Robert MacLean
7 April 2011
It’s that time of year again, it is DevDays time again which is the premier conference from Microsoft for developers! This year it is a very different beast from previous years:
- Cost: For the second year, you’ll need to pay. This year it is R350 and that is excellent value for the event.
- Cape Town first: It kicks off in Cape Town this year on May 24th and then moves to Johannesburg after that on may 26th!
- Johannesburg new venue: We are at Gallagher Estate this year! Very excited about the venue!
- No Durban
- Hash tag from day one! See complaining to Cliff on Twitter does work so now we can all hash with #DevDaysSA!
- No SharePoint – I can’t remember a DevDays without SharePoint, but we have so many other awesome SharePoint options now (Information Worker, SharePoint Saturdays etc…) it is good to have some balance.
There is three tracks so you may want to brush up on how to pick good sessions (short answer, mine 
) plus their is special slots for student & community sessions which really excites me to see new presenters getting big stage time!
I am also very glad that BBD Software (previously known as BB&D) is a major sponsor this year!
You can signup, get more details and engage on the official site at: http://www.microsoft.com/southafrica/devdays/
Agenda:
- End-to-end software testing with Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio
- Level: 200
Speakers: Ahmed Salijee & Colin Dembovsky
Visual Studio 2010 offers a wide range of software testing capabilities: manual testing, automated UI testing, database testing, low-level unit testing and even performance testing tools capable of simulating thousands of active users. It also provides support for test case management, defect tracking as well as configuring and running your tests in virtual and physical environments. But how do you know which tools to choose for your project? This session will, via a demo scenario, walk you through the various testing capabilities to assist you with the most effective use of Visual Studio 2010's testing capabilities. This session will be useful to developers as well as various tester roles including functional, performance and automation.
- Level: 200
- An end-to-end experience of Windows Phone 7 development
- Level: 200
Speaker: Rudi Grobler
An end-to-end walk through for developing Windows Phone 7 applications using Silverlight
- Level: 200
- Blend: Wiring it all together
- Level: 400
Speaker: Shane Morris
- Level: 400
- A lap around Internet Explorer 9 for web developers
- Level: 200
Speaker: Simon Wilkinson
Internet Explorer 9 adds new support for HTML5, CSS3 and many other new web standards, and this is the place to find out all about them. Not only will we learn about those, but we'll take a dive into the work the engineering team has done to make the browser faster through it's new JavaScript engine, the work they've done to ensure that the same mark-up works across all browsers and how hardware acceleration will make your site run faster, without any changes to your code!
- Level: 200
- Azure: Development from scratch
- Level: 200
Speaker: Gareth Jane
The Windows Azure platform is a flexible cloud-computing platform which allows developers to rapidly create highly scalable software applications. This session will introduce developers to the various services and components of the Windows Azure Platform. We will create a very simple application on this platform, especially focusing on the areas which distinguish development on Azure from traditional application development
- Level: 200
- ASP.NET web development with MVC
- Level: 400
Speaker: Brent Samodien
Join us in this session and discover the new features in ASP.NET MVC3 and what scenarios you can target with it. Learn more about the improved HTML Helpers and the new updates to Controller/Action/Method that make your code cleaner. Also, explore the richer URL routing and URL route mapping. We will also show how you can use alternative View Engines, including Razor.
- Level: 400
- A website's life: From sketch to publishing
- Level: 200
Speaker: Simon Wilkinson
WebMatrix is a new, free, fully featured, easy to install web development tool that helps you build ASP.NET and PHP websites and perform validation, SEO optimization and one-click publishing. My favourite feature however is a new script syntax for ASP.NET called Razor, which will help you create dynamic websites incredibly easily. We will spend some time sketching/wireframing our website, doing visual design work in Expression Design and then experiencing the rich development toolset in WebMatrix.
- Level: 200
- Let's get ready for the cloud: Building your applications so they
are cloud ready- Level: 400
Speaker: Robert MacLean
In a world where you hear people talking about the cloud, here are some guidelines on how to start building and structuring applications that will be easy to migrate to the Azure platform.
- Level: 400
- Code First in entity framework
- Level: 200
Speaker: Brent Samodien
Code First has been a great success with customers, and in this talk, we'll take a deep dive into how it works and talk about its upcoming RTM (Q1 2011). You'll see how Code First uses convention over configuration to improve developer productivity. Its flexibility allows for either automatic database provisioning or the ability to work with an existing database. We'll be demoing features beyond the initial RTM, such as Migrations support, and we'll also talk about the roadmap for Code First going forward
- Level: 200
- Silverlight 5: The Future
- Level: 200
Speaker: Shane Morris
- Level: 200
- Exploring Windows Azure storage
- Level: 400
Speaker: Gary Hope
Examine each of the foundation storage capabilities of Windows Azure, Blobs, Tables and Queues. Discover how to create storage accounts; upload and retrieve blobs and blob metadata; create, update and query tables; and create a simple service that uses a message queue for communication
- Level: 400
- LightSwitch basics: Building your first LightSwitch application
- Level: 200
Speaker: Robert MacLean
Visual Studio LightSwitch is the simplest way to build business applications for the desktop and cloud. LightSwitch simplifies the development process by letting you concentrate on the business logic, while LightSwitch handles the common tasks for you. In this demo-heavy session, you will see, end to end, how to build and deploy a data-centric business application using LightSwitch. After that you will discover what is under the hood to better understand the architecture of a LightSwitch application. Finally you will learn how you can use Visual Studio 2010 Professional and Expression Blend 4 to customize and extend its UI and Data layers for when the application's requirements grow beyond what is supported by default
- Level: 200
- Kung Fu Silverlight: Tips and architectural patterns and practices
- Level: 400
Speaker: Dave Russell
Learn about the rewards of using RIA Services together with development patterns, such as the Service Providers, Single Responsibility pattern, Commanding, user Interactions, Messaging, ChildWindows, Design Time Data, Testing, and developing using Model-View/View- Model (MVVM) pattern, to build Silverlight and Windows Phone apps. Hear the top tips you need to know for building data driven Silverlight apps that solve real world problems.
- Level: 400