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.

Achieving a truly real-time web application with the stateless HTTP protocol can be challenging.  Retrieval of new data with web-client has traditionally been achieved by continuously polling the web-server.

In order to accomplish a more sophisticated solution, clients can use long-polling with AJAX or web-sockets. Combined with JQuery and JSrender, we can easily create a true real-time experience, where data is pushed to all clients immediately.

This session will demonstrate how to create an asynchronous web application based on the publish-subscribe pattern with .NET back-end. We will cover the basic architecture, background and the publish-subscribe model. The main focus will be on getting up and running with your first real-time asynchronous app, which will be based on MVC4/SignalR/JQuery/JSrender.

[Co-presenting with Simon Ince]

Stuart and Simon have worked with a wide range of customers building with ASP.NET MVC and have seen a wide range of ways to build a site with it. Attend this session if you want to find out how not to build a site in ASP.NET MVC!



Links from the session are at : http://bit.ly/ddd10-mvc-gone-wrong

Visual Studio Lightswitch 2011 (catchy!) is the new Access - at least in terms of writing Line of Business applications. 

ASP.NET MVC has quickly become a popular framework for .NET web developers, but there is often a perception that it is quite manual and slow to work with. Do you share this view? Do you want to find out how to avoid having more attributes than properties in your models? Do you want ASP.NET MVC to read your mind? If you answered yes to any of these questions (except maybe the last one) then attend this session to find out how you can add your own conventions on top of those the ASP.NET MVC, and how to get ASP.NET MVC to do even more for you.

This session is different from most other sessions at a developer conference. It is aimed at project managers, team leaders and developers. The goal is to provide sufficient awareness of internationalization issues to allow attendees to plan a strategy for internationalizing a .NET Framework application. The problem faced by many projects is that there is generally a low awareness of the issues involved in internationalization and this leads to projects bolting on internationalization solutions as the project develops and as the team members become aware of internationalization issues. The purpose of this session is to introduce all of the concepts which require a decision to be made. It can be regarded as an upfront checklist for project managers and software architects. This session covers the issues, potential solutions and their pros and cons so that decisions can be made before a line of code is written.

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

Dependency injection is a technique that helps you build loosely coupled code but do you have to use an inversion of control container to be able to do use the technique?

In this session I’ll contrast performing dependency injection without a container to how you do it with a container and what if any benefit there is to each way.

If you're developing an internet facing application, chances are your users are distributed around the globe. Providing the highest level of service to everyone means that you need to move parts of your application as close to your users as possible. In this talk I'll go over some simple techniques that you can easily implement, such as using a CDN and sharding your data, to help you deliver a fantastic experience to everyone.

Want to develop Web Applications for IIS using Web Matrix and Visual Studio but don't want to have to run with administrative priveleges all the time.  Would you like to be able to make use of IIS 7-8 features on operating systems from Windows XP all the way through to Windows 8?  If so, let me introduce you to IIS Express a lightweight developer server which implements the core features of IIS  In this session we'll look at how to get started with IIS Express, learn some tips and tricks and we'll take a look at what's coming in future versions.

Do you find deploying updates to your web applications a nightmare, take a lot longer than you would like?  In this session we'll look at how we can make use of MS Deploy (Web Deploy) to make this entire process a lot simpler and take away the stress of deploying application updates.

Back in 2009 the Software Craftsmanship manifesto was published that wanted to focus not only on the preferred practices of the agile manifesto but improving professional software development.

In this session will look at the manifesto and try answering the questions:

·         Why would you want to be considered a craftsman?

·         What does it mean to be a craftsman?

·         How could you become a craftsman?

The aim is that when you leave the session you can answer these questions for yourself.

The new Azure has arrived and it's freakin' amazing, there I said it.

Let's look at what it takes to build an app, get it running on azure and consuming the services available there so we can become web scale millionaires.

Let's see what Microsoft are shipping to help us with this, and talk about why this is exciting.

During my last few talks I was surprised to learn how few developers are aware of the power of Microsoft OneNote, one of the products in the Microsoft Office suite. OneNote is an advanced digital notebook that I use for accessing my personal notes through SkyDrive or Office 365, as well as a shared notebook that agile teams use for keeping track of who is doing what. In fact, those who practice Test Driven Development will be surprised how essential OneNote is.

In addition to OneNote, many other tools and add-ons exist that can really boost your productivity. Some you may know, some you don't. But do you already get the most out of tools like NuGet, GhostDoc, ReSharper, Notepad++, and many others? If you're in doubt, come check out my session. I'lI show you what I use to be as efficient as possible in my job as a professional developer.

In the recent June update to Windows Azure, Microsoft introduced Windows Azure Web Sites.  In this session we'll take a look at this powerful but simple hosting platform which enables developers to rapidly build and deploy everything from a simple ASP site all the way up to a high scale line of business applications.

The social gaming landscape often paints a picture of cloud computing, NoSQL databases, and PHP!

Windows 8 is the most ambitious release of Windows since the release of Windows 95. 

With Windows 8, Microsoft has introduced the Windows Runtime and a new application development model – Metro Style Apps.

In this session, we will use the latest and greatest version of the OS (Should be RTM by September) and explore how you can target this new platform with XAML and C#.

Expect WinRT specifics, Metro Style Controls, C# Language Enhancements, Visual Studio 11, Blend and much much more.

Javascript is no longer "just for the browser", with document databases such as MongoDB, application frameworks like NodeJS and front end libraries such as JQuery, it's now possible to "properly" architect end to end, enterprise scale applications entirely in Javascript. In this presentation I'll walk you through archictecting such an application so that, by the end of this session, you'll have a far greater appreciation for the Javascript language.

F# - that strange beast tucked under 'Other languages' in your Visual Studio setup.  You don't know much about it, but you are sure of one thing:

"It won't ever get used here!"

This talk gives you the tools to get past the 'not here' barrier:

- Instant gratification: Practical wins - right here, right now!

- Guerilla tactics: become a Functional Trotskyist.

- Epic win: How we coded a game changing calculation engine, in a couple of evenings, while watching the telly.

This talk is about actors, what they are, and why they're a great building block for concurrency. Taking advantage of multiple cores is difficult and fraught with errors, but actors make parallel code easy, elegant and comprehensible. Actors require asynchronous programming, so C# 5 makes writing actors much simpler.

I'm not a designer - I can't draw a straight line with a ruler, but since becoming involved in software development for Natural User Interfaces I have been involved in many successful NUI software projects.

This session will explore NUI and UX, showing the art of the possible with great new touch technologies from the Samsung SUR40, to the Microsoft Surface with Windows 8 including how to choose the right platform for your touch experience.

There's a new version of Windows Phone coming. But what does this mean for developers?

What's new?

What's changed?

How do you upgrade an existing Windows Phone 7.x app?

How do you support WP7.x & WP8 with one codebase?

How do you develop for Windows Phone and Windows 8?



Come to this session for the answers to all these questions and many more! ;)

We all seem wary of waterfall – too much process with little actual code. Well, let’s think about what Agile is becoming? How much of Agile today is about process, process, process? Agile puts customer value at the top yet the Agile practices we follow seem to not. Bold statement? Think about it – if a customer requests a change, can we cater to it without saying “It’s not designed that way”? Are we afraid of adding things - or even experimenting - because of the numerous tests that we will have to maintain? Do we spend time building up automation to the point where weeks go by and the customer sees nothing? Do we have technical tasks the business has to pay for but doesn’t understand why they’re doing so? All of the steps in agile that we follow have costs associated with them. And in many cases, those costs have become part of the Agile process that in many ways go against a lot of the agile manifesto. In this session, we look at some of them. And kill some sacred cows in the process.

Starting with ruby on rails and getting something small working is really quite easy. But what if you building something more substantial with lots of moving parts and lots of business logic. Chances are the way you did it the first time probably won't work, so how do you do it. 

In this talk I'll bring together all the recent advice coming out from the expert ruby community and explain where these things have come from and why you should be using them on you next money making idea.

In this session I will go over my top list of common misconceptions and mistakes I see regularly made in SQL Server.

With "ReSTful" frameworks a plenty it's often tricky to know which one to use, and sometimes you realise you chose wrong too late to change your mind!

In this session I will explore a few of the frameworks available on the .net framework looking at the pros, any cons and demonstrating a simple project built to exercise some of the common features!

Frameworks you will likely see will be ASP.net MVC, ASP.net WebAPI, WCF ReST, OpenRasta, Nancy & Simple.Web.  Others may make an appearance too!

We're writing more and more JS at the moment.

JavaScript is weird. Yet it is increasingly important. Not only limited to the browser, it can now be used for apps that run on servers, phones, tablets and even desktops. It has its own little world of weirdness that can catch you out when you least expect it. In this session, we will look at some of the idiosyncrasies that are all too easy to run into. We will see why they represent what can only be considered as strange behaviour. And we will look at what we can do to overcome them. You’ve seen the WAT, now here’s the why.

Linq2Rest combines uniform interface of REST with a known query syntax from OData. This promotes consistency and discoverability when it comes to fetching data from the web.

The Multilingual App Toolkit is a free Visual Studio add-in from Microsoft. It translates, packages and unpackages resources for round tripping with localizers. This session illustrates its use for localizing Windows 8 Metro applications and shows how developers and localizers can work together to build localized applications.

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, in particular focusing on "MiniProfiler" and "Dapper".

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.

Uncle Bob Martin once said about VI "20 years ago I couldn't wait to get off VI. VI???? What the hell???" but you know what, VIM is actually really fun to develop with and is really productive, but with its modal editing environment it can be a scary at first use.

In this talk we I try and take the initial sting out of getting started with vim, how to navigate documents and files with speed and edit documents in half the time of a standard text editor. I will also cover some essential plug-ins for refactoring, auto-complete and may other that can make VIM rival any IDE available today.

(RailsConf 2011: Robert Martin Keynote http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mslMLp5bQD0) 

Ember.js is one of the new league of javascript frameworks bringing MVC to the front end of your application.

In this talk we will look at the basics of ember.js including the differences in the MVC model that you maybe used to with ASP.NET MVC or rails, moving business logic to the front end, communicating with a backend server and what ever else seems important.

In this session we'll have a look at the new Raspberry Pi, examine what ships out of the box and look at some of the cool things you can do with it. Who knows, I may even let you touch it. :-)

So you’ve written your ASP.NET MVC application and you want it to work in another language ? Then this session is for you. World-Readiness is all of the work that a developer needs to do to globalize an application and make it localizable (i.e. capable of being localized). In this session we will cover localizing HTML and HTML Helpers, localizing and globalizing Data Annotations, localizing and globalizing JavaScript and localizing URLs. No previous experience of ASP.NET localization is required.

Agile, agile, agile, thats all you hear.  You know about TDD, CI and all the other lovely technical practices but perhaps getting a form of agile working practice is proving a little more difficult.

Enter Kanban! A lightweight working practice to help you visualise and track your work.

Come to the session and I'll introduce you to Kanban, show you how it works, how you can use it and customize it to suit your own situation.

IoC – there are containers for that, right? They do all sorts of magic, don’t they? You wire up some dependencies here and there and by some kool runtime reflection, they figure out what goes where. And it all works quite well….until it doesn’t. And it’s all very simple…until you need to be aware of certain conventions and rules they enshrine. AoP frameworks – they make our lives so much easier. They rewrite our IL so that our aspects get weaved into the final binaries. That’s so awesome. Wait…what? A tool is going to change your binaries – the binaries you wrote all your unit tests for – and we think that’s brilliant? BDD – natural language driven outside-in tests for business users. And radical tools that use reflection and regular expressions to generate human readable …erm… test names. Would you ever consider using reflection and regular expressions as the first choice for your applications?

In this session, we will look at how we can leverage functional pipelines for all three of the things mentioned above. And all with zero magic, with pure and simple C# code - in a way that doesn’t require an instruction manual to use. 

Gadgeteer is a rapid prototyping platform for small embedded hardware devices, that has the advantages of .NET programming and simple assembly of electronics from a kit.

Using the software tools you know - C# and Visual Studio - you can use Gadgeteer to easily construct both simple and sophisticated devices.

This session will explore what is possible with Gadgeteer.

I'm a massive fan of C#. In most ways I think it's a lovely language. It has its rough spots though, and in this talk I'll use those as examples of how languages could be designed better.

In meeting the challenge of the iPad, Microsoft is rebooting how we build software for Windows. Metro-style is the new process model in Windows, but asks a great deal of developers. Months of confusing messages and seemingly weird strategy changes all come to a head as the market decided whether Windows 8 and Windows RT makes sense to people on the ground.

In this talk, Matthew Baxter-Reynolds takes us through the history that brings us the era of Metro-style and details the opportunities and challenges ahead for developers looking to work with the Microsoft stack.

NodeJS has become the darling of the startup and VC space over the last year or so. In this presentation we'll deconstruct a network appliance and see what makes NodeJS such a cool framework. We'll also answer that perennial question, "how do you deal with IO bound problems using NodeJS?"

Passwords are surrounding us, thousands of websites are asking us to register every day. At some point we tend to lose 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 altogether.

This session will introduce you to the OAuth components new being part of the ASP.NET MVC 4.0. I will show you how to get rid of your individual password storage and start using  Live ID, Google or Facebook to authenticate your users. We will look at how to create OAuth authentication for a brand new website and how to modify the existing one. Finally we will look how to achieve the same in older versions of the MVC framework.

In this session I'll run through converting OS post code data into a Geo-Spatial Data type, then explore some of the possibilities

In this session we will explore the key concepts of new 'HTML5' WebSockets standard, looking at its implementation on both the client and server, before moving on to look at the use of SignalR for connectivity and RPC between server and client, looking at both browser and alternative client implementation.  To conclude the session will explore where these two technologies meet, looking at the use of WebSockets by SignalR.

A test involving an SQL database is an integration test, right?

Not any more!

Find out how to put together fine-grained, performant unit tests of database artefacts using F#, FSUnit and a little bit of pixie dust.

- Creating and tearing down a database with no residue.
- Bringing the database up to a specific schema version.
- Writing and executing FSUnit unit tests.
- Test driving your schema.

This talk is for C# programmers who are curious about F#, a new multi-paradigm programming language in Visual Studio 2010.

In: test driven development, classes and functions

Out: maths, monads and moth-eaten jumpers

Expect plenty of practical examples with live code samples, including interop between C# and F#.

Most applications need to use dates and times in some form or other. Unfortunately, it's all too easy to write code which looks correct, but is actually subtly broken.

This session is about the efforts put into Self Service Business Intelligence in SQL Server 2012 and the tools allowing us to achieve that.
We will look into PowerPivot, Power View and SSRS. The traditional Business Intelligence versus the "New" Business Intelligence.
The session is filled with demos and best practices.

Come with me as I trace through my career from junior noob to senior developer. I'll cover the core practices I've picked up along the way that I use every day, why I value them, and why you should value them if you don't already.

OMG MAKING GAMES IN THE BROWSER. 

10 reasons your sites might be suffering from not treating the static content on your site in the same way you treat the dynamic and 10 easy ways to address them. Covers compression, optimization, security, minification and more.

Apparently, Nancy is a lightweight web framework.

Every time you execute a piece of SQL code against SQL Server a query plan is generated and this query plan contains an Aladdin's cave of information about what is going on behind the scenes.

Using lots of demos and examples, in this session we will take a look at what query plans are, how to read and interpret them and why they are one of the most useful tools available for diagnosing and dissecting your SQL code. 

This session has something for everybody, whether you've never even heard of a query plan before or you look at them frequently and want to deepen your understanding

Veracity is a new apache licensed distributed version control system by the nice folks at Source Gear, this session is planned to walk around Veracity and compare it to both Git / Github and Mercury. Existing DVCS users will learn something new as part of the comparison process.

Veracity also provides a wiki, bug and work tracking along with scrum burndown charts. I will be showing how to setup a CI server that ties in to veracitys build tracking on both linux and windows, making veracity into a low end TFS replacement.

I'll be showing how to use JavaScript and veracitys JSON interfaces to extend veracitys functionality.

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 keyframe animations.

• Discover the syntax (phew it's not so diffy after all)
• Where can we use it? (woohoo it degrades gracefully)
• Most importantly: Know when to use them!
• JS vs CSS techniques

Do you really understand SQL Servers’ Concurrency behaviour? Are you sure that Transactions are an ALL or NOTHING operation? Do you believe Read operations cannot start a Transaction? Do you really know if READ_UNCOMMITTED is safe for reporting? Is being Optimistic *really* better than being Pessimistic? Is SQL Server 2012 be the solution to all our problems or our worst nightmare? I look forward to you joining me in this very revealing and thought provoking session where I will provide answers to these questions and more and make you wish you had known about all of this sooner.

You are a good Software Developer. You build great web applications in exactly the right way. You fully understand the reasoning behind that architectural choice and design decision. But I bet you don’t operate it or maintain it. There’s someone else that does that, right?

Well, I decided to switch to the other side and ran a Web Operations team for a large scale, web application - serving hundreds of thousands of site visitors and mobile app sessions worldwide on a daily basis. Through that experience, I’d like to share with you the 5 most valuable lessons from those trenches that make me a better Software Engineer.

A lot will be common sense, but coupled with some war stories and some real code examples, we’ll have an honest conversation and hopefully show how a DevOps mindset can help you be a better Software Engineer.

The Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCAT) is a lightweight load testing tool designed to measure the performance of a web server in a controlled environment.  WCAT can be used to simulate very small to very high workloads for either a single web site or multiple web sites.  In this session I'll walk through how to use the tool and how to interpret the results to help to identify performance or scaling issues before release.

As companies move away from using traditional hosting methods which allow for the storage of session state in memory and to more of a distributed distributed based model many developers are having to look at alternative options for storage of session data.  In this session we'll take a look at some of the options available, what is involved in making use of them and identify the advantages and disadvantages each approach.

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.

Do your users constantly suffer from a poor experience while waiting for your web application to warm up?  Would you like to provide a fantastic experience for your users whether they are the very first user to access your site/application or the thousandth.  The IIS team have released the Application Initialization feature for IIS 7.5 and IIS 8.0 which helps to eliminate the bad user experience which occurs when an application is first accessed and not "warmed up".  In this session we'll start with a simple implementation of this feature and move up to more advanced scenarios making use of the URL Rewrite module to provide more options.

Simple.Web is a lightweight, object-oriented framework for building RESTful web applications and services.

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.

All too often large models are used to represent application data. And layers of abstraction used to prevent the emergence of what is known as a Big Ball of Mud. People use things like repositories, services, IoC containers and other strange mechanisms for even the most trivial applications – all in the name of avoiding that ball of mud. And this pursuit takes considerable effort. The teams have to deal with complicated versioning problems and often this leads to massive rewrites of entire products – thus negating the very reason of loose coupling. Can we not avoid this? And are balls of mud really such a bad idea? Can we not have architecture that lives on rather than dies every year or so?

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

(Yep still a much requested session for those jQuery noobs)

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".

In this session we will run through the history of SQL Server Management Studio Add-ins, then goto through the step by step process of creating an Add-in for SQL Server Management Studio 2012.

We will look at some of the cool things you can do and break.

This session is for people who have some C# knownledge and want to extend SQL Server Management Studio.

Those of you who know me personally will know that I have a passion for social network analysis (SNA), it's a topic I research both in my spare time and professionally, as head of Gibraltar Labs.

In this talk Paul will look at team dynamics and how team formation impact the velocity of a team. We will also look at how the teams formation affects the quality of the code produced by the team.

Test Driven Development is a phenonemon every developer should be aware of by now. I can't believe I've been developing professionally without it, and have been using it in every project since I discovered it 5 years ago. But, applying TDD on UI logic can be challenging, even if you apply patterns like MVC, MVP or Presentation Model. Creating readable and maintainable unit tests that drive a Presentation, ViewModel or Controller is a big maintenance burden.

That's why our ASP.NET WebForms/MVC project jumped on the SpecFlow and WaTiN bandwagon. Using this beautiful combination we can now smoke test the overall behavior of the system, in addition to the large coverage of automated unit tests. Granted, this isn't the same as Acceptance Test Driven Development, but those smoke tests have been really worth their money. The functional abstraction that SpecFlow offers has proven to be a valuable aspect that allows us to keep our UI tests maintainable. In fact, the Gherkin matra Given-When-Then has even found its way to our test professionals.

During this talk, I'd like to share some of the basic principles behind SpecFlow and the most important aspects of WaTiN. Just like with TDD, there's a whole lot you can do wrong. That's why I want to focus on some of the best practices that worked for us. Anyway, if you're serious about building high quality products and system, check out what I have to share.

An intro to the world of responsive design for websites.

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

A relation database, document database and key value store walk into a bar. The next day none of them could remember anything. But seriously, we often talk about using the right tool for the job and these days with so many options available there's no need to try to stuff everything into SQL. In this talk I'll show how you can use different types of data store for the things they're good at to make you're life easier and your applications better. And I promise I won't tell any jokes.

CQRS and Event Sourcing are two of the latest buzzwords in the community. In this session, we will look at what they are and what benefits they can bring to your applications. We will discuss different approaches that can be used to leverage these patterns. We will also discuss pros and cons so that you can make an informed decision as to whether these patterns are appropriate for your applications. Finally, we will look at a simple sample application – with all the plumbing needed in one 250 line .cs file that you can use for your projects with little or no modification. 

Riak is a very interesting Key-Value NOSql store. Built on the notion of combining many small, cheap parts for a durable whole, Riak loves and speaks the web. It is fault tolerant - to the point that a failed node is not an emergency. In this session, we will look at this extremely flexible database - what benefits it provides, what its drawbacks are and when you should consider using it. We will also look at how we can use it from our .NET applications. 

SQL Server Data Tools, Database Projects (SSDT-DP) is a declarative and ubiquitous model that includes all the phases of database development, maintenance, and update inside Visual Studio. It is a rich SQL Server development environment with full Visual Studio integration, so database and application developers can work on SQL Server or SQL Azure projects in Visual Studio. SSDT-DP includes declarative-based tools and designers that can be used in online and offline development.

In this session I will show you how to use SSDT and lay out the general guidelines for upgrading from Visual Studio 2010 Database Projects to SSDT-DP.

This session will also cover the most common behavior and breaking changes while upgrading projects from Visual Studio 2010 Database Projects to SSDT-DP.

This talk is a look behind the curtain, at the source code and architecture of Simple.Web. I'll explain some of the design decisions; share some cool coding tricks I learned while building the thing; and demonstrate how to extend the framework for your specific requirements.

The world of neuroscience changed over the last 5 years. Neuroheadsets (headsets that read brainwaves) became affordable and accessible. Neuroscience is no longer confined the realm of huge research budgets and professors in lab coats. It is accessible to regular developers. This session illustrates a neuroheadset that reads brain waves and uses a C# API to allow developers to recognise facial expressions, emotions and cognitive thought – that is, the headset can read basic, deliberate conscious thought. Although the headset is aimed at the gaming market the potential for the physically impaired is considerable. Come and see the potential of today’s Brain Computer Interfaces.

A good developer should always follow the DRY principle. Why is it then we ignore the elephant in the room that is CSS. Personally, I get twitchy if a class reaches 130 lines, yet we still tolerate CSS with 2k lines and endless repetition. There has been plenty of focus on writing better Javascript, but when it comes to CSS, we don’t seem to care much.

SASS and LESS both address the common problems with writing and maintaining CSS. And let’s just say from the start, this talk is not about arguing which one is best. This talk is about demonstrating how SASS+compass can save you time and make your CSS clean.

The session will cover the basic setup, SCSS syntax and introduction into imports, mixins and selector inheritance. I will show you how you can do spriting in seconds and deal with media queries neatly. All that using real-world examples from past and current projects.

The explosive take-up of NuGet clearly demonstrates just how valuable a packaging system for .Net can be. 

SQLite is natively supported on every mobile platform, apart from Windows Phone and Metro-style. In this talk, Matthew Baxter-Reynolds will take you through how to use it in Metro-style. (What he shows you will also work on Windows Phone - you know, as a bonus.)

Learn both the basics of how to get it up and running, and best practice tips and tricks in order to not go mad whilst doing so.

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:

1.       Lightswitch is the new Silverlight based application builder, you’ve probably heard how bad this is but let’s see what its actually like.

2.       Asp.Net Dynamic Data can provide a working Asp.Net web forms site in minutes.

3.       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.

A thought-provoking, fact-crammed whirlwind open topped bus tour of *your new mindset for tackling every device from 2" to 100". Everything you need to know if you site is going to cope with the ridiculous range of devices now hitting us.

"An essential tour of the mobile development world: Differences; challenges; solutions. This session crams in masses of tips and info for you to ponder. And all presented in George's typically ridiculous style."

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
• Focused functionality, different interactions
• It's all about the content
• Tapping, not clicking. And certainly not hovering
• Web / Hybrid / Native / App / Fixed / Fluid / Responsive / Grid
• You'll no longer say silly things like:
•   - "Go on, just dumb down your website to look ok on a diddy phone"
•   - "Mobile First? No way, we've got too much to display"
•   - "Why so much fuss about mobile? Our site works fine on the CEO's iPhone."
• Did I mention content?

Glimpse allows you to take a never before seen look inside your server. Instead of forcing you to go line by line inside your code, Glimpse does the work for you. It tells you exactly what's going on with each request. It's able to summarize your server data in a way that facilitates ease of understanding. Glimpse is the tool that not only lets you follow your code, it combines and displays your data in such a way that the debugging process that once took hours can now take minutes.

After releasing Glimpse at Mix11, Glimpse has become a tool that is used daily by tens of thousands of developers around the world. Learn how to use Glimpse to reveal what is happening within your ASP.NET MVC and WebForms sites. See what tools are included out of the box and see how you can easily extend it to suit your needs. For more information on the Glimpse Project, see http://getglimpse.com.

By now, you’ve seen the introduction talks. You know how to develop your first Windows 8 Metro-style app or maybe you’ve already started building some. But then things start to get a bit more complicated.
That’s where this session comes in! We won’t be touching on the basics, but we’ll explore topics you don’t hear about in most talks. We’ll see how to connect with services, what data binding options we have, how MVVM can be implemented, how local and roaming storage works, how you can integrate with the Live SDK for single sign-in, how push notifications work and much more.
Fasten your seatbelt, this demo-driven session will take you to the next level!
Level 350
Technologies: Windows 8, Metro, WinRT, XAML

Many of you who have dipped their toes in functional programming may have heard of an obscure term called Monads. While they are used frequently in functional languages, the idea is actually a mathematical concept. And the same idea can be used in mainstream languages as well (be it will a little less syntactic sugar). The main roadblock in understanding monads seems to be the requirement of knowing a functional language well enough to follow through the description. This need not be the case. In this session we will look at what monads are, and use them in commonly used languages like JavaScript / C#.