Proposed Sessions

‘Tips and Tricks for WP7 Marketplace Submission’ - Pete Vickers

‘Tips and Tricks for WP7 Marketplace Submission’ looks at how to get your WP7 application through Marketplace certification, and best practices to ensure your app gets certification. See the main reason apps fail certification and make sure your app passes.

Pete Vickers has been in computing for more years than he cares to remember, working on everything from mainframes down to PDA's. He has specialised in mobile development for the past 10 years, and has been a Microsoft MVP in mobile device development for the past 7 years. He has written several tools for Windows Mobile development, including networking, database and migration tools. A joint-founder of APPA Mundi, Pete has a wealth of database and design experience, networking and performance, and more recently Windows Phone development and training.

Performance and Scalability, the Stack Exchange way - Marc Gravell

We all know the common tricks for improving perceived performance, but often far too little emphasis is given on making the servers do their work more efficiently - otherwise all you achieve by scaling-out is distributed slowness. Here we take a hands-on look at some pragmatic ways to measure and improve the performance of your server-side code. The examples focus on ASP.NET MVC, but the themes should apply to most .NET web development, and beyond. In particular, this session focuses on some of the technologies that Stack Exchange have built (and released freely to the community) to achieve high scalability in .NET, including: mvc-mini-profiler, dapper, and booksleeve.

Marc is part of the development team for Stack Exchange (and a self-confessed Stack Overflow junkie), and has been a C# MVP for the last 4 years. He has a long history of open source projects, and tries to focus on high-performance, low-impact libraries (hiding all the "ugly" from app developers). Before his transition to Stack Exchange, his history is corporate / line-of-business (mainly on the Microsoft / .NET stack).

A look at various benefits of CQRS, Event Sourcing and related patterns - Ashic Mahtab

When people here CQRS and Event Sourcing, they seem to think vastly scalable systems and things “they don’t really need”. They see it as one big thing – all or nothing. In reality, it is a collection of orthogonal concepts that can be mixed and matched for various benefits. These range from proper object orientation and reduction of complexity to better testing and adherence to SOLID principles. In this session, we will discuss these benefits and how we can easily attain them.

Ashic is a .NET consultant based in London. His experience ranges from real time fault monitoring systems to working for Her Majesty at Parliamentary ICT. When not messing about with code, he can be found moderating www.asp.net or having a rant on twitter. An ASP.NET MVP since 2009, he holds a BSc in Computer Science and Engineering from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology and is currently pursuing a part time MSc in Software Engineering from the University of Oxford.

Hey Mama, Look at me - I do composition without your IoC - Ashic Mahtab

There seems to be a great deal of magical frameworks out there – IoC containers, AOP frameworks, mocking libraries etc. They can do very complicated things from compile time IL weaving to runtime code generation. In reality, the requirement for such magical complexity that “just works” (until it doesn’t) can easily be negated by following simple object oriented principles (and even some functional ones). In this session, we will look at simple approaches that can work well in a lot of scenarios without requiring Hogwarts OWLs. Lots of code examples for us muggles to look at.

Clean Up Your JavaScript Act - Ashic Mahtab

JavaScript is going from a niche tool to pretty much a requirement in modern times. It is an extremely flexible language and as such, it is quite easy to end up with an unmanageable mess that "works". We seem to focus so much on unit testing everything server side, yet pay so little attention to what runs on the browser. In this session, we'll look at a clean approach to using JavaScript "objects" - not mimicking languages like C# but using what's already in the language. We will quickly look at how we can use these objects with an MVVM framework called Knockout. We will use QUnit to unit test our code and then integrate it into a build script.JavaScript is going from a niche tool to pretty much a requirement in modern times. It is an extremely flexible language and as such, it is quite easy to end up with an unmanageable mess that "works". We seem to focus so much on unit testing everything server side, yet pay so little attention to what runs on the browser. In this session, we'll look at a clean approach to using JavaScript "objects" - not mimicking languages like C# but using what's already in the language. We will quickly look at how we can use these objects with an MVVM framework called Knockout. We will use QUnit to unit test our code and then integrate it into a build script.

From C# to Kindle - Jimmy Skowronski

I finally joined the flow and got myself a Kindle. After a few days of pure happiness and loading nearly hundreds of books I asked myself a question if I can create my own ebook. The first approach guided by Google was to use Instapaper but that worked but far from the level I would feel as a satisfactory. More research guided me to some software that could do the job but no joy with that either. Being a born and bread developer I decided to write my own piece of code. It turned out to be easier than I expected.

In this talk I will show you, in a few basic steps, how easy is to transform any content you want to a fully functional Kindle ebook you can easily publish on the Amazon marketplace.

Jimmy started his computing adventure long time ago with Atari, which of course was far better than Commodore, contrary to the popular believe. Fast forward... When the first .NET version was released he jumped on it as an excuse to stop writing code in classic ASP and Delphi. He is now working as a Principal Software Engineer in Symantec.cloud where he is a technical leader and the .NET evangelist . His day is mainly consumed by mentoring, managing development and from time to time designing and coding a new cool stuff. Currently, his favourite topics are MVC 3, WIF and identity and Windows Phone. After a hard day in the office he loves to fly a virtual space ship in Eve Online. Jimmy is leader of the GL.net, a free .NET user group based in Gloucester and Cheltenham area.

No More Passwords! - Jimmy Skowronski

Passwords are surrounding us, thousands of websites are asking us to register every day. At some point we tend to loose control over them and start either using the same password everywhere or escape to a password vault solutions. Many of you are building new websites almost every day and you often you need users to log in. Don't create your own password storage in that case. Save your users from the need to create and remember yet another login and password, and use one of the existing identity providers. It can be Live ID, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo or many other and you can choose one of them or all together.

This session will show you how to get rid of your individual password storage and authenticate your user using OAuth with Live ID, Google and Facebook. You will be amazed how simple it is and your users will be amazed how cool you are.

C# + PowerShell = happy couple - Jimmy Skowronski

Windows PowerShell is a great tool for system administrators and normal users alike. One of its design principles was extensibility. It provides powerful scripting mechanism but is also very easy for developers to create new tools and utilities to be integrated with PowerShell. It provides easy to use SDK that eliminates many tasks that typical command line tool would require.

The session introduces into PowerShell development from the ground up. You will learn how to start and the basics of argument processing, output and pipeline processing. We will also look at error handling and diagnostics to end up deeper in custom types and type conversion. After the session you will be able to sit down and write a tool your system administrator will love you for.

Going Native with SQL Server 2012 and C++ - Nick Haslam

I’ll take you through the delights of creating a module to interact with SQL Server 2012, a function in T-SQL (briefly), then using C# to create a SQL CLR module, and then looking into the performance gains by making a C++ application querying the SQL Native Client (ODBC). All three sections will do the same job, and we’ll cover the advantages and disadvantages of each.

We'll cover the following:

T-SQL, SQL CLR (C#)
SQL Server Native Client
Advantages and Disadvantages
Performance Opportunities
How to use it to connect to SQL Server from C++
How to query a database
Comparison between T-SQL, SQL CLR & C++ solutions

Nick is a BI Consultant for TAH Ltd & has worked with SQL Server since 6.5. Recently, he's been working towards the MCM certification, and developing large Data warehouses with SQL Server & Wherescape RED. He has numerous Microsoft Certifications including MCITP's on SQL Server 2008 (Database Administrator and Database Developer), MCTS's on SQL Server 2005, SharePoint & Dynamics CRM. He has a secret; he codes C++ when the lights go out.

Introduction to Aspect-Oriented Programming - Yan Cui

Aspect oriented programming is a programming paradigm that aims to increase modularity by allowing the separation of cross-cutting concerns.

This talk is for programmers who are curious about AOP and how it can help you:

write fewer lines of code
write cleaner, more concise and more maintainable code
produce fewer defects
produce more reusable code
be more productive!

Based in London, Yan works as a server side developer for iwi, a software house focused on producing high quality social games that run on platforms such as Facebook and Hi5. Yan’s primary focus is of building highly distributed and scalable server-side solutions to support the rapid growth of iwi’s games - JackpotJoy Slots is now serving over 375k users each day handling over 100m requests and growing! Yan mainly specializes in .Net technologies such as C# and WCF, but he also holds strong interests in other areas such as AOP, NoSQL, functional programming and cloud computing.

Web caching 101 - dispelling the myths - Sebastien Lambla

When it comes to web sites, caching has been the most painful aspect of delivering web sites. At the same times, it's always been promoted as the best way to scale. Who to trust, what does caching means and how can proxies actually make your life easier and your site cheaper? If you want answers to those questions, this talk is for you!

Sebastien Lambla runs Caffeine IT, a .net consultancy / contracting company helping the good people of London adopt new technologies, new processes, new methodologies and in general anything that's new and shiny. Specializing in cutting-edge tools, from REST architectures to occasionally connected rich clients, Sebastien has been developing with .net since 2000, and has a secret love affair with javascript. In his spare time he’s working on OpenRasta, a resource-oriented MVC framework, and OpenWrap, an alternative package manager.

Links, forms and unicorns - Sebastien Lambla

Hypermedia is the most powerful aspect of the web, a tried and tested technology that lets you link things with other things. This session will follow a secret agent travel across Europe, showing how links and forms can make any secret agent a much better ReST client.

.NET On OSS By Example - Benjamin Howarth

So one of the most powerful CMS software products in the world has finally release their new version on the MVC platform. Apart from being yet another .NET open-source CMS, it’s also a seriously awesome programming framework. This session shows off some really cool stuff as to why Umbraco rocks, and how it can run end-to-end on a FOSS framework (Linux, Apache, Mono), and then be made super-scalable on NoSQL thanks to a brand-new architecture under the hood.

Benjamin has been programming since teenage years starting out on BBC Micros with BASIC, and has been in computing for the last 5 years in a mixture of .NET, PHP and anything else that clients throw at him.

He is currently a freelance web consultant & former member of the Umbraco core team, and a serial OSS patcher, with experience covering programming, network and application security, and enterprise-level architecture, as well as recently starting to delve into the Windows Phone platform.

Cross platform Mvvm - Databinding across WP7, MonoTouch, MonoDroid - Stuart Lodge

This talk won't include any intro into WP7, Touch or Droid coding - but any C# coder should pick that up anyway :) Instead this talk will cover hands-on coding of MVVM for iPhone, iPad, Droid and WP7, including:

how to get databinding working in non-Microsoft platforms,
how to unify ViewModels across the different platforms,
using IoC for platform specific operations
some strategies for ensuring you can maximise code reuse in your ongoing cross-platform development.

Stuart Lodge is a very late convert to the world of Mvvm and Databinding, but has recently worked on a big iPhone, Android and WP7 project and we've used Mvvm and Databinding across all 3 platforms.

'Unit testing with Visual Studio 11'Beta - Richard Fennell

In the Visual Studio 11 Beta there are major changes to the way unit testing frameworks are implemented, you are no longer limited to MSTest it is now a pluggable model. In this session I will show what is now available ‘out the box’ and what other options are open to allow you to leverage the testing tools you want to use.

Richard is the Engineering Director of the Black Marble Ltd a Microsoft Gold Partner based in the North of England. Black Marble specialises in BizTalk & SharePoint based business automation.

As Engineering Director he is responsible for the delivery of systems and tools to allow the company, and their clients, to deliver solutions efficiently. All Black Mable's development activity is underpinned by Visual Studio Team System an agile process model. He is an MVP for Visual Studio ALM (nee Team System), an ALM Ranger, a Typemock MVP and a Certified Scrum Master

He is a regular presenter at community events in the UK and Ireland (and the rest of the world given a chance) where my most common subject is software testing and the development process.

Beyond db.Users.FindByEmail - Simple.Data Deep Dive - Mark Rendle

Now that Simple.Data is complete and released and 1.0 and everything, I’d like to take an hour of your time for a really comprehensive run-through of how to use it and what it can do. Complex queries; bulk insert and “upsert” operations; simple mocking for TDD/BDD; lazy and eager loading; adapters for non-SQL data stores; and a decent amount of time for Q&A at the end.

Mark is a freelance Software Development and Cloud Computing Consultant; a (programming) language geek; a Windows Azure MVP; the creator of the Simple.Data .NET data access library; licensed to run with scissors; and a speaker at conferences around the world.

Pragmatic F# for Normal People - Mark Rendle

You’ve heard of F#. You’ve played with it a bit. But you don’t work in the financial or scientific sectors, so you don’t really have a use for it. Do you?

In fact you almost certainly do, as long as you know which problem patterns are easier and cleaner to solve with F# than with C# (or VB.NET). And that’s what this talk is about. That horrible-looking code you have to write from time to time where you think “there must be a better way.” I’ll show you places where you can reduce a hundred lines of C# (or VB.NET) to a dozen lines of F#, and how to integrate that F# seamlessly into the rest of your solution.

Mark is a freelance Software Development and Cloud Computing Consultant; a (programming) language geek; a Windows Azure MVP; the creator of the Simple.Data .NET data access library; a part-time Pope; and a speaker at conferences around the world.

Developer's Guide to Windows Phone App Marketing and Monetization - Alan Mendelevich

Releasing a great Windows Phone app or game is an important step. Developers tend to focus all attention on ensuring top quality, richness and great user experience of their apps. Unfortunately, most of the times, having a superb app is not enough to guarantee its success in the marketplace. Developers have tried various methods to increase app’s popularity and income. Some worked and some didn’t. There are a lot of breadcrumbs of information about individual cases spread over the internet and we try to collect them in this session. Learn techniques used by other app publishers to maximize exposure and revenue.

We will cover:

Monetization strategy selection based on the nature of the app, publisher's location and target markets. When to go the ad-supported route vs. paid? How to price paid apps? Global accessibility of paid apps.
Tips and tricks to improve your app's chances at getting maximum exposure (both free and paid).

Alan Mendelevich has been developing software for a living for more than 15 years. He has been an active participant of Windows Phone community since its inception. Alan has delivered talks on Windows Phone development, marketing and monetization at multiple events in Europe. In early 2011 Alan launched AdDuplex – an ad exchange network for Windows Phone applications. AdDuplex is helping developers promote their apps for free by helping each other. Via his involvement with AdDuplex and Windows Phone community in general, Alan was able to collect and analyze valuable information and insight about promotion and monetization techniques used by developers. He is happy to share the insight back with community on his blogs at http://devblog.ailon.org and http://blog.adduplex.com and talks on the subjects of Windows Phone development, app marketing and monetization.

Is your code S.O.L.I.D? - Nathan Gloyn

Everybody keeps on about SOLID principles but what are they? and why should you care?

In this session I'll aim to walk through each principle telling you about that principle and examining why you should use it.

Once we've talked about the principle in theory we'll look to how we can put it into practice refactoring an existing application.

Nathan is a passionate developer, designer, Certified Scrum Professional, wanna-be architect, agile evangelist, and presenter. Currently work for software house creating bespoke software for medium to large enterprises

Selenium a UI testing paradigm - Nathan Gloyn

You may or may not have heard of Selenium the open source test framework for web applications.
In the session we’ll cover:

What Selenium is and where it’s come from
How it works
The various ways to use it
How to build your tests for ease of understanding and reuse

Whilst focusing on using Selenium the talk will also cover best practices around UI testing regardless of the tool you use to do the testing.

Enterprise Applications in minutes! - Nathan Gloyn

So you are being asked to produce web based applications in less and less time, so what can you do about it?

Microsoft has a range of technologies that can help you to do this and in this talk I’m going to give you a brief overview of 3 or them:

Lightswitch is the new Silverlight based application builder, you’ve probably heard how bad this is but let’s see what its actually like.
Asp.Net Dynamic Data can provide a working Asp.Net web forms site in minutes.
Asp.Net MVC using scaffolding support is the newest of the bunch helping you generate the code you need quickly and easily.

Join me as we tour through these 3 different technologies and see what they have to offer.

“Cursors are evil” - Dave Ballantyne

That’s frequent advice given on forums when asking about performance problems. Its correct advice, but how do you go about removing cursors and what do you replace them with? That’s the tricky part! By deconstructing a cursor based routine, Dave will demonstrate a number of TSQL techniques and how they can be applied to generate a new routine with significantly less overhead.

Dave has been working in the IT field for over 20 years, the past 15 of which has been specialising within the SQLServer environment. Tuning and optimizing SQLServer processes is his particular talent. Dave regularly contributes to online forums and is a regular speaker at UK events such as SQL Bits and user groups. He also is founder of the Kent .NET/SqlServer user group.

Whats new in SQL Server 2012 for T-SQL - Dave Ballantyne

There have been many TSQL enhancements added to SQL Server 2012. In this session we will take a high level look at some of these. However just as important, if not more so, is the functionality that has been lost or changed.

Thinking mobile and beyond - Matt Lacey

For almost all of us, the future is going to involve developing for devices other than a traditional PC or a laptop. Up until a few years ago, if you developed for anything other than a PC it would probably have been a phone but it could now be any of a plethora of devices including tablets and other mobile devices.

Fortunately, years of mobile development have taught us many tips, tricks and best practices for coping with the scenarios created when you're not developing for a PC. Additionally, as the collective experience of developers working with other non-PC devices has grown, it's shown that those mobile differences also apply to other platforms too.

This means that if we understand how mobile is different it can help us develop better experiences for all our users, regardless of the device they're using.

Do you need to think about someone viewing your website on a phone? Do you need to know how to make a version of you app that will work well on a tablet? Do you want to be prepared for adjusting your app to work with a Kinect? Will you have to write apps which run on other devices? Will you have to output to a display on a wall, or a table, or something other than a traditional screen? Will you ever be taking input from anything other than a mouse and keyboard? Will you write apps which interact with the "Internet of things"? If you can answer yes to any of those questions then attending this session will help.

Matt is a freelance developer specialising in Windows Phone 7. He's developed for mobile for over 9 years (since before it was cool) and on the desktop and web before that. Prior to going freelance he worked for a variety of companies and has developed on more platforms and in more languages than he can remember. Matt organises two user groups: DevEvening, in Woking; and the Windows Phone User Group (WPUG), in London. When he has any free time he can usually be found answering questions about Windows Phone 7 on StackOverflow, blogging at http://blog.mrlacey.co.uk/ or tweeting as @mrlacey.

Rewriting software is the single worst mistake you can make – One year on! - Phil Collins

Joel Spolsky once said that rewriting software from scratch is the single worst strategic mistake a software development company can ever make.[1] We all know of the Netscape story and the never-released v5.0. So as a developer how do you react when you're faced with the fact that there is little other choice than do exactly what you're told you should never do.

During this session I will describe how as a team we are managing to beat the odds and rewrite our main flagship product from a legacy platform into VB.net; as well as describing the decisions behind the choice of language, the choice of development methodology, how we built the project plan, what has changed since we started, how the plan and we have adapted, how we learnt from our mistakes and our successes, how working with Bournemouth University and their study of our rewrite has helped us, and whether or not we still think it's something you should never do.

Almost one year on since I last spoke about this project and two years into the rewrite project as a whole it's time to bring everyone uptodate with how it's going and what's changed over the past year.

[1] Joel Spolsky, Things You Should Never Do, Part I - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Phil is a Development Director for a software development company. He has programmed and developed code since the days of the Sinclair ZX81.

Before joining his current role Phil had previously worked as a web developer and an Omnimark programmer. Currrently he leads a team of developers in a massive rewrite project as the flagship company product moves away from its legacy platform. He embraces continuous integration and if you’re not careful he will bore you off your socks about build radiators!

Getting a grip on Responsive Design - George Adamson

People are hitting your website with all sorts of gadgets these days, does it look the same on all of them? Different? Does it work at all?

What is this Responsive Design malarkey? Do we have to design for every device now?

We'll tinker about with techniques, css and principals for delivering your site to multiple devices. Bring your internet enabled fridge and settle down for some ui geekiness.

What are we "responding" to anyway?
Desktop is no longer the default
So we just target iPhone yeah?
Media Queries and breakpoints
Orientation
Responsive Design vs Adaptive Design
Graceful Degradation or Progressive Enhancement?
Your mobile test suite

An accomplished design architect, front-end dev and UX evangelist, George has tackled apps and web sites ranging from luxury travel to Doctor Who, getting immersed in all aspects of Information Architecture, Interaction Design and Ideation. He strives to edge clients towards Institutional Usability. From time to time George pops off to speak at conferences and user groups, typically on jQuery, responsive design and interaction design, about which he’s rather obsessive. With his development head on, George spends his time with front-end HTML5, CSS3, hardcore jQuery and jQueryMobile. Historically, he has built on top of Microsoft tech at the back-end but during 2010 he moved to Ruby, Rails, Merb, NodeJS and GIT. In addition to the creative stuff, George enjoys the agile world and is experienced in the full project life-cycle, having worked with a variety of development initiatives for major corporations, duelling the ever-present constraints of time and budgets.

Designing for Mobile - George Adamson

"Why so much fuss about mobile? Our site works fine on the CEO's iPhone."

Wooah, we'd better have a good old think about what mobile means and why it's soooo different:

The mobile context: mindset and attention
Focussed functionality
Tapping, not clicking. And certainly not hovering
Native / Web / Hybrid
Go on, just restyle your website to look ok on iPhone
"Mobile First? No way, we've got too much to display"

CSS3 Transitions and Animations - George Adamson

Yay it's the 90's again: we can make stuff blink and move for no good reason all over again!

We'll rummage about under the CSS3 hood exploring all the goodness of transitions and keyframes.

Discover the syntax
Find out where it's supported
Most importantly: Know when to use them!
JS vs CSS

Building a Single Page Application (SPA) with Backbone, Knockout or Ember JS - George Adamson

Client-side frameworks go in and out of fashion on a weekly basis. Lets see what it's like to build with them.

We'll compare the features of these 3 frameworks and just in case you're becoming obsessed with them, we'll look at lighter alternative techniques that can be simpler and faster!

Get going with jQuery - George Adamson

An energetic and entertaining introduction to jQuery and all it's cross-browser loveliness:

Applying jQuery to your pages with Progressive Enhacement; the CSS-like selector syntax; binding and handling events; effects; plugins and ajax. Then perhaps we'll do a little more ajax. If needed we'll chat about closures, JSONP, cross-domain issues and solutions. Lots of code and demos along the way and avoiding yawny slides. A great session for those fairly new to jQuery or who would like to do more with it. We also dive into some advanced usage and best practices. Described by a previous audience member as "Eddie Izzard does tech".

Getting started on AJAX with jQuery - George Adamson

We'll hurtle straight into using jQuery to handle your AJAX; Rummage about in code, 'hijaxing' links and doing fashionable things like Progressive Enhancement; JSON and JSONP; solutions to get around the 'Same Domain Policy'. We'll work through a bunch of examples to POST and GET data from various sources. If there's time we'll explore more of jQuery's AJAX methods and events and maybe even look at live ajax event handling in large single-page apps.

There will be a few minutes' refresher on jQuery basics then it's non-stop AJAX. Some experience with JavaScript will help but if your world is C# and curly brackets then I'm sure you'll be as happy as a pig in, er, shift+]

Intro to jQuery Mobile (and perhaps a peek at SenchaTouch too) - George Adamson

All of a sudden it's a doddle to make web apps for mobile devices. We'll whiz through the goals of jQuery Mobile and ponder which devices we can target. Romping through some code examples in George's usual unorthodox style, we'll build up pages using the cunning Unobtrusive techniques that jQuery Mobile is imbued with. We'll see how interactions can be added and how elements can be styled using jQuery UI theming. If there's time we can have a quick look at SenchaTouch too. It's different approach and its pros and cons.

Ding dong, Virtual PC is dead - Hyper-V arrives in the Windows client - Liam Westley

Windows 8 Consumer Preview brings with the latest version of Hyper-V to the desktop operating system.

In this session we'll see what this means, examine the handful of restrictions, compare it with VirtualBox and VMware Workstation, as well as provide an overview of how a developer can make maximum use of Hyper-V.

Liam Westley is Head Of Engineering at Criteria Labs Ltd where he leads a team of .Net and JavaScript developers in delivering digital media downloads. He works in an office on the 8th floor in Hammersmith where you can look out over Wembley Stadium, Loftus Road (QPR) and Craven Cottage (Fulham).

Previous to Criteria Labs, Liam worked as a consultant, and still runs his own company Tiger Computer Services Ltd, specialising in software for Broadcast Television. His Niagara SMS moderation system has been used by QVC UK for the last four years to display SMS messages from viewers, live, on screen. Liam is also responsible for the ticketing system for Hat Trick Productions which provides e-tickets to shows such as Have I Got News For You, The Armstrong and Miller Show and Room 101.

Liam has worked for chellomedia, GMTV, BSkyB, SmashedAtom and Original Thinking Group. In his time he created the first in house weather system for Sky News using Visual Basic 1.0, acted as architect for two general election systems, project managed the launch of the GMTV web site, was key to delivering the first interactive television chat service in the UK for BSkyB and helped launch the first live shopping channels in the Netherlands.

He’s also a Microsoft MVP in Virtual Machines.

Hyper-V and PowerShell - automation perfected - Liam Westley

Windows 8, server and desktop not only come with the latest and greatest version of Hyper-V but there is also a comprehensive library of PowerShell 3.0 cmdlets ready to automate all those tedious virtualisation tasks.

We'll take a quick look at the basic cmdlets within the PowerShell library and how this can be used to integrate virtualisation for automated builds and testing without the complexity of TFS and Lab Manager using it with the TeamCity continuous integration server.

He’s also a Microsoft MVP in Virtual Machines.

Deploying your first Application onto Windows Azure - Gary Ewan Park

You will have likely heard a lot of buzz about Windows Azure, but what exactly is it?

In this session we will attempt to break down Windows Azure into its constituent parts, explaining each component, and where you would use each one. A demonstration will then be provided of how you can deploy an ASP.Net MVC Application into the Cloud, making use of the Messaging System between a Web Role and a Worker Role, as well as BLOB Storage.

Gary Ewan Park has been developing on the .Net Platform for almost 7 years. Starting out with VB.Net and then settling on C#, his day job sees him developing using SharePoint, Silverlight, WCF and Ontological Databases. In his spare time, Gary is developing on the Windows Phone 7 platform, as well as investigating the Windows Azure offerings, and also moderating the ASP.Net Forums at www.vbforums.com. In addition, Gary is a founding member of the Aberdeen Developers .Net User Group, that holds monthly sessions on any topic related to the Microsoft .Net Technology Stack.

Getting Started with Caliburn.Micro and Windows Phone 7 - Gary Ewan Park

Getting started with the Windows Phone 7 Development Platform is relatively simple, however, using a Framework like Caliburn.Micro takes away some of the more mundane tasks, and allows you to focus on what you are trying to achieve. In this session we will start with a blank Windows Phone 7 project, and start to create our first Windows Phone 7 application using features such as:

ActionMessages
Action Conventions
Binding Conventions
Navigation Service
The Bootstrapper
The IPhoneService
Tombstoning
Lauchers and Choosers
The IWindowManager

Gary Ewan Park has been developing on the .Net Platform for almost 7 years. Starting out with VB.Net and then settling on C#, his day job sees him developing using SharePoint, Silverlight, WCF and Ontological Databases. In his spare time, Gary is developing on the Windows Phone 7 platform, as well as investigating the Windows Azure offerings, and also moderating the ASP.Net Forums at www.vbforums.com. In addition, Gary is a founding member of the Aberdeen Developers .Net User Group, that holds monthly sessions on any topic related to the Microsoft .Net Technology Stack.

StyleCop – Breaking down the barriers to entry - Gary Ewan Park

Starting with a brief introduction to what StyleCop is, and what it can be used for, we will then apply StyleCop directly to a real world application. Then we will investigate:

What breaks?
What doesn’t work?
What techniques we can use to correct StyleCop warnings/errors, and ignore them completely?
What tools can be used to speed up refactoring for StyleCop warnings/errors?

Dev11 - Turning your web development up to 11 - Niall Merrigan

With the release of VS11 Beta, there are many new improvements in both the IDE and ASP.NET 4.5 that take some of the hassles out of web development. This session will show some of the new features, bits, tips and tricks included in this beta release (and beyond when announced or out of embargo) Level 100 - 200.

Niall Merrigan is an IT Architect working with Laerdal Medical in Stavanger in Norway. He has over 10 years of experience in web development, design and architecture as well as system and database administration. He is an ASP.NET MVP and also the assistant country lead for the Norwegian .NET User Group and has managed to give talks in Norway, Scotland and Ireland. Blogs at http://www.certsandprogs.com and can be found on Twitter as @nmerrigan. MVP Profile is https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/niall.merrigan.

Defensive Programming 101 - Niall Merrigan

10 common security mistakes that developers make when developing web applications and how to avoid them. Covers topics such as XSS, SQL injection, correct permissions and securing your web.config file. This session is a level 100 - 200 talk with code samples in C#.

Bing Maps Weather Data Mashup - Niall Merrigan

This session shows how use geographical data and plot it on a map using the Silverlight Bing Maps control. We go through how to get the information from a web service showing weather data and plot that on the map using custom graphics. It is also shown how you could use other services and custom data to present other ideas on a map. Session level is 200 with an audience familiar with ASP.NET, Web Services, LINQ and some Silverlight (Level 100).

Real World Lightswitch - Pleasure and Pain - Joel Hammond-Turner

Visual Studio Lightswitch 2011 (catchy!) is the new Access - at least in terms of writing Line of Business applications. In this session I'll cover some of the wins and pitfalls for using this tooling in the real world - including how to get Lightswitch to play nice with NuGet.

With experience of most Microsoft technologies (and more than a few non-MS ones), Joel focuses MOSTLY on C#, Asp.Net MVC, Lightswitch and Silverlight - working as a Technical Lead at Landmark Information Group - but messes around with anything digital, and is really looking forward to teaching his boys Python on a Raspberry Pi this autumn. He can shoot & edit video and create graphics too.

Using your NuGet for Fun and Profit - Joel Hammond-Turner

The explosive take-up of NuGet clearly demonstrates just how valuable a packaging system for .Net can be. This session will look at creating NuGet packages for use within your own organisation rather than for general consumption, and will look at the options for hosting a NuGet server both on-site and in the cloud.

Continuous Integration, from the start, in an hour, on a shoestring - Phil Collins

In this session we'll look at how small teams can bring continuous integration into the fold quickly and easily (within an hour, because that's how long this session is). We'll highlight how wonderful continuous integration is and how quickly it can make a change to how you work.

Starting with just a version control system we'll plug in ticketing using YouTrack and automated builds using Team City. We'll install each system just to show how easy it is to get up and running with continuous check-in based builds and end the session with a bug being fixed and the change resulting in a build and a completed ticket with a build radiator thrown in for good measure.

It certainly won't be your run of the mill presentation but for those who've never attempted CI, want to see some new stuff install and work, or you want to learn some cool features of YouTrack and TeamCity then this the session for you.

The System Metaphor - Johnno Nolan

Rainbows, Unicorns, a decent Coldplay record, are all examples of mythical beasts. Extreme Programming has its own, The System Metaphor. Perhaps XP’s forgotten practice, it certainly doesn’t have the reputation that others do. In this interactive session we will be tracking down the beast and observing its charateristics. We investigating if it is still relevent in today’s world, see if it has evolved or just doomed to become extinct.

John Nolan has been developing software for around about 10 years. Occasionally blogging at http://johnnosnose.blogspot.com/ and often being stupid at https://twitter.com/#!/johnnonolan now misleading teams in the NW. An aspiring agilist I've been trying to work out extreme programming practices for sometime.

Loving Legacy Code - Chris Canal

Michael Feathers, author of Dealing Effectively with Legacy code, defines Legacy Code as code without tests. How much legacy code does that definition mean you have? Even on new projects, if you check in code with tests, you have just created new legacy code. Even on projects that have some form of testing, legacy code will still creep in. In this session we will look at a number of techniques, patterns and tools that can make dealing with legacy code an interesting challenge instead of a daunting task.

What web stack? - Chris Canal

In recent years, the .Net ecosystem has seen a number of web platforms being relase; from Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC to OSS solutions like OpenRasta and FubuMVC. It is no longer a straight forward decisions of picking the Microsoft framework, as some frameworks can offer better solutions depending on your goal. In this sessions we will compare and contrast 4 of the most popular ones:

ASP.NET MVC
Nancy FX
FubuMVC
OpenRasta

We will look at the pros and cons of each, and where each framework might work better than the others. We will also have a brief introduction of the .Net Http Abstractions/OWIN project and what it could mean for .Net web development

DDD at DDD - A Modelling Session - Ashic Mahtab

Domain Driven Design focuses on managing complexity resulting in maintainable solutions. However, a lot of people tend to focus too deeply in technical infrastructure and end up calling a technical solution "DDD". In this session, we will look at a fairly non-trivial problem and attempt to create a domain model to solve it. We will look at various approaches and discuss what trade-offs each force us to make. Along the way, we will discuss various building blocks of DDD.

WebSockets and SignalR - Building the real-time, multi-user interactive web - Chris Alcock

This session will look at the concepts and platform support for WebSockets both in .NET and web browsers, before moving on to look at the SignalR library which builds on these concepts to provide a rich and powerful experience for building web applications which involve interactions between multiple users.

Chris is a software developer and architect working on the Microsoft .NET stack, plying his trade in the tourism sector. Chris also maintains the daily .NET news link blog 'The Morning Brew' (http://themorningbrew.net/) which aims to be a reputable source for .NET news across the Microsoft and Alt.NET worlds.

Invading your brain. Intro to game development - Andrea Magnorsky

You always liked games, but haven't actually created one, years ago it was hard, now, not so much. Lets build a space invaders clone in an hour. The talk will cover:

The game loop,
Sprite movement and animation
Input management
Sound
State management

Andrea is the most amazing Lolcat finder, she also finds most biogs pretty boring, for that she tends to go and look up people online. If you look her up you'll hopefully find she is a passionate software developer that loves to code, occasionally speaks spanish and shares links to really good articles as well as funny pictures, but she wont always warn you about which one is which.

RavenDB day to day - Andrea Magnorsky

In this session we will go over some everyday tasks in Raven, in no particular order:

Setup: production and testing. Not really everyday but needs to be here.
Test strategies,
Indexes and map reduce. Understanding stale data.
Migrations
Backup
Document design

Code Shapes - Andrea Magnorsky

Analize your code with abstract shapes. You run a little program over your project that draws a diagram for each class and gives you a high level overview on the interaction within the class. As boring/fun as it sounds. Based on a post by Michael Feathers http://michaelfeathers.typepad.com/michael_feathers_blog/2010/08/testng-and-what-wed-like-code-to-be.html

What’s new in Entity Framework v5 (Beta1) - Geff Lombardi

This is the first preview of EF 5 and includes a number of key new features, including the long awaited Enum support. In this session I will demonstrate some of the key new features of Entity Framework, note this session is NOT an introduction to entity framework.

New features in Entity Framework V5:-

Enum support allows you to have enum properties in your entity classes. This new feature is available for Model, Database and Code First.
Table-Valued functions in your database can now be used with Database First.
Spatial data types can now be exposed in your model using the DbGeography and DbGeometry types. Spatial data is supported in Model, Database and Code First.
EF query Performance enhancements
Code First DB Migrations

The following new features are also available in the Entity Model Designer:-

Multiple-diagrams per model allows you to have several diagrams that visualize subsections of your overall model.
Shapes on the design surface can now have colouring applied.
Batch import of stored procedures allows multiple stored procedures to be added to the model during model creation.

.Net Collections Deep Dive - Gary Short

If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like Justin Bieber. The same predicament can befall a .Net developer if the only collection class they know well is the List<T>. In this presentation we’ll take a closer look at List<T> and highlight some of the quirks of that class before going on to examine other collection classes so that, by the end of the session, if you find yourself needing to smash Justin Bieber in the face, you’ll know exactly which collection class to use.

After leaving school Gary joined NASA where he was an engineer on the “Noxious Gases Infiltration Prevention Module” on the MK1 space suit, where he was responsible for researching the module’s success rating, thereby being one of the few men in the world who really does know how popular a fart in a space suit actually is. Upon leaving NASA Gary became an independent researcher, his specialist field of research being “What was the most popular thing before sliced bread?” Having solved that problem Gary now works as Head of Gibraltar Labs, a skunk works division of Gibraltar Software, tasked with investigating opportunities in the Social Media, Geolocation and Augmented Reality fields.

Breadth First NodeJS – Everything You Need to Know About the New Framework of Desire - Gary Short

The world of VS funded, uber-cool, set-your-hair-on-fire, no-one-under-the-age-of-30 start-ups has a new darling, and that is the NodeJS framework. I could wax lyrical about what NodeJS is, but that would rob me of the first three minutes of my session, so suffice it to say that NodeJS is a really cool framework, written in a really crappy language and I’ll be demonstrating both parts of that in my presentation. This session will provide a breadth first introduction to NodeJS and show you all aspects of the framework, enabling you to have all the knowledge required to install the framework when you get home and start work on your billion dollar idea… just don’t forget who told you about NodeJS when you make your fortune.

When two tribes go to war, one is all that you can score! So, it pays to make sure that you are on the winning side! Because of that, the military has developed a lot of useful lessons to ensure that they have the best chance of delivering that victory. I think some of these lessons are directly applicable to programming and in this session I’ll introduce you to some of them. So GET ON PARADE! And get along to this session, it’ll be fun and enlightening.

Ten years ago, if the Government had asked everyone to carry around a device so that they could tell where all of us were at any given time, there would have been a public outcry – but these days we do it through choice. Yep, that’s right, most phones and web browsers these days are capable of identifying where we are on the planet, if asked the right questions. In this presentation, I’ll be showing you how to ask those questions and trying to look into the future a little to see what the next generation of applications around Geolocation, Geosocial and Augmented Reality will be.

Spread Your Cache - Phil Pursglove

"I have yet to find a single ASP.NET application that could not benefit from using caching" ScottGu

In this session we’ll take a look at Windows Server AppFabric’s distributed caching features and what it can do for you. In particular, we’ll cover tagging and how you can use AppFabric’s features to perform complex queries against your cache, how to use AppFabric to build an Output Cache provider, and how to use the new read-through/write-behind features in AppFabric 1.1 to read and write all your data to the cache and have the cache choose when to persist to the database.

Phil is a Senior Developer at WSP Group, based in Cambridge, and has been working on the Microsoft stack for *cough cough* years. When not coding, he is often found with a sword in his hand chasing people down a fencing piste!

A Quantum of Computing - Dave McMahon

Dave McMahon provides his own look into the far future with a brief resume of the world of Quantum Computing. Sounds too Sci-Fi? Too Fantastic? Maybe, but people are today seriously researching Quantum Computing and Quantum Computing Devices. Some people claim to have already created them, others refute the claims, and the reasons why there is some controversy will be covered in this session. It'll be fun, mind-blowing and you get a glimpse of what could be in store for us in the coming years and why the future of Search may be in harnessing the power of the sub-atomic and why SSL's future prospects may not be so rosy ...

Relativistic Computing - Dave McMahon

In this session Dave gives us a Relativity 101 and then goes on to explain how some computer scientists hve proposed making use of General Relativity and it's bizaare effects to boost the computing speed of computers and to break the 'Turing' Barrier so to speak. No previous knowledge of relativity is expected or required, just a very open mind!!

Bringing your data to Life using Visio Services - Dave McMahon

We’ll show how using Visio Services you can bring that extra wow factor to your data using data bound Diagrams, and how you can combine various data sources on a single Visio Diagram to create a Silverlight Dashboard simply and easily and how to combine that dashboard with other SharePoint elements. We’ll focus on how to create a data Connection Class to talk to a Custom Data source. The Point? That way you can plug in multiple data sources from anywhere to create your dashboard. We’ll talk about authentication but most of all we’ll talk about how easy it is to create a web page which brings your data to life!

Scripting SharePoint with Powershell - Dave McMahon

Working on one of the biggest ever SharePoint Projects in the UK was quite a challenge, not so much from the size of Production Farm used, more from the shear number of Farms required to support Production. The work over a period of about 5 months involved building as near identical Farms as possible every one to two weeks. These were BI farms too and required end-to-end Kerberos configuration for Reporting Services, Excel Services and PerformancePoint as well as a PowerPivot Deployment. In this session Dave McMahon will talk through the iterative approach of how a number of Powershell and Windows Scripts were built up to allow a consistent build of farms for the projects. No previous knowledge of Powershell is assumed!

Building a Silverlight BI Dashboard - Dave McMahon

Bringing together a bunch of the latest technologies to make a SharePoint site come alive is an exciting process and this is exactly what Ridgian did with one of their clients who wanted a BI solution integrated with mapping technology. Blending a mix of SharePoint/Silverlight/Bing Maps/PRISM Framework/Analysis Services/Reporting Services/Performance Point Server together to produce a stunning set of visuals for the users to work with. This solution is now a flagship system for the client who themselves plan to 'sell' their services through it and to expand it into all areas of their organisation. In this session Dave McMahon of Ridgian and SharePoint MVP will discuss the integration issues encountered and solved when blending Third-Party Mapping Solutions with Custom Built Silverlight Controls built using the PRISM framework.

MicroORMs: Making data access fun - Ian Russell

Do you ever get to the stage where you are fed up of writing loads of boilerplate ADO.NET code or having to jump through an ever-increasing number of hoops with an ORM? Do you wish that there was something easy to use, with minimal configuration, that just works? You are not alone; Come and see how a MicrORM could be just what you have been looking for!

NoSql Document Databases: Why would you want to use one? - Ian Russell

If you write apps that store data, is your natural instinct to jump to SQL Server without considering any other options? If it is, then you could be missing out on one of the biggest growth areas of recent times; the document database. In this session, I will dive into why you might want to use one and how to get the best out of it.

NSubstitute: A mocking framework for the 21st century - Ian Russell

Can you tell the difference between fakes, stubs, mocks etc? If you use NSubstitute, you don't have to care! In this session I will show you how easy mocking can be using NSubstitute.

Get in line please there is a queue here - Chris Hay

In this session we look at the various queuing options available to you for queuing. We'll look at the old and the boring (MSMQ) The unknown and unloved (SQL Broker) The fast, open and shiny (Redis) And some of the other open source ones like RabbitMQ. We might even look at some situations where you might need queues, which patterns you might wanna follow and which queueing solution might be most appropriate to you.

Redis the new black - Chris Hay

Redis is one of the coolest things ever. Seriously, i cannot say this enough. Redis is cool, Redis is cool, Redis is cool, Redis is cool, Redis is cool, Redis is cool, Redis is cool, Redis is cool, Redis is cool.
In this session we'll do the whole 101 thing with Redis. What is it, Why should I use it, blah de blah. You know what a 101 is. But as always we'll do a 101 in-style. Seriously though, v.cool product and you really should be using it :)

We don't need your money, money, money - Chris Hay

So this is a strange session to do. It's not really .net related. But I kinda think it's relevant. In this session we'll explore the world of virtual money. We'll look at Bitcoin, Namecoin, Linden Dollars, Liberty Reserve, Dwolla etc. And if you haven't heard of this lot , you probably wanna go to this session, cause I think it's gonna be kind of relevant if you're building commerce type stuff. This session is the culmination of me scratching my head and other things whilst trying to figure out how all this fits together.

Taking it from side line to full time - Tim Gaunt

Taking a business from a side line to full time income is easier than you might think. I’ll cover the basics of starting with an idea and growing it into your main source of income.

Growing Pains – what WAS born at the barn? - Tim Gaunt

Our Born In The Barn recruitment drive was a hot topic at the DDD South West 3 but nearly a year on what have we learnt about taking on your first full time employee? Find out what worked, what didn’t and how we conquered the recruitment agents to play our ace card.

Ten Top Tips Towards Ten Years Of Terrific Trading Triumph - Tim Gaunt

After ten years of The Site Doctor, get the low down on my top ten tips on growing a business and how you can use them to break free of the 9-to-5.

What is customer loyalty, how to measure, monitor and leverage it - Tim Gaunt

Everyone wants more customers but what about the customers you already have? Learn how to identify what loyalty is, how you can earn it from your customers and most importantly how you can leverage it to become an instant superstar in your managers and clients eyes.

Clients don’t bite - Tim Gaunt

Clients are humans too, knowing how to find them, talk to them and keep them on-board is the key to a long-term loving relationship. Get the lowdown on how to find more clients, talk to them without panicking and nurture them for a long term prosperous relationship.