with NDbUnit This session you will teach you how to use NDbUnit to clear away this very significant automated testing obstacle. And so, you avoid a common pitfall of automated integration testing.