Killer PDC Sessions

Jul 14, 2005 • 9 minutes to read

As Brad and Cyrus point out, we have officially listed a lot of the PDC sessions. Check out the PDC Blog for up-to-date information.

Below are some of the sessions that grabbed my attention including: Web Designer improvements, developing with Atlas (a Microsoft framework for creating Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) applications), C# 3.0, P2P application development, MSN Search APIs, creating managed snap-ins with MMC 3.0 (finally!!), IE 7, IIS 7, Avalon, Indigo, Longhorn Server, programming RSS in Longhorn, Longhorn UI automation for testing, and even integrated data querying capabilities.

If you haven’t yet registered for PDC, do it today or code/blog your way to the PDC!!

ASP.NET: A Sneak Peek at Future Directions in Web Development and Designer Tools This session provides an early preview of the Web tools that will be shipping in Visual Studio “Orcas.” It Highlights the integration of advanced CSS, XHTML, and other Web design features. In addition, this session covers tight integration between FrontPage and Visual Studio to allow designers and developers to work together effortlessly.

ASP.NET: Future Directions for Developing Rich Web Applications with Atlas (Part 1) Take an in-depth first look at Atlas, a new set of technologies that will build on innovations in ASP.NET 2.0 and make it easier to build Web applications that deliver rich, interactive, and personalized experiences in the browser using technologies such as DHTML and XMLHttp. Atlas includes a 100% JScript cross-browser client script framework that allows you to easily build browser applications with rich UI and connectivity to Web services, full integration with ASP.NET application services such as user profiles, a set of ASP.NET server controls for Atlas, and a set of client application services. Learn how you can use the Atlas preview release and ASP.NET 2.0 to start developing richer Web applications.

ASP.NET: Future Directions for Developing Rich Web Applications with Atlas (Part 2) Take an in-depth first look at Atlas, a new set of technologies that will build on innovations in ASP.NET 2.0 and make it easier to build Web applications that deliver rich, interactive, and personalized experiences in the browser using technologies such as DHTML and XMLHttp. Atlas includes a 100% JScript cross-browser client script framework that allows you to easily build browser applications with rich UI and connectivity to Web services, full integration with ASP.NET application services such as user profiles, a set of ASP.NET server controls for Atlas, and a set of client application services. Learn how you can use the Atlas preview release and ASP.NET 2.0 to start developing richer Web applications.

C#: Future Directions in Language Innovation from Anders Hejlsberg Join Anders Hejlsberg, Distinguished Engineer and chief architect of the C# language, for an in-depth walkthrough of the new language features in C# 3.0. Understand how features like extension methods, lambda expressions, type inference, and anonymous types make it possible to create powerful APIs for expressing queries and interacting with objects, XML, and databases in a strongly typed, natural way.

P2P: Developing P2P Applications In this session, we describe Microsoft’s comprehensive peer-to-peer infrastructure. With support for naming and discovery, security, session management, and multi-party connection management and messaging, this rich feature set provides everything you need to rapidly add P2P capabilities to your existing applications or develop new P2P solutions. Support for P2P development is provided in both unmanaged and managed code environments, and on both Windows XP SP2 and Longhorn. This session demonstrates sample P2P applications and shows how they are built using these new features. Gain a broad view of the different types of P2P applications and how P2P technologies enable innovative new experiences and cost savings. Understand how P2P applications are built and how they operate, and learn the features of Microsoft’s P2P infrastructure to get started on P2P development.

MSN Search: Building Web and Desktop Search into Your Applications This session shows you how to harness the power of Web and Desktop Search within your applications. We provide an overview of the MSN Search APIs for both searching the Web and your desktop. We then demonstrate how to use these APIs to create applications that harness the power of searching your local data and Web data.

MMC 3.0: Developing Managed-Code Snap-Ins Want to write better management tools using a lot less code? The new managed-code framework in MMC 3.0 take advantage of.NET extensively so that you can quickly write a console in whatever .NET language you like. Learn about all the new UI features including Windows Forms support and how you can easily get a console up and running starting with as little as fifteen lines of code.

Future Directions for Building Avalon Interfaces Introducing a new tool which utilizes Avalon to allow the creation of rich user interfaces. Come see how you can produce visually stunning UI using 2D vectors, animation, 3D, layout containers, control templating, databinding and code. Get a tour of Interactive Designer, and then walk over how features are used to build a UI.

IE 7: What’s New in IE Internet Explorer is an essential part of Microsoft platform, providing functionality that both Web developers and Windows developers rely on for their solutions. Attend this session to hear about advances in the next version of Internet Explorer 7. This includes changes around security, user experience, and developer features.

IIS 7: A Lap around IIS 7 IIS 7 makes developing, deploying and configuring Web applications easier then ever before. In this overview session, we demo all of the key changes in IIS 7 that impact developers. Come see how the new componentized Web server architecture enables you to not only add or remove modules in IIS to customize it for a particular application, but replace IIS modules with your own. Learn how the new configuration system makes distributed configuration of IIS settings possible, and allows Web developers to XCopy IIS configuration, along with content, to remote servers. Get a first glance at the brand new, rich graphical UI, which enables remote (over HTTP) management and configuration of applications. Finally, we show off the new diagnostics and instrumentation features which make it much easier to debug errant applications, and diagnose server failures.

Longhorn Server: What’s New for Developers Longhorn Server is Microsoft’s next version of Windows Server. In addition to describing all the developer oriented technologies shipping in Longhorn Server, this session also demonstrates how these technologies will work together. In this session, gain a deeper understanding of the overall application platform by going through specific scenarios that highlight the benefits of combining these technologies. Finally, this session discusses techniques and technologies you can use to ensure that your applications are well behaved citizens in the data center.

Longhorn: 10 Ways Your Application Can Take Advantage of Longhorn Learn 10 ways to enrich and enliven your Longhorn applications. Come and listen to Chris Jones, Windows Vice President, outline the key elements of Longhorn that help your application “light-up” and provide a more secure, reliable, optimized and attractive user experience for your customers. This session shows how Longhorn will revolutionize not just how your application looks and behaves, but also how you develop and support your product. We cover all the major features in Longhorn like Avalon, AERO, LUA, Search, Metro, Watson and the Developer Portal and educate you on how they impact you and what you need to do to take advantage of the power of the next generation of Windows.

Longhorn: Building RSS Enabled Applications Longhorn adds support for RSS (Really Simple Syndication). The RSS functionality in Longhorn is being designed to make it simple for end users to discover, view and subscribe to RSS feeds, as well as make it easier for developers to incorporate the rich capabilities of RSS into their applications. In addition, the RSS functionality includes Simple List Extensions, a set of extensions to RSS that can be used to enable Web sites to publish lists such as of photo albums, music playlists and top 10 lists as RSS feeds. Come see multiple examples of subscription-enabled applications built on the RSS APIs. Security safeguards are also explained.

Longhorn: Developing for Test Automation and Accessibility Using Programmatic Access to UI In this session, we show you the rich set of classes for controlling and driving Avalon applications. UI Automation (UIA) provides a single model for programmatic access allowing automated tests to interact with the UI and assistive technologies to expose UI information to end users. Provider-side interfaces allow developers to plug their object model into UIA tree exposing property information/firing events and implementing control patterns. Client-side interfaces support automated testing through querying the tree structure/discovering UI elements, determining control functionality, driving a control and calling control-independent methods.

The .NET Language Integrated Query Framework: An Overview Modern applications operate on data in several different forms: Relational tables, XML documents, and in-memory objects. Each of these domains have profound differences in semantics, data types, and capabilities, and much of the complexity in today’s applications is the result of these mismatches. The “Orcas” release of Visual Studio aims to unify the programming models through integrated query capabilities in C# and Visual Basic, a strongly typed data access framework, and an innovative API for manipulating and querying XML. This session introduces each of these areas and walks through how they are related.

Using the .NET Language Integrated Query Framework with Relational Data Database-centric applications have traditionally had to rely on two distinct programming languages: one for the database and one for the application. This session introduces advances Microsoft is making for the “Orcas” release of Visual Studio in programming languages and frameworks to help integrate relational data and queries with C# and Visual Basic. These advances enable developers to express queries and updates in terms of their local programming language without sacrificing the server-side execution model of today’s high-performance SQL-based approaches. Using these advances, database queries that previously were stored as opaque strings now benefit from static type checking, CLR metadata, design-time type inference, and of course IntelliSense.

Using the .NET Language Integrated Query Framework with XML Data One of the key challenges to working with XML data has been the impedance mismatch between XML and programming languages. This session introduces advances Microsoft is making for the “Orcas” release of Visual Studio in programming languages and frameworks to help integrate XML and queries with C# and Visual Basic. The advances include a framework for navigating, querying, and transforming XML that is both easier to use and more efficient than current XML programming techniques. This framework marries the capabilities of XPath, XQuery, and the DOM with the language integrated query framework planned for C# and Visual Basic.

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