Indy Code Camp on April 26, 2008: Sessions

.NET (Room 1)
William Steele	Office 2007 Development with VS2008
Jeff Moser	Better Know a Framework The popular podcast, ".NET Rocks," begins with a segment entitled "Better Know a Framework" where the host, Carl Franklin, briefly identifies classes and namespaces in the .net framework. This session will cover some of the more interesting ones mentioned in the show as well as several others. The session will adapt to the audience, but could include going over classes like: System.Text.StringBuilder, System.IO.Path, System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex, System.IO.Stream, System.Threading.Threadpool, System.WeakReference, System.Linq.IQueryProvider, System.CodeDom, etc. The point is not to cover any of these in depth, but just to raise the awareness that they exist and how they're useful in building applications.
Michael Eaton	An Introduction to Castle ActiveRecord, or Stop Writing CRUD Nobody likes writing CRUD. After writing an obscene number of methods and stored procedures you are left with a mountain of repetitive, error-prone, data access code. Wouldn't it be great if you could spend that time writing actual business logic instead of being a plumber and writing the same old data access code? In this talk Michael Eaton will introduce you to an open-source framework called Castle ActiveRecord that will help you write less data access code and be more productive
Josh Heyse	Core: An Aspect Oriented Business Objects Framework Learn about aspect-oriented design patterns and how they can be used to quickly add common functionality to your business objects. Aspect-oriented programming allows for the separation of true business logic and the code written allowing interaction with user interfaces. The Core framework is a generation model that dynamically adds common services, such as logging, auditing, persistence, and security to business objects. Aspects, or behaviors, are requested using attributes or configuration files which allows services to be included only where necessary eliminating overly bloated objects and tailored for the environment into which the object is loaded.
Dan Rigsby	Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation Windows Communication Foundation is Microsoft's "next-generation" programming platform and runtime system for building, configuring and deploying network-distributed services. It was initially released with .Net 3.0, but there are many people who have yet to dive into this technology. This is an introduction session that will guide you through the basics of Wcf, why you should move to Wcf, and how you can move your existing applications to Wcf.
Dan Rigsby	Intermediary Windows Communication Foundation Whether you attended the “Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation” session or not, anyone with a basic understanding of Wcf will get a lot out of this session. We will be covering the .Net 3.5 Wcf Web Programming Model, Duplexing, and potentially other more intermediary Wcf topics.
.NET (Room 2)
Michael Neel	What's new in ASP.NET? .Net 3.5 is here, and we have a shiny new Visual Studio 2008 bicycle - so what gifts did Santa bring leave for ASP.NET developers? We'll find out by taking a look at things like the ListView control, play with JavaScript debugging, and see what the ASP.Net Merge Tool does. We also might sneak a peek in the old man's magic sack and see what gifts are on their way!
Michael Neel	Zen and the Art of Website Maintenance ASP.NET provides a wealth of time-saving data components, functional UI widgets, and methods for consistent template layouts. While understanding each of the pieces is key to being a great ASP.NET developer, true mastery comes from knowing how to use them together. This session will cover using Master Pages, Themes, Skins, CSS, Web User Controls, Site Maps, Navigation Controls, Role and Profile Providers, and Dynamic URLs together for effective website architecture.
Dan Rigsby	Agile Project Management with Scrum An introduction to Agile Project Management with Scrum. We will go over the Agile Manifesto and dive into the core principles that make up Scrum and how it can be used to help your development processes.
William Steele	Productivity Enhancements with VS2008
Michael Eaton	Ouch, that hurt! Lessons Learned from an Agile Project Ever been on a project where everything that could go wrong did? Successful projects are great, but some of the best and most valuable lessons are learned from our failures. In this talk, Michael Eaton will lay it all on the line and discuss the mistakes he made and the lessons he learned on an agile project where Murphy's Law was in full effect.
David Leininger	From Triage To Good Health: Error Management by Criticality and User Role Explore a back-end management module/tool/classes/queries that application admins use to manage the volume and criticality of application errors sanely. The session exercises VB2008, SQL2005, and a bit of an open source (DNN) framework.
Desktop (Room 3)
John Magnabosco	A Study of Dynamic SQL Dynamic SQL, In-Line SQL and Stored Procedures: We all have used one or more of these techniques in our UI code to communicate with the database. If you spend any time scanning the web, you will see that this topic is a surprisingly controversial one. In this session we will explore these options without prejudice and explore how they affect the integrity and performance of the UI and database.
Joe Wirtley	WPF for Developers You've seen the sizzle, but what about the steak? In this presentation I will describe Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for developers. No reflected images. No animated page flipping transitions. No Expression Blend. No Silverlight. Just Visual Studio 2008 and code to actually do stuff. I'll cover the WPF fundamentals, including XAML, dependency properties, data binding, commands, validation, and styles. Then I'll talk about how to use these features to create desktop applications and describe some of the challenges I encountered creating my first WPF applications.
Michael Brown	LINQing Presentation, Communication, and Workflow the Foundations of Windows Apps The goal of this session is to take a look at the "Big 4" frameworks of Visual Studio 2008 and show how they can be used together to form the (excuse the expression) foundation for powerful, interconnected, usable applications. We will look at the individual pieces of the .NET Framework 3.5 in sequence and show how they support each other as a cohesive unit.In the end we will have a working application that leverages the power of the .NET Framework 3.5 to provide a real world solution.
Michael Brown	Climbing the Curve: Making WPF More Approachable The first rule of learning WPF is letting go of your assumptions regarding UI development on Windows. In this session, I will try to provide the lessons I learned as I cut my teeth with WPF so that my fellow developers will not have to go through the same growing pains.With the first rule of learning WPF in mind, we will approach WPF as a totally new programming framework, starting with Hello World and building a practical (to someone) application, we will look at the major elements of WPF development: Controls; Layout; DataBinding; Commands; and Templates and Styling.Going beyond the basics, I will also attempt to disseminate some "best practices" as agreed upon by experienced WPF developers.
Michael Wood	Be a Rules Follower Windows Workflow (WF) was introduced as one of the four pillars of .Net 3.0 and it provides a rich set of tools to embed workflow within your applications. Sometimes you have to provide more than just a simple workflow though. Sometimes you have an intricate set of business rules involved that may change quickly over time due to changing laws, industry trends, sales reports or the whim of pointy haired bosses. WF provides the Policy activity to wrap rules that can be dynamically generated or declaratively included with your workflows. This presentation will focus on the rules engine provided by WF and how it can be leveraged both within and outside your workflows.
Eric Willeke	Branch Management with TFS
Web (Room 4)
Jeff McWherter	ASP.Net Performance and Optimization So, you've created a slick ASP.NET web application, but the performance isn't what you were expecting. In this session I will demonstrate tools to help find the bottlenecks and offer advice on resolving them.
Dan Hounshell	SEO for ASP.NET Developers Search Engine Optimization is the art of making web sites irresistible to search engines and the people using search results. Good SEO = more traffic = more $$$. I will debunk SEO myths such as: It is a “dirty” business. It is not the developer’s job. It is too difficult. It is something that can be done later. I will explain why you should care about SEO, demonstrate some simple ways to build SEO into your sites from the beginning, and describe some changes that you can make right now to improve your site’s search engine rankings.
Chad Campbell	Silverlight - Your LINQ To A Better Experience This session will focus on the data and communication features in Silverlight 2. These features will be tied together in a lively user experience. Come with your questions and leave with the answers.
Alan Stevens	Introduction to Test Driven Development With the ASP.NET MVC Framework In this session, we will introduce the ASP.NET MVC Framework (MVC Framework) architecture and development style. One of the core requirements for the design of the MVC Framework is to enable effective Test Driven Development. We'll introduce the core principles and practices of Test Driven Development (TDD). Because this is an introductory talk, we will limit our demonstration of TDD to exclude mock objects and dependency injection frameworks. This talk will focus on understanding the concepts behind the MVC Framework architecture and the practice of TDD.
Alan Stevens	Deep Dive into Test Driven Development With the ASP.NET MVC Framework In this session, we will explore extensibility points in the ASP.NET MVC Framework (MVC Framework). We will use this extensibility to isolate our components for more effective unit testing. We will introduce the concepts and practices behind the use of a dependency injection container, to loosely couple our classes from their collaborators. We will explore the various methods or controlling collaboration dependencies in unit tests by creating mock objects using a mocking framework.
Josh Heyse	Line of Business Applications in Silverlight 2.0 Learn about Silverlight 2.0 and how it can be used to rapidly create feature rich line of business applications. Most Silverlight demos focus on the visual features and pass over binding and data manipulation. While, most developers do not create applications with animations and richly designed user interfaces, Silverlight is still a viable option for line of business application development. Learn how and why Silverlight 2.0 will change the way you write code while walking through the development of a simple CRM solution.