Today it's very common to simply throw some data over the wire and call it REST. But REST as Roy Fielding described it is much, much more. Come to this session and we’ll explore the tenants of a RESTful system. We’ll start with looking at traditional web services, then we’ll remove the SOAP shackles and explore what we can achieve as we get closer and closer to HTTP. We’ll also look at various frameworks both within and outside Microsoft for achieving REST Nirvana.

The Instant Feature Builder is a personal project I built to see if I could make a drag/drop experience for Visual Studio that built simple (non-modeling/non-menu-exposing) Feature Extensions that would run on VS Pro (and above) and target VS Pro (and above).

If you've ever wanted to package a project/solution/item template with documentation and links to related websites, you've found the right tool: The Instant Feature Builder

Add document files, text files containing URLs, project/item templates and build... out the other end comes a VSIX that delivers your templates and documents within Visual Studio.

Many teams working with Microsoft technologies are moving to Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio ALM. Most are not using the platform to its full potential. This session shows how some teams are using Visual Studio ALM tools to enable genuine agility and deliver well-crafted software. In this session you'll see ways to reduce friction and increase flow by focusing on the Visual Studio ALM features most teams find most helpful and appropriate ways to use them.

The Visual Studio Ultimate team recently released the Feature Builder Power Tool for Visual Studio 2010. Feature Builder provides an easy-to-use authoring environment for building Visual Studio Extensions (VSIXs) which combine tools, code and process guidance enabling the delivery of an in-product experience for Hands-on-Labs, software product line automation and more. This session will include an overview of the continuum of in-product experiences, demonstration of simple and highly automated Feature Extensions and a demonstration of how to use the Feature Builder.

Visual Studio 2010 Keynote by Jason Zander

Forms-over-data are the bread-and-butter of business applications. Someone has to write those forms and that someone is probably you. You know you suck at it … but could you suck less? Or put in economic terms, could you produce better results that are easier to maintain in less time? You could if you understood a little about the visual design tools and built your views around design time data that came right out of your ViewModel. We’ll look at how you can use MVVM and pluggable Repositories in pragmatic ways to “get it done” and “do it right”. Your views will still suck (I’m not a miracle worker) but they’ll be better.

Prism v4 includes new guidance and content on Model-View-ViewModel and application navigation. This in-depth, "how to" session will cover leveraging and extending the Prism v4 Navigation API's to create a cloud/Intranet connected, WPF Line of Business application that provides a rich, responsive and user friendly navigation experience.
This session will cover navigation-related topics such as asynchronous data operations, displaying dialogs and how to handle exceptions. Additionally, we will see how to use the decorator pattern to simplify ViewModel code.
While the Asset Management sample application is a WPF application, all of the navigation guidance and principles also apply to Silverlight.

Download the presentation materials from Karl's blog here.

Hate the thought of writing JavaScript? Get frustrated by cross-browser DOM quirks? Ever wondered how those spiffy sites do that animation without Flash or Silverlight? Think that JavaScript isn't a real programming language? Well come and see how jQuery makes writing JavaScript fun again. Microsoft is now shipping and supporting jQuery, an open-source JavaScript library, with ASP.NET and Visual Studio. Furthermore, the ASP.NET team is actively contributing to jQuery, in order to add new features such as globalization, templating and data-linking. jQuery is fast, lean, simple and hugely expandable, enabling you to build compelling web applications quickly and easily.

The cloud offers unique opportunities that were once available only for big companies: geo-distributed datacenters, virtually infinite amount of resources and elastic resource provisioning. How to take advantage of these features? What are the design patterns that are required to leverage these capabilities in the most efficient way? Using a practical approach, with concrete examples, we'll explore Windows Azure and common design patterns to make the most of this new platform.

The Model-View-ViewModel (M-V-VM) UI design pattern is a very natural fit for the Microsoft XAML platforms (WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7) and is one of the most written and talked about topics in this space. This session will explain what M-V-VM is, why it is a natural fit for XAML platforms and its benefits to developers, designers and testers.

This session provides the foundation for the two following sessions that cover building M-V-VM applications.

Download the presentation materials from Karl's blog here.

In this session, Brad will demonstrate how ASP.NET MVC was designed to enable quick and effective developer testing. The session will offer a brief introduction to Test Driven Development, followed by several immediately usable tips and tricks for developer testing with ASP.NET MVC, including route testing, isolating and mocking framework dependencies, and making your controllers more testable via dependency injection. Finally, he will cover new features coming in the next version of ASP.NET MVC.

Charlie's Bio:

Charlie Kindel joined Microsoft in 1990 and has helped ship numerous technologies and products to developer, IT professional, and consumer customers. In the 1990s and early 2000s he co-founded Microsoft Premier Support, drove Microsoft's platform strategy, designed & shipped Microsoft’s distributed object technology, ran engineering teams responsible for home networking, Windows Media Center, and Windows Media Center Extenders. From 2002 to 2004 Charlie was the Executive Technical Assistant to Sr. Vice President Bob Muglia driving technical and business alignment for Microsoft’s enterprise server products.  Charlie was the driving force behind Windows Home Server.  Most recently Charlie has been responsible for defining and evangelizing the Windows Phone Developer Experience.

The Open Data Protocol (OData) represents a shift in focus from programmatic data access technologies to an approach based on web protocols. This shift has significant implications and opportunities for software developers, architects, and anyone interested in data. This talk uses code to look at both how and why OData works, how it can impact application and service architectures, and outlines where we're going with both the protocol and the surrounding ecosystem of services, content, and tools.

CQRS. A confusing jumble of letters? Well, yes, but it's also an architectural pattern which is rapidly gaining popularity today. It promises much better scalability and easier development that existing approaches. In this talk we'll look at what CQRS is, how it lives up to the promises, and what kinds of systems would benefit from this approach.

The cloud offers unique opportunities that were once available only for big companies: geo-distributed datacenters, virtually infinite amount of resources and elastic resource provisioning. How to take advantage of these features? What are the design patterns that are required to leverage these capabilities in the most efficient way? Using a practical approach, with concrete examples, we'll explore Windows Azure and common design patterns to make the most of this new platform.

Cloud computing has the well-publicized advantages of reduced costs and increased agility. To reap these benefits, resources are typically allocated from a global large-scale computing infrastructure, highly shared among many applications and customers. This talk starts with an overview of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, as a concrete example of a large scale highly shared cloud. The talk then presents some of the challenges of cloud computing, including security, evolving applications for cloud computing, and the federation of multiple clouds. The talk explores the tension between, on one hand, the desire for reduced cost and increased agility, and on the other hand, securing applications and their data.  The talk also discusses the need to evolve the application model to truly attain the advantages of cloud computing.

Multi-core and HPC technologies are rapidly moving into the computing mainstream, allowing us to develop applications with improved performance, increased responsiveness, and reduced latency. The many established design patterns in this space can help developers and architects reuse proven approaches to solving many types of problems using parallelism. This talk covers many of the key patterns and gives examples of how they can be implemented using the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 libraries. This talk is aimed at experienced software developers who are relatively new to the parallel computing space but expect it to become more important to their work.

The most fluid and transient part of any application is the user interface. This is because users continually change and refine their requirements at this level, and because UI technology itself is constantly in flux to accommodate new hardware capabilities and form factors. It is very likely that UI technologies will change out from under your application at least 1-2 times before the actual application functionality must change to meet new business requirements. So how do you preserve your business logic, validation, authorization, data access and other valuable software assets when the UI is so volatile?

One of the first questions that should arise in any user interface design is, “How frequently and how deeply will users use this particular application?” The answer has a huge impact on the client platform and feature set selected for the application. Systematic analysis of the possibilities has never before been attempted. But now, inspired by Martin Fowler’s keynote speech at this symposium last year (I can’t remember what he said, but it had something to do with quadrants and he was darn convincing), David Platt will present his brilliant Quadrant of Ubiquity™ (patent pending) tool for analyzing users needs of depth versus frequency in application usage. Live and without a net, he will daringly apply the QoU to existing and proposed applications, highlight good and bad usages of its results, and let the chips fall where they may.

Inversion of Control Containers were first introduced in 1998. Since then they have evolved a lot, but the underlying problems they try to solve remain unchanged. We will take a look at the principles behind IoC and how applying these principles can help you in practice. Then we can look at how MEF and Unity can be used to help you on a daily basis.

This is an audio+slides recording of Robert Martin's Keynote.

What does it mean to be a professional software developer? What rules do we follow? What attitudes do we hold? And how can we maintain our professionalism in the face of schedule pressure? In this talk Robert C. Martin outlines the practices used by software craftsmen to maintain their professional ethics. He resolves the dilemma of speed vs. quality, and mess vs schedule. He provides a set of principles and simple Dos and Don’ts for teams who want to be counted as professional craftsmen.

Also, the P&P Symposium starts one week from today...  Register now!