Upcoming TechEd Talks

It will definitely be a busy TechEd for me this year. I'll be giving six sessions at TechEd Developers Orlando in June, as well as spending a lot of time in the TLCs and at the RD booth..

The sessions are as follows:

Tue, 3 June, 11:30-12:30 AM: Vista Ask the Experts area

Doing Q&A on selecting the right client technology.

Tue, 3 June, 1:15-2:30 PM: WIN315 - Data Binding in WPF

This talk will cover the A-Z of data binding capabilities in WPF. I'll start by talking about the different kinds of data sources you can bind to and the interfaces those data sources need to support to have high fidelity data binding. Then I'll go through what data contexts are and how they allow you to flow data into you UI in a more decoupled fashion. Then I'll get into Binding objects and how you use them to hook up the data binding to your controls, and the many capabilities they expose. Then I cover navigating and filtering your data with collection views, and finally finish up with data validation.

Tue, 3 June, 4:00-5:00 PM: Vista Ask the Experts area

Doing Q&A on WPF Data Binding

Wed, 4 June, 10:15-11:30 AM: ARC304 - Selecting the Right Client Technology

This talk covers the spectrum of options that exist for building client UI applications today, helping you to make the right choice when getting started with a new UI application. I start by talking about the decision between smart client and browser based applications, drawing out the pros and cons of each approach. Then I get into each of the current technologies including WPF, Windows Forms, ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, and Silverlight, and talk about the pros/cons, differences/similarities between each of those technologies.

Thu, 5 June, 4:30-5:45 PM: WIN301 - Windows Presentation Foundation in Windows Forms and Vice Versa

This talk covers the interoperability story between Windows Forms and WPF, which is a great one. I start with the motivations of why you would want to use interop as opposed to building a homogenous application in one or the other technology. Then I show how to embed WPF controls in a Windows Forms application, and Windows Forms controls in a WPF application. If it were just about the code required to do those things, I could give this talk in about 10 minutes. But of course, there are always other considerations and hazards to be aware of when doing interop between technology stacks, so I then let you know what those hazards are and how to address them.

Fri, 6 Jun, 8:30-9:45 AM: WIN306 Building Differentiated UI Applications Using Composite Windows Presentation Foundation

I'll be joining Glenn Block from p&p to code monkey for this session on using Prism to build composite WPF solutions. I've been working with the team part time building this, so Glenn was nice enough to invite me to help present.

Fri, 6 June, 1:00-2:15 PM: SOA305 - Getting Workflows Running and Talking in Your Applications

This talk covers the hosting and communications aspects of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). You will learn how to set up the host environment for running workflows, how to leverage persistence and tracking, how to pass parameters into a workflow and get them back out when it completes, and how to make calls from the host application into the workflow. I'll also briefly discuss making service calls into and out from a workflow, but don't demo those in details because my TLC session (listed next) covers doing that in detail.

Fri, 6 June, 2:45-4:00 PM: SOA08-TLC - Developing Service Oriented Workflows

This talk shows you how to leverage the new WCF related capabilities in WF 3.5 to build workflows that particpate directly in your service oriented architecture. You'll see how to use the Receive and Send activities, the context bindings that take care of automatically routing incoming messages to the right workflow instance, and the WorkflowServiceHost class to host your workflows. This is a TLC session down on the show floor, and the rule of the game there is max interaction, and minimum if any PowerPoint. I in fact have only two slides planned, a couple architecture diagrams to couch the discussion, and the rest will be all code demos showing you how to really leverage this stuff.

I also plan to spend an hour after each session in the associated TLC area, and then most of the rest in the RD booth.

If you are going to be at TechEd, I hope to see you at one of my sessions. If so, stop by and say hi and let me know you are one of the few who actually read my blog. :)