Ahmed Salijee

July 2006 - Posts

TechED 2006 - Your comments please

Below is a draft list of developer orientated sessions (these are not all in the dev track, they sit in multiple tracks). Let me know what you think. It does not matter whether you are attending or not.  I am also interested in your feedback on what topics/areas are most relevant. Percentage current vs future etc. Take into account your own preferences and what you might also need in the market. Forgive the WinFX bit J . Not all of these sessions will make it!

ASP.NET: Integrating ASP.NET into Your Existing Architecture Using the Provider Model

ASP.NET: Under the Covers - Creating High-Availability, Scalable Web Applications

ASP.NET: Best Practices in Creating Scalable, Data-Driven Web Sites

IIS 7: End-to-End Overview of Microsoft's New Web Application Server (Repeat Session)

Baking Security into the Development Life Cycle

Windows SharePoint Services (version 3) Development 2: ASP.NET, Web Parts, Master Pages, Field Types, and More

Microsoft Office Open XML Formats

Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Microsoft Office (VSTO) version 3.0: What's Coming

Windows SharePoint Services (version 3) Development 1: Working with Content Types, Field Types, and Other Facilities for SharePoint Lists and Libraries

Windows SharePoint Services (version 3): Overview and What's New

Visual Studio: Developing Local and Mobile Data Solutions with SQL Server Everywhere

Patterns and Practices for Windows Mobile Application Development

Build Beautiful Applications with Windows Presentation Foundation

Windows Forms: Solutions to the Most Common Windows Forms Development Challenges

Visual Studio: Rapid Development of Data End-to-End Solutions and How They Work in an N-Tier Model

Windows Vista: Tips & Tricks for Targeting Key Native APIs from Managed Code

Smart Client: Offline Data Synchronization and Caching for Smart Clients

(WinFX) Windows Presentation Foundation: Building Data-Driven Applications with Windows Presentation Foundation

(WinFX) Windows Presentation Foundation: Creating Windows and Web Applications with WPF

Windows Forms: Building Enterprise-Ready Forms Applications

(WinFX) Windows Presentation Foundation: Building Rich Content Experiences with Windows Presentation Foundation

Windows Vista As a Document Platform: Programming XPS and 2007 Microsoft Office System Documents with WPF

Delving into Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers

Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server: Step-by-Step Migration and Adoption Planning

Windows Forms: Leveraging the Microsoft Enterprise Library in Windows Forms Applications

Visual Basic 2005: Application Development Tips and Tricks

Introducing Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals

Visual Studio: The .NET Language Integrated Query Framework Overview

(WinFX) Windows Presentation Foundation: Introduction

SQL Querying Tips and Techniques

(WinFX) Windows Workflow Foundation: Building Rules-Based and State Machine Workflows

(WinFX) Windows Communication Foundation: Building Reliable and Transacted Distributed Services

Integration Technologies: What to Use When

Modifying Applications to Run on Windows Vista

Application Compatibility in Windows Vista and the Application Compatibility Toolkit

Architecting Applications for a Service-Oriented World

ADO.NET Design Patterns

A Lap Around Atlas

ASP.NET Tips and Tricks

TFS Session 2 - What topic? Tips and Tricks Session?

Smart Client Software Factory

Web Services/Integration Software Factory

Web Service Factory Available

Visit the Service Factory page. A summary from that page

The Web Service Software Factory (also known as the Service Factory) is an integrated collection of tools, patterns, source code and prescriptive guidance. It is designed to help you quickly and consistently construct Web services that adhere to well known architecture and design patterns.

If you are an architect or developer responsible for building service-based applications, the patterns & practices team would like to invite you to learn how the Service Factory can help your future service development activities. The Service Factory provides guidance that addresses many of the challenges associated with building Web services and the components of a distributed application. These challenges include:

Designing messages and service interfaces.

Applying exception shielding and handling.

Designing business entities in the domain model.

Translating messages to and from business entities.

Designing, building, and invoking the data access layer.

Planning for the migration to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

Sandcastle CTP available

What is Sandcastle you might say ? The simplest description is that is the more or less equivalent of NDoc (which sadly the developer has discontinued work on). So if you are looking to create help files from XML Comments then this is what you want.

Visit http://blogs.msdn.com/sandcastle/ for more information

User Experience does matter

I am right now reviewing a set of data which sits on an internet site. The UI for this makes me want to give up real soon. What should have taken me 30 minutes looks like it will take 2 hours ? so the UI and the user experience have a direct impact on productivity and hence on costs. In one particular case there are 2 dropdowns. After the first dropdown I get a postback to populate the second dropdown. That is fair enough. After the selection in the second dropdown another postback happens for absolutely no reason. Yuk

Develop Without Borders Challenge

This looks almost perfect for South Africa.

The concept is simple:  Developers choose a charitable organization that they would like to help, understand the business challenges that it faces, and propose a solution based on the 2007 Office system that addresses one or more of those challenges.  The solutions that make the most impact on the organization and that best utilize the Office system technologies can win up to $50,000 to help pilot or implement the solution.

Visit http://www.developwithoutborders.com/ for more information.

Windows Presentation Foundation Resources to get you started

As promised at Devdays

Labs

WPF Labs (Feb CTP) - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=05755a9d-98fa-4f16-bfdc-023e3fd34763&DisplayLang=en

Labs for Beta 2 -  http://wpf.netfx3.com/files/folders/labs/default.aspx

Web Sites

Community Site  http://wpf.netfx3.com/

MSDN Site http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/reference/presentation/default.aspx

Getting Started

Guided Tour of WPF - http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnlong/html/wpf101.asp (nice article to read for a good overview)

Read this blog posting from Karsten ? very good

Useful blogs and sites

http://blogs.msdn.com/karstenj/

http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/

http://www.thewpfblog.com/

http://www.simplegeek.com/

http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson

Expression

Main Site - http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/default.mspx

Books

Programming Windows Presentation Foundation

Applications = Code + Markup by Charles Petzold. He has a book blog too

Devdays slides are posted
Windows Workflow Foundation Resources

At Devdays I promised a blog entry with links to the resources mentioned in my presentation.

http://www.windowsworkflow.net/ was the premier the website for all things windows workflow but we have now created a single community site for all the .NET Framework 3.0 technologies. So the website to visit is http://wf.netfx3.com/

The other key site is the MSDN workflow site

A few things you will find useful

1) Labs ? You can download a set of Beta2 labs from here

2) I used the MSMQ sample activity in my demo. You can download this from http://wf.netfx3.com/files/folders/communications/entry1952.aspx. If you browse through the site many other activities are available 

3) If you starting off and maybe don?t want to download any bits then check out the nuggets on the MSDN UK Site. I would highly highly recommend these videos. You will get to know stacks about workflow in an hour or so.

4) If high level vision etc is what you are looking for then check out the whitepapers mentioned at http://wf.netfx3.com/content/resources.aspx. The David Chappel article is a nice one to get going.

Enjoy!