Topic:  Wiring Applications: Enterprise Library 2.0 or Spring.NET? 

Trouble all too easily happens when hooking up several components to support an application. .NET developers can deal with these troubles many ways. The Enterprise Library 2.0 and Spring.NET provide two of the more promising ways. This presentation explores them and the problems they solve.

Speaker:  Tom Fischer 

Tom Fischer’s professional experience includes work with many of Microsoft’s latest (and oldest) technologies and tools. Tom has written about .NET security and object oriented design. He also holds several certifications, including the .NET MCSD

Topic:  What Every .Net Developer Needs To Know About Windows Workflow Foundation and BizTalk Server

In 2006, two of the latest tools from Microsoft that support building process oriented systems will be released: BizTalk Server 2006 and Windows Workflow Foundation. In this session, we will cover getting started with BizTalk Server and Windows Workflow Foundation to provide attendees with an understanding of the capabilities of both tools. In addition, the two technologies will be compared to provide attendees the information needed to determine when to apply which technology. If you have heard about these technologies and wondered what all the hype was about, this is the session for you.

Speaker:  Matt Milner

Matt is an independent software consultant specializing in Microsoft technologies including .Net, Web Services, XML and BizTalk Server. In addition to spending countless hours digging into these technologies for his customers, Matt has tried to share this knowledge with others by contributing articles to MSDN Magazine, .Net Developers Journal, and C# Today. He has also co-authored several books on ASP.Net and ADO.Net including his most recent, 'ASP.Net Best Practices' published by APress. As an instructor for Pluralsight, Matt teaches courses on Windows Workflow Foundation, BizTalk Server, Windows Communication Foundation and ASP.Net. Matt lives in Minnesota with his wife Kristen and his son Max.
 

Topic:  Overview of CSLA .NET 2.0

Be among the first to get an in-depth look at the concepts and techniques from Rockford Lhotka's Expert VB 2005 and C# 2005 Business Objects books on distributed business object programming updated for .NET 2.0. You will learn how to design Windows and Web-based applications based on distributed business objects, achieving high levels of reuse, scalability, long-term maintainability, and other benefits. Learn how to apply System.Transactions, generics, new ADO.NET features and data binding when building distributed applications on .NET 2.0.

Speaker:  Rockford Lhotka

Rockford Lhotka is the author of several books, including the upcoming Expert VB and C# 2005 Business Objects books. He is a Microsoft Regional Director, MVP and INETA speaker. He contributes to several major magazines and regularly presents at major conferences around the world - including Microsoft PDC, Tech Ed, VS Live! and VS Connections. Rockford is the Principal Technology Evangelist for Magenic Technologies (www.magenic.com), a company focused on delivering business value through applied technology and one of the nation's premiere Microsoft Gold Certified Partners. For more information go to www.lhotka.net.

Topic:  SharePoint Products and Technologies Primer

SharePoint Products and Technologies provide a versatile framework and powerful set of tools (think platform) that can be used to enhance your business processes. The extent of what SharePoint can do is limited only by your creativity and imagination. This session will provide an expeditious overview of the features of SharePoint and proceed to demonstrate how to consume some of the out-of-the-box Web Parts and even how to create custom Web Parts. A lot to do in two hours so don't be late.

Speaker:  Todd Bleeker

Todd has architected many solutions for small and large corporations. For instance, in 2003 Todd architected the software that Air Canada uses to track its roughly $30 million of annual in-flight cash sales. Todd helped the State of Minnesota webify and manage over 40,000 pages of systems documentation using SharePoint Team Services.
Recently, Todd joined forces with Bill English to grow Mindsharp (http://Mindsharp.com), a high-quality training company.

Topic:  Real world AJAX Enabled Web 2.0 Solution for the Financial Market

Over the past 6 months Dow Jones Labs has been working on aggressive AJAX based Web 2.0 powered products to bring financial news and tools to any website in the world. Check out www.marketwatch.com and watch the stock information update real-time with the market without any user input. Make sure to try it when the stock market is open.

This presentation will include real-world examples of financial applications created as mash-ups, and a deep dive into the grab bag of technologies powering it. We'll explore LiveQuotes which uses a thin-client Javascript library along with a asynchronous threadless web solution to drive over 10,000 requests per second all day, everyday. Much more than a simple display technology, LiveQuotes is in reality a distributed publish-subscribe data distribution model at Internet scale. Technologies covered: C#, .Net 2.0, DHTML, CSS, AJAX, JSON, SOAP, EBML 

Speaker:  Jamie Thingelstad, Louis Dejardin, Brent Nelson 

Jamie Thingelstad is MarketWatch's Chief Technology Officer. Thingelstad was a founding member of BigCharts which was acquired by MarketWatch in June 1999. He designed the technology infrastructure of the combined company and its MarketWatch.com Web site, whose 1000 servers now perform over 2.5 billion content transactions each month.

Thingelstad has been featured in many technology industry publications. He was featured in a nationwide advertising campaign for AT&T. Thingelstad has also served on the customer advisory boards for Akamai and F5 Labs.

Before joining BigCharts, Thingelstad co-founded WebSpan—a regional ISP and Web development firm in 1994. He also served as Technical Coordinator for Disability Service at the University of Minnesota where he built a centralized database to better serve disabled students, faculty and employees. He resides in Minnetonka, MN with his wife Tammy and young daughter Mazie

Topic:  New XML Features in .NET 2.0 

This discussion will focus on the following top 10 Features in the System.Xml namespace in .NET 2.0

10) Static Creation Methods on XmlReader and XmlWriter
9) XML Standards Support by Default
8) Universal Type Support and Conversion
7) XmlReader and XmlWriter Usability
6) The XQuery Language
5) Security
4) Easier XPath Queries with Namespaces
3) The XPathDocument as a Better DOM
2) XPathEditableNavigator, an Updatable Cursor
1) Performance

Speaker:  Ron Hovland from New Horizons of Minnesota

Ron Hovland is a staff .Net instructor for New Horizons of Minnesota. He has been in the training industry for the last ten years and has focussed on .Net since its rollout. Ron also teaches classes on SQL, SQL Server programming, scripting, and ITIL.

Ron is a Microsoft Certified Trainer, has his MCSD.NET, MCDBA, and is an ITIL Manager.

Topic:  Deep Dive into the .Net Framework 2.0

Having spent a significant amount of time working with latest version of .Net, some very interesting concepts and ideas have been put to the real world test. This presentation will be a technical deep dive into how best to utilize some of the new features of .Net 2.0. See how generics are incredible solution for collection classes. Learn how to take programmatic control of XML serialization. See interesting ways to leverage the new User Profile and Membership features of ASP.Net 2.0 and more.

Speaker:  Doug Nelson from ILM

Doug is the Practice Partner with ILM. He provides expert application development services for a growing number of clients with a primary focus on solving complex business problems. These applications developed are based on a Sql Server backend database with a web based front-end. He has been doing web development since 1996, transitioning from CGI applications to classic ASP and on to ASP.Net. In addition to the web development, these applications also support WinForms and Pocket PCs. He has extensive experience implementing truly distributed applications involving windows services, message queueing and web services.

Topic:  Windows Presentation Foundation – Declare Your Next User Interface

The next generation of UI development is here… Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF for short, is Microsoft’s newest User Interface platform… designed from the ground up to introduce declarative syntax, graphics card powered, next generation experiences for users. This talk will walk through an introduction to WPF, examples of how you can take advantage of it RIGHT NOW in your applications, and where to get more information. There are plenty of tools and resources out there... and with the release of .Net 3.0 (includes WPF) right around the corner, you’re better off being prepared.

Speaker:  Jacob Good

Jacob Good is a Senior Consultant with Inetium and has been consulting / developing software in the Twin Cities for nearly 3 years. His development experience has been primarily focused on smart client development and mobile development. He dabbles in all kinds of technologies from Ruby on Rails to bioinformatics packages in Perl and of course .Net.
 

Topic:  The -ilities of software development, how non-functional requirements drive software architecture

Have you ever wondered what the heck an architect does? Well here is your chance to find out. Learn all about the -ilities of software development. Learn why extensibility, maintainability, longevity, scalability, recoverability really get an architect jazzed. Discover why code downloaded from the Internet doesn't just get installed on production servers. Learn how a department application that updates customer addresses differs greatly from an enterprise application that updates customer information on the web. John will talk about how the Board of Pensions addresses developing and hosting enterprise code. He will walk through an example application and take you through its transformation from a department application to an enterprise application as he applies the enterprise level non-functional requirements to the application.

Speaker:  John Lomnicki from ELCA Board of Pensions

John Lomnicki Jr. is the Enterprise Architect for the ELCA Board of Pensions and has been consulting / developing software with .NET since Beta 2. He has been consulting at the architectural level with .NET for the last 4 years. His checkered background also includes work with Java, Oracle Applications, InfoPath, Silver Stream, VB6, and VBA. When he is not coding in his spare time, you might find him working on a holiday display for his yard

Topic:  QuickCounters.net Library for Performance Instrumentation

QuickCounters.net is an open source library that allows you to quickly and easily add performance-counter-based instrumentation to your application. With a simple BeginRequest and SetComplete/SetAbort metaphor within the API, you are able to get the following metrics: Requests Started Requests Executing Requests Completed Requests Failed Request Execution Time Requests/Sec Requests/Min Requests/Hour These are the most common metrics that you typically want at a request or transaction level (just look at the Sql Server and ASP.NET counters…) But using the native performance counter APIs within .NET would involve a large degree of hand-coding. The QuickCounters library makes this process painless for both your fine and coarse grained transactions. It also adds an alternative user interface to the traditional perfmon UI. In addition, if you are using QuickCounters in a BizTalk setting, special handling is provided to accommodate dehydration/rehydration scenarios.

Speaker:  Scott Colestock 

Scott Colestock consults independently through Trace Ventures, LLC. He has been focused for the last three years on delivering solutions that leverage BizTalk 2004/2006 for a variety of clients in the Minneapolis area, and writing about his experience on www.traceofthought.net. He is a BizTalk Server MVP, and frequent speaker at user groups and conferences.

Topic:  Concurrency and Composition in .NET Applications 

Multi-processor machines and multi-core chips are becoming common-place. It is essential for .NET developers to have a solid understanding of concurrency within their applications to take advantage of these hardware scenarios. This talk will cover multithreading techniques and concepts, with most of the talk focused on frameworks to help developers not only create asynchronous methods but compose them as well.

Speaker:  Jason Bock

Jason Bock is a Senior Consultant for Magenic Technologies (http://www.magenic.com). He has worked on a number of business applications using a diverse set of substrates and languages such as C#, .NET, and Java. He is the author of "Applied .NET Attributes", "CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET", ".NET Security", and "Visual Basic 6 Win32 API Tutorial". He has written numerous articles on software development issues and has presented at a number of conferences and user groups. Jason holds a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Marquette University. Visit his web site at http://www.jasonbock.net