VBUG4Thought Agenda

In this session we will build an application that takes advantage of many of the features available in Windows Azure and SQL Azure and look at the implications of how we store data when we build applications deployed in the Cloud. We will cover "code near" vs "code far", relational vs none relational, blobs, queues and more.

Reactive Extensions is a library from Microsoft exposing a different way of thinking about streams of data. We're all familiar with IEnumerable<T> (hopefully) - a "pull" data model where the code which is interested in the data explicitly pulls it from a data source. This session will introduce you to IObservable<T>, where data is pushed to observers from the source. This will be a session of tinkering more than theory. Jon will introduce "marble diagrams" but won't go into the mathematical duality between the models. He promises not to mention monads at all, except when reiterating this promise.

ASP.NET MVC is an excellent framework for creating web applications that are testable and have a clear separation of concerns. However, there is a lot of groundwork and infrastructure to put in place to be productive between projects. In this session we’ll see how to get the best out of the framework by creating infrastructure code and putting certain architectural practices in place that can help out greatly in real-world applications. We'll see how to leverage the extensibility of MVC and the functional programming style of jQuery to boost productivity.

Join Josh as he explores the idea of building an Application Store for the enterprise. Find out about the new Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) which ships with .NET 4.0 and how it figures in his continuing quest for ‘tighter integration with looser coupling’. The session will leverage MEF to create an extensible WPF application and maybe even extend some Services. There’ll probably be a bit of gratuitous XAML thrown in there too for good measure.

2007... Silverlight 1.0 is released. 2010… Silverlight 4 is almost upon us. Did you lose track of all the new features that are in the platform right now? And how does Silverlight 4 compare to WPF 4? In this session we will take you on a tour through the most exciting features that Silverlight 4 has to offer, varying from Trusted application to full data binding support, from rich text-editing to webcam support etc. While we’re at it, we’ll look at how WPF 4 can help you achieve the same effects. After this session, you’ll have a better understanding on the position of Silverlight 4 and WPF 4 and their newest features.

With Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 being released just before the VBUG event, it's time to take stock of what this means for the developer: Where can I get it? What does it contain? Should I upgrade? In this session we'll look at the major new features, focusing on the areas that will have the most impact on development, from changes in the Visual Basic and C#, to new functionality in Visual Studio itself.