The next edition of the Microsoft Beta days is organized in the Netherlands at the Class-A training center on 1+2 Dec 2009, and in Belgium on 3+4 Dec 2009 at the U2U training center.

Speakers: This seminar runs in a joint effort of both U2U and Class-A trainers: Peter Himschoot (U2U), Anko Duizer (Class-A), Lieven Iliano (U2U), Astrid Hackenberg (Class-A), Jurgen Postelmans (U2U)

Learning Goals

You certainly know the beta feeling: you just succeeded in implementing the latest Microsoft technology in your business applications, and the next Microsoft technology wave is already waiting for you. To relieve you of the beta feeling, we organize a few times a year the Microsoft Beta days.

Microsoft software is evolving in a very high pace and the next technology wave is almost ready to be released. The Microsoft Beta-days at U2U will try to prepare you for the technology wave ahead and will make sure you will make the right choices.

Target Audience

This two-day seminar is meant for experienced .NET developers, who want to learn about the future set of development technologies and tools released by Microsoft.

Outline

Day one - 3 December 2009

9:15-10:45 -  Preparing your business for future Microsoft products

In this first session we will give you from a developer’s perspective a state of the art of the Microsoft technologies available to developers and position the upcoming technologies. We will introduce you to the Microsoft cloud computing strategy and give you an overview of the technologies announced in the Windows Azure Platform: Azure is the internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services. We will discuss what the new developer opportunities are introduced in Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010. We finish this session with a roadmap of all the Microsoft developer products.

Technologies discussed: Windows Azure, Microsoft .NET Services, Microsoft SQL Azure, Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint 2010.

11:00 - 12:30 - Running your future applications on Windows Azure

Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system. Designing and developing applications for Windows Azure is different. This session shows you what functionalities are available today, how and why you should move you application to the cloud. You will get familiar with the design and deploy issues related to cloud computing applications. We will demonstrate how to design, implement, deploy and manage a ASP.NET web application and WCF service on Azure. You will learn how to work with the Fabric and how to work with the staging and production environment.

Technologies discussed:

Windows Azure, ASP.NET, WCF, Windows Azure Storage.

13:30 - 15:00 - New features in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0

Recently Microsoft announced Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. The 2010 release delivers advances through its support for the new .NET 4.0 framework, enhanced developers experience, enabling emerging trends as cloud computing and better support for application life-cycle management. In this session you will learn what’s new in Visual Studio 2010 and how it can increase the productivity of your team. The upcoming .NET 4.0 framework brings improvement concerning the programming language, the CLR, WCF, WF,... We will mainly focus on the improvements and new features in WCF and WF. You will learn about the improved REST support and the new WS-Discovery support in WCF and the new designer of WF.

Technologies discussed: Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4.0, WCF 4.0, WF 4.0

15:15 - 16:45 - Windows Identity Foundation and Access Control Service: Making your application secure in a federated environment

Traditional access control and identity management are proving to be incapable of handling the cross-domain and federated scenarios of today. We will look at new patterns and architectures of securing applications outside the domain. We will make use of the Geneva framework and the Access Control Service to support single sign-on, federation and strong authentication scenarios for on-premises and cloud applications.

Technologies discussed: ASP.NET, WCF, Access Control Service, Windows Identity Foundation, Geneva Server, Geneva CardSpace

Day two - 4 December 2009

9:15 - 10:45 - Enhancing your existing applications with Azure cloud services

The Microsoft Azure Services Platform groups a number of new cloud services (Microsoft .NET Services, Live Services, SQL Azure, ...) and applications running inside and outside the cloud can take advantage of these services. In this session we will discuss how you can enhance your on-premises business applications with Cloud capabilities including Workflow Services, SQL Azure and the .NET Service Bus. You will discover which services are useful to enhance existing applications and how to implement those cloud services.

Technologies discussed: .NET Service Bus, Workflow Services, SQL Azure

11:00 - 12:30 - What’s new in Microsoft web development technologies

In this session we will look at the new features in ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 and how they can help you build Web 2.0 websites in ASP.NET. You will learn how Visual Studio 2010 can improve your Silverlight Development and we will give you a sneak preview on the upcoming Silverlight 4 release. To finish we will discuss the new features in ASP.NET MVC 2 and guide you in selecting the appropriate technology for your web applications.

Technologies discussed: ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, Silverlight 4, Visual Studio 2010, ASP.NET MVC 2.

13:30 - 15:00 - SharePoint 2010 overview and what’s new

SharePoint 2010 will be released with a refreshed UI. One of the most striking improvements is the introduction of ribbons in SharePoint 2010, all the actions you need are just one or 2 clicks away. Further on we will demonstrate the new SharePoint Workspaces technology. SharePoint Workspaces takes your SharePoint data offline and syncs it back when you’re re-connected. Another new technology is the Business Connectivity Services, the successor of the Business Data Catalog. We will show you how to connect SharePoint to your external line-of-business systems. This new version provides read/write access in a codeless way. To finish we will introduce you the new SharePoint Designer 2010 and InfoPath 2010 and show you what kind of new functionalities are available to customize your SharePoint environments.

Technologies discussed: SharePoint 2010, InfoPath 2010, SharePoint Designer 2010, Business Connectivity Services, SharePoint Workspaces

15:15 - 16:45 - Developing for SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 provides a robust development platform to rapidly build, create, package and deploy solutions using Visual Studio 2010. You will learn how to use Visual Studio 2010 to build SharePoint Solution packages. You will query SharePoint lists and document libraries by using the new LINQ for SharePoint. This new LINQ provider hides the complex CAML queries from the developer. We will end this session by showing you the capabilities of the Client Object Model. It extends the power of the SharePoint object model to remote client machines. We will call this Client OM from JavaScript, .NET code and Silverlight code.

Technologies discussed: SharePoint 2010, Visual Studio 2010, LINQ for SharePoint, Silverlight 3