U2U, Gold Sponsor of Tech Days 2009

U2U at the Microsoft Tech Days 2009 in Belgium

Tech-days 2009 is Microsoft Belgian technology conference where developers, IT pro’s, designers and architects can broaden and deepen their knowledge and skills on Microsoft existing and future technologies.

This year’s event will have a full day pre-conference (March 10th) and two main conference days (March 11th and 12th).

The developers pre-conference day will be delivered by Jan Tielens and Lieven Iliano, both working as trainer at U2U.

For the two main conference days both Peter Himschoot and Jurgen Postelmans will present a session.

The U2U sessions @ TechDays 2009 in Belgium

U2U presents the following sessions:

Keynote: Ready? Now!

You've been hearing about, looking into or even using WPF, Silverlight, Linq... Great! These technologies are ready now to help you build those applications your customers are asking for.
With our 3 regional directors we've been having a little fun with these technologies and we will show you in this demo-loaded keynote how you can quickly build applications today and at the same time be ready for some future developments like windows 7, Microsoft Surface and Windows Azure.

Pre-Conference: Deep-dive into development for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

SharePoint 2007 is built on ASP.NET 2.0. When it was released the current development tool was Visual Studio 2005. Since then many technologies and tools have been released that integrate with MOSS 2007, we can think about Visual Studio 2008, .NET 3.5, IIS7, etc. This pre-conference will give you the ground-layer and go further than the basic introduction training on MOSS, taking into account the use of latest technologies into SharePoint development.

Pre-requisites: Basic knowledge of MOSS2007 development

1. SharePoint 2007 Architecture and Development Overview Level: 200 (Jan Tielens & Lieven Iliano)

In order to develop on the SharePoint platform, a good understanding of its developer architecture is essential. This session will start with general overview of SharePoint’s main components that are of interest for the developer: Farms, Web Appplications, Site Collections, Lists and Fields, Features and Solutions, etc. Having seen the architecture we will then review the WSS Visual Studio 2008 Extensions as well as a set of community tools that will help you with your development process for SharePoint.

2. Using LINQ with SharePoint Level: 300 (Jan Tielens & Lieven Iliano)

LINQ was first released with .NET Framework 3.5, which was after the release of SharePoint 2007. But that does not mean you cannot take advantage of this new technology in your SharePoint development. We will start with an overview of existing LINQ providers today and how the CAML queries work. Then we will show you how you can take advantage of LINQ to query SharePoint data with the LINQ to SharePoint provider, querying both list and document data from an external application as well as using LINQ for custom development inside SharePoint.

3. Consuming and exposing SharePoint services using WCF Level: 400 (Jan Tielens & Lieven Iliano)

Did you know you can also take advantage of Windows Communication Foundation in conjunction with SharePoint? We start off by reviewing the SharePoint APIs (the SharePoint Object Model and the SharePoint Web Services) before introducing WCF. You will learn how to host you WCF services and also how to use SharePoint as a WCF host. At the end of this session you will know when to use the out of the box SharePoint APIs and when to use WCF to accomplish the right task.

4. Using Workflow Foundation 3.5 with SharePoint 2007 Level: 400 (Jan Tielens & Lieven Iliano)

This session starts off with a crash course into Workflow Foundation 3.5 and SharePoint workflow and how to use Visual Studio 2008 for this. We then move on to authoring custom workflows using ASP.NET forms and InfoPath, as well as building Custom Activities. At the end of this session you will have a depth look into SharePoint workflow and how to develop custom workflows and activities and taking full advantage of WF 3.5.

5. Integrating Silverlight 2 into SharePoint Level: 300 (Jan Tielens & Lieven Iliano)

Silverlight is Microsoft’s new Rich Internet Application technology, which can be used in conjunction with SharePoint to give your end users a much nicer and more dynamic user experience. This session teaches you how to integrate Silverlight 2 within SharePoint. We start off by addressing the setup and configuration needed in SharePoint in order to make Silverlight integration possible. Then we will see how you can access SharePoint data directly within a Silverlight application and how you can build Custom Field Types with a Silverlight UI. Extending you WebParts to use Silverlight as an interface is also addressed. By the end of this session you will know how to take advantage of Silverlight inside SharePoint.

Two main conference days, developers track:

Live Mesh and Live Framework: Make your application’s data available anywhere and anytime.(Peter Himschoot)

How to make your data available everywhere, online or offline? Microsoft Live Mesh with the Live Framework solves this problem by providing a framework that syncs your data across all your applications, devices, your friends and on the web. In this session you will learn about the benefits of this approach and see how to program against the Live Services from any device, platform, runtime, or programming language.

ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 (Jurgen Postelmans)

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. We will especially talk about the following new features: * Client-side template rendering * Declarative instantiation of behaviors and controls * DataView control * Markup extensions * Bindings