Sessions

You may have heard that we should not estimate at all in Agile Projects. Although this may be a valid option, it is not realistic for many projects.

So what do we do? In this session we will review the different types of estimating that are done on both traditional and agile projects. The second half of the session will be an hands on activity where we will break into teams and estimate three well known projects using the following methods: Task Based, Deliverable Based, Planning Poker

At the end we will compile and review the results of estimating across all the teams and analyze the different methods and results.

You will see the pros and cons of the different methods and understand how you can best determine how to fit the estimating methods to your situation.

This session will present and review hands on practices on how a database modelling can be integrated with Agile techniques. These practices will apply to Application databases, Operational Data Stores, and Data Warehouses. Terry will share experiences with recent projects on how Operational Data Stores and Data Warehouses have successfully been delivered in iterations.

User story mapping is a technique popularized by Jeff Patton that will cause you to revoke your membership in the Flat Backlog Society. A user story map allows you to see the big picture in your backlog; acts as a visual project plan; provides a technique for gathering scope and stories fast; supports better user story slicing, prioritization, and scoping; and helps you to build the right thing first. In this session you will find out what a user story map is and how to create one with your team immediately after the conference.

This presentation will tell the story of 4 organizations in Winnipeg that have adopted agile. Through their stories you will hear: • Tips and patterns these organizations used to help their teams adopt agile. • The failure and frustration stories that led these teams to explore agile. • The before and after picture of each organization - how agile has benefited them. • The science behind celebrating failure.

This brief introduction to Command Query Responsibility Segregation will break your brain and give you a really nasty rug burn on your left elbow. We’ll discuss traditional CRUD models, the staleness of data, collaboration and, most importantly, when to not use CQRS.

Come to the only session where you not only get to keep your phone turned on you have to. We are going to build some awesome applications which make use of text messaging and phone APIs to prank your friends, get you out of meetings and, I guess, help out your business. No phone required, but you’ll miss out on some of the fun.

Come to this presentation and learn about the myriad NoSQL options that predated the modern relational database. After a stroll down memory lane, we’ll go over several modern NoSQL options and why RDBMS's just don't work in certain cases. We'd love to end with a discussion around the lessons history can provide, and when NoSQL makes sense.

Behavior Driven Design (BDD) is a way to create focused tests through collaboration between product owners, developers, and testers. SpecFlow is a tool that employs natural human language to create executable NUnit or MSTest tests.

In this session, Charles Nurse, Senior Architect at DotNetNuke Corporation will show how to use SpecFlow to write and execute BDD tests within Visual Studio and how to seamlessly integrate BDD into your current specification gathering and programming processes. Depending on accepted usage pattern in your team BDD can act as a successor or supplement of Test Driven Development practice.

Cloud, Mobile, Social – CMS redefined. In its latest iteration (v6) DotNetNuke supports all three of these emerging trends. With over 6 million downloads and 600,000 sites in production, DotNetNuke is the most deployed ASP.NET Web Application, and with over 800,000 registered users it is the single largest Open Source Community in the .NET world.

In this session, Charles Nurse - Senior Architect for DotNetNuke Corporation – the creators of DotNetNuke, will demonstrate what this means for the average ASP.NET developer and how a knowledge of DotNetNuke development is an important skill to add to your repertoire. We will explore what the core DotNetNuke Framework provides and how you can hook into the product to extend it, either for your own use or for distribution as an open source or commercial extension.

If you’re like most software developers, few things are dreaded more than estimating how long it will take to develop software. Why are we so terrible at this activity that is an important part of *every* project we work on?

In this session we’ll examine what the common problems with estimation are, and take a look at some strategies we can use to be more effective at estimating. The techniques discussed will improve your ability to estimate in all types of projects (Agile, Waterfall, etc).

At the end of the session you’ll be able to immediately apply some of these practices to improve your estimates today, and approach estimates in the future with a different mindset to ensure you are providing the business with the information it requires.

In this session I'm going to pretend I can travel back in time and give the rookie developer version of myself an hour of advice. This session will be that advice. I'm specifically focusing on advice that will help us write better code.

I've written a lot of horrible code in my career, and learned a lot of lessons in the process. In my day job I also get the opportunity to look at a lot of other teams code, and help them clean it up. Over my career I've gotten a pretty good idea of what I think the most important lessons are when learning to write "good" code. And here's a hint, it's not neatly captured in the SOLID set of principles that seem to be so popular at conferences these days.

Expect a lot of examples and concrete advice that you can take away and start applying immediately to improve your code.

So you’re building a website. What is your target audience – the desktop, the tablet, or the phone? Wait… All 3?? And you only want to build once?? Responsive Web Design is a methodology that is used to build your website once and still be accessible on a number of screens. We’ve seen building an application for multiple screens – now let’s look at the skills needed to create one app that is available across multiple browser resolutions!

One of the most powerful libraries out there for website manipulation is jQuery. This session will discuss what you need to do in order to get started with the library, discuss how to instantiate and utilize the library, some simple optimization techniques, and if time permits dive into creating your own jQuery plugins.

You've heard the hype. You've heard the buzz. Improved code quality. Looser coupling. Higher productivity. But how does Test-Driven Development and Behaviour-Driven Development really work in practice? In this dojo, we will work through a series of code katas to familiarize you with how TDD and BDD work in practice. Bring your laptops and get ready to code in this fun-filled introduction to TDD and BDD.

Join Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin as they record a .NET Rocks show LIVE! Web developers have a wide variety of choices with regard to frameworks and tool stacks. HTML5 has become a buzz word with wide support across the major browsers. Frameworks like PhoneGap allow you to develop mobile apps using web technologies. Windows 8 and Metro embrace HTML5 and JavaScript. Where have we come from and where are we headed? Are there technologies that we should be paying more attention to? What are the emerging trends? What are the next big bets?

Windows Azure Storage provides a scalable and reliable storage service in the Cloud for BLOBs, tables, queues, and drives. In this session, you will learn when to use and how to use each Windows Azure Storage service and how you can utilize the services whether your applications are running in Windows Azure or elsewhere. Best practices for optimizing Windows Azure Storage will also be discussed.

The web is full of standards and patterns. So much that it is hard to keep your services up to date. In these days of browser compatibility and mobile platforms, the name of the game is reach. How compatible is your web service? WCF WebAPI makes it easy for developers to expose their services to a broad set of clients and build rich REST web APIs. WebAPI is the future of WCF REST and is scheduled to ship with MVC 4.

Performance tuning is often a critical issue in the development of enterprise applications. Traditionally, up-front analysis and design have tried to understand and meet performance requirements. The poor results from this approach have led many to leave performance issues until all functional requirements have been implemented.

But then too often we are left in a last minute panic with limited options. This presentation describes how agile techniques have been successfully applied to meeting performance requirements. The principle of rapid feedback encourages us to put working software in customers’ hands early and often, to discover the real performance issues. We measure relentlessly to identify bottlenecks and choose among alternate strategies, always favouring hard evidence over performance folklore. We use refactoring techniques and clean code principles to encapsulate performance-sensitive algorithms and keep the code base supple. Automated regression tests help us measure and track key performance areas as the system evolves. System performance need not force us to abandon good development practises and search desperately for a performance super-hero to save the day at the last minute.

By applying the same principles we’ve learned as agile developers, we can turn performance tuning from a nightmare into a competitive advantage.

Agile teams define acceptance tests collaboratively to uncover assumptions and build a shared understanding. By automating these tests, they become executable specifications. Fit has been used for acceptance testing for a decade now, and has been continually enhanced as a leading-edge tool. fitSharp, the current .NET incarnation of Fit, lets us improve transparency, reduce effort and increase flow in our testing efforts. This session will combine lecture and code demonstration to illustrate the challenges of the acceptance test practice and to explore approaches enabled by current tools to increase its effectiveness.

In this session, Kent will take you for a lap around Microsoft’s latest Cloud based Middleware offerings including Azure AppFabric Service Bus and Azure AppFabric Queues and Subscriptions. Kent will also discuss how to bridge these new Cloud based offerings with your existing on-premise Middleware and Line of Business Systems.

Many agile teams start off well. But once the initial energy has dropped, and the team has gained some experience, what’s next? What do great agile teams do that good or failing agile teams don’t? You will learn how great agile teams develop the skills to continually improve, moving from good teams to high-performing teams that work ‘in the zone’. You will also develop a ‘flight plan’ for your agile team, creating the environment to stay in the sweet spot of high performance.

We all know the engineering practices we should be using, and many teams I meet say that they have plans to start unit testing or test automation, ‘in the next 6 months’. But for a variety of reasons familiar to all of us, like time pressure and ever increasing demands from the customer, these worthy plans rarely come to pass. Using experiences from starting agile teams, I’ll throw out some proven strategies for getting a toe hold in adopting great agile practices, as well as looking at real examples from the audience and how we might accelerate the adoption of good practices.

Andrew Nurse, developer on the Razor view engine at Microsoft, walks through the new features coming in Razor 2 (MVC 4/WebPages 2) and gives a general overview of Razor for those unfamiliar with the language.

Andrew Nurse, developer on the Razor view engine at Microsoft, takes Razor and puts it in places you never thought possible: SharePoint, DotNetNuke, Templating, Code Generation, Web Control Development, and Visual Studio. Razor – It’s not just for web pages any more!

In this session, we will explore the Code First variety of Entity Framework 4 and learn how easy it is to build scalable applications using ASP.NET MVC 3 and Entity Framework. Topics covered will include defining complex relationships, initializing databases, tracking changes, and performance tuning. We will also cover some of the known limitations of Entity Framework Code First and some common approaches to overcoming those limitations.

Moore’s Law states that transistor density doubled every two years. This translates to CPU speed doubling roughly every two years. This fortunate trend meant software developers could improve the speed of their software simply by waiting two years. Sadly, this trend has drastically slowed. To increase CPU power manufacturers are turning to increasing the number of processors, increasing the number of cores, or increasing the number of threads. So, what’s a software designer to do?

The answer is the parallelization of work or horizontal scalability. This session details how programmers and designers can write and design software to take advantage of the trend towards the multi-processor power increase. Concepts include: multithreading, thread synchronization and locking, distributed processing, message-oriented architecture, and asynchronous operations. Examples of parallelization will be shown with technologies like .NET threads, Task Parallel Library, Asynchronous CTP, and message queues.

Automated testing provides a way for developers to validate a certain level of quality. But, automated testing provides much, much more than that. Automated tests form the basis of many types of documentation, if you let them.

This session details how you can organize and name your test classes and test methods to make your tests work for you. Your tests can be the reference documentation for your internal APS. Tests can validate code but they can also validate requirements and acceptance criteria. When tests are well organized, they can be used to round-trip requirements and acceptance criteria to give stakeholders full round-trip validation by generating human-readable documentation based on certain tests. This session also details ways to reflect certain types of tests to document how tests are validating requirements and acceptance criteria.

HTML 5 is becoming more and more of a common term in the world of web development. Now, it is even starting to spread as a common term for mobile and even for desktop development. As Microsoft web professionals, we need to stay on top of the technology stack and understand the latest and greatest tools. This session will be to show Microsoft developers how to develop ASP.NET applications using HTML 5 with the tools they are already familiar with such as Visual Studio 2010, the all new WebMatrix, and your favourite web browser.

Everyone wants a piece of the HTML5 because it’s fresh, new, and demonstrates boundless possibilities for developers. Even with all that excitement, there developers still need to deal with the reality of the situation: Even though HTML5 might be the future we are still living in the present. This session aims to provide developers with the information they need about the “future web” to make the right decision for their web projects. We will demonstrate some of the real-life limitations that developers face when using HTML5 today and how to overcome them using the familiar tools already in the developer’s toolbox.

As our ASP.NET web applications become more and more successful we switch our focus from adding feature to performance, scale and management. Richard has been in the lab studying the scaling habits of the average domestic ASP.NET solution and has emerged to discuss his findings (no applications were actually harmed during the capture of this data). Come and learn where ASP.NET stumbles and how to get it back on its feet. In this session you will learn about the web acceleration equation, identify common ASP.NET bottlenecks, explore solution alternatives, uncover the secret sauce and determine a reasonable strategy for scaling ASP.NET applications.

Franklin's Kinect Gesture Toolkit allows you to record, efot, and recognize gestures with the kinect sdk with no programming except to handle an event that tells you one of the gestures was recognized.

Kanban is an Agile methodology that is used to evolve and improve any organization's processes that are used in the delivery of "knowledge work". It is also a team management method, improving the delivery of value through better visibility and limits on work in process.

In this session, Dave White will present the 5 core principles of Kanban and some of the standard ways that teams implement those principles. He'll also discuss how you should pronounce Kanban. :)

A code-intensive session where we'll work on a walking skeleton of the "BusMeUp" example from the "Why They Aren’t Buying Your Agile And How To Make Them Love It" session. The goal is to learn more about how architecture and design influence project plans and timelines and vice versa.

We’ll use the fictitious org chart (distributed teams, etc.) from BusMeUp, Inc. and requirements from the project to do some value stream mapping: If we design it this way, how might it cause or alleviate friction? If we plan it in a certain way, how will it help or hinder team communication and what might the resulting design look like? We’ll look at:

• Interfaces and mocks - how to get early feedback on architectural decisions which would bite you later.
• How to use auto-generated Visual Studio architecture diagrams to verify your mockup and convince your boss that writing code without any up front design does not necessarily make you a cowboy.
• How to be guided by tests when prototyping.
• Dealing with legacy code.
• Using the walking skeleton for project planning - identifying tasks, establishing timelines.
• Delivering the goods - guidelines for fleshing out the skeleton: In what order, to what level of detail, by whom. (Visual Studio, C#, Resharper, NUnit, FakeItEasy)

If Agile works, why isn’t everyone doing it? Or, as Agile has become fashionable of late, why all the lip service without the expected amount of real change? This presentation makes the argument that it comes down to trust and presents tools and examples of how to build trust among the various stakeholders involved.

Most of us have been trained in traditions of scientific management which try to optimize for mass production: We implicitly equate standardization of processes and repeatable “recipes” for uniform results with well-laid plans and high quality. Their perceived absence undermines trust and triggers risk mitigation reflexes aimed at introducing them.

The problem is that building software is not mass-production: Every system is a one-off and building it is an incremental process of discovery. Therefore, something which would be essential for success in an industrial setting (optimizing for repeatability by managing to minimize variance from a plan) will lead to waste and mediocre results in software development.

Hence we are dealing with a perception problem if we want to introduce Lean and Agile techniques: How do we sell “Trust us, we’ll get it right by doing everything in a way incompatible with your training and experience”?

The session will introduce techniques and examples for designing and delivering systems in a way which lessens the need for stakeholders to trust each other in the first place.

We’ll look at:

Firewalling. Doing Agile while appearing not to. Benefits, pitfalls, examples, trust issues.

The right amount of communication builds trust. Too little communication and too much need for communication both undermine trust. How to use bounded contexts and other domain-driven design concepts to design simpler, easier to deliver systems, by example.

Defining success: Build it and they will come. At that point, will they boo or cheer? Setting expectations right is crucial.

The purpose of this level 300 presentation is to show how to architect a Windows Azure application such as this one: http://westcoastdpe.cloudapp.net It is a simple Stock Chart application that lets you enter in a stock symbol and pick parameters for the display of a stock chart. The app integrates with Facebook so you can share your stock chart and comments with your friends by posting to your Wall from within the Stock Chart app. Technically, it is an ASP.NET app utilizing IE9/HTML5 site pinning and automatic screen resizing when viewed on a PC, Tablet or Phone (i.e. 3 screens). It uses a mixed language Stock Chart API (VB.NET) and the official Facebook API (C#). It uses OAuth 2.0 to authenticate the app to your Facebook account. It uses Windows Azure blob storage for storing the chart pictures and exposes web services to be consumed by other devices such as a Windows Phone 7 application.

The next version of SQL Server is just over the horizon. In this session, we’ll take a look at the new high availability features, columnar indexes, contained database authentication, the new developer tools (codename “Juneau”), FileTable and some TSQL Language enhancements. I’ll bring the latest and greatest news, so don’t miss this session – especially if you are planning any DBMS upgrades or new projects.

Data access can be easy to set up in your applications with wizards and ORMs, but sometimes your queries are just not as fast as you think they should be – especially on those tables that are getting bigger and bigger. In this session, we will take a peek under the hood and see how SQL server answers the questions you ask of it. This is an introductory session, but it will be jam-packed with demos and useful tips that you will be able to use to make your applications more responsive.

Learn how to leverage out-of-box features & services (PerformancePoint, Visio Graphics, Access Services, and Word Automation Services) of SharePoint using HTML5 & JavaScript to rapidly build composite solutions.

Do you feel that there is more to patterns that what you do every day at work? Would you like to learn what others use for modelling solutions featuring: * Object construction, behaviour and collaboration * Multi Threading * Domain persistence * Database Testing * Decoupling and messaging * (put yours here) This is the session for you! Something to learn, something to teach and something to take home! Bring the patterns you like, questions and issues that your struggle with when it comes to modelling and design. Don't forget: your participation is key! In summary: You show me yours, I'll show you mine and have a design pattern party!

Get a basic understanding of the MVC pattern and how it's been translated to the .NET world as an extension to ASP.NET. We'll have a look at some of the project templates, how the VS2010 IDE has been tooled to help you do your job, and some of the features that the latest build brings. Oh yeah, we're totally going to destroy a data-driven web site. That's right, start to finish in less than 10 minutes. And it'll be something you can actually use.

Fear not, tireless web warriors, you too can get started in the MVC Framework, it's as simple as File -> New -> Project! Bring your laptop and take a break from Web Forms while we walk through the key components and add them to your battle arsenal. Know Ruby? Great! Cross train for a bit and get a good feel for what your .NET brethren are up to. A hands-on lab that will walk you through Razor, routing, model binding, filters, authentication and authorization, the MVC tool chain (including NuGet) and complimentary bits (like jQuery). We'll build a site with all of the above. Come for the pattern, stay for the framework!

This lecture will highlight the tips, tricks and lessons that we have learned from developing 'Own This World' on three different platforms. Topics that will be covered are: platform comparison, marketplace comparison including real honest sales numbers, as well as tips, tricks and lessons for each platform.

Writing software is a complex task. We start with a few classes and slowly we add all the good practices like observers to events, dependency injection, etc. One morning we realize that the complexity of our code has grown quite a bit due to the coupling of dependencies. Extending our application is not that easy any more. Join me in a session that we will explore how to use an "Event Aggregator" as a mechanism to decouple our classes and add indirection between dependencies. We will follow an example and code our own EventAggregator, discuss implementation options and usage patterns.

Why are some apps a pleasure to use while others a source of endless pain? In this follow-up to Designing for Success Part 1, we’ll focus on end-user interactions. Looking at several design patterns we’ll explore how to generate less frustration and more delight for our clients and their customers.

As software developers, we love to solve problems. Too often, however, we start mapping out solutions using our favourite patterns and technologies before we fully understand the goal, or we focus on functional requirements and lose sight of the big picture. In this session we’ll cover the basics of what a User Experience approach brings to the table and how it can make a difference in the success of your application.

This talk will introduce the Reactive Extensions for .NET (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/gg577609), an extremely powerful tool for developing modern desktop and web applications that should be in every developer's toolbox. I'll show how to get started with Rx, some theory about how Rx is related to LINQ and the new TPL async/await keywords, as well as showing some awesome practical examples on how to integrate Rx with your existing codebase.

Creating a successful open-source project involves far more than simply writing some code and putting it up on (GitHub|CodePlex|SourceForge|star) - learn how to make sure that others discover your open-source code and use it in their projects. This talk will cover some of the basics of marketing an open-source project. I'll talk about what I mean by "marketing" as well as give plenty of practical how-to's about the difference between a great project that nobody uses, and a great project that takes off and forms a community around it. Everything from good documentation, to mailing lists, to optimizing for contributions, we'll go over what makes a successful open-source project.

Data Quality represents the degree to which the data is suitable for usage in the required business processes. The quality of data can be defined, measured and managed through various data quality metrics such as completeness, conformity, consistency, accuracy, and duplication. Improved data quality is achieved through people, technology and processes. Learn how SQL Server Data Quality Services (DQS) provides approachable data quality capabilities for organizations of all sizes to help improve the quality of their data. DQS is designed to help ensure data quality through the profiling, cleansing, and matching of critical data.

Integration packages perform extract, transform, and load (ETL) operations to bring data from an operational database to a data warehouse. I will show the patterns and practices I use to develop these packages:

• Naming Conventions
• When to use the Slowly-changing-dimension task
• Using stored procedures and views in the source and target databases for integration purposes
• Using the Lookup task.
• Incremental extractions
• Snapshot extractions
• Change tracking in source, and extraction tracking in target
• Making packages idempotent
• Package configurations
• Deployment and execution
• Custom SSIS task development

This session is for you whether you have an existing public facing site that you want to replace or you are new to the world of .com. We’ll also discuss how to configure public facing sites, what security needs to be place and what features to leverage. We will also focus on the needs of your visitors and how to ensure a consistent experience. After this session, you'll have the knowledge to tackle the following key areas: Performance optimization, SEO, Branding Guidelines, Technical Architecture

Helping to ensure that your SharePoint Farm infrastructure is running smoothly is one of the most important areas that an administrator of SharePoint is concerned with. In this session you will learn how Microsoft System Center can be configured to assist you in helping to keep your SharePoint-based infrastructure running well. You will find out how to tune alerts according to configuration and internal governance policies, help to increase overall service levels, as well as proactively manage incidents using the family of System Center products.

Coming Soon!

Congratulations, your company has adopted SharePoint! You are now one of the millions of licensed users that are using SharePoint within their organization. In one form or another, many of you are now responsible for maintaining SharePoint. As Uncle Ben said, "With great power comes great responsibility". The same is true for SharePoint. As the adoption of SharePoint increases within your organization, it can get out of control if proper governance is not in place. Attend this session to learn about useful and practical Governance Tips on SharePoint for Everyone. You'll learn about governance in SharePoint-based environments as well as pick up tips to help you effectively implement governance in your organization. This session will also dig into how to leverage out of box components of SharePoint to compliment your governance strategy.

It is said that Cloud Computing is the biggest change to hit our industry in many years, but what does that mean for a developer? In this session, you’ll discover just that. You'll walk away with an understanding of the foundations of the Cloud and what each of the components of the Windows Azure platform do. You’ll see how you can leverage your existing knowledge of .NET, Java, PHP, Ruby, or Python to work with Windows Azure and what tools and toolkits are available to you to make it easy.

There is no mobile Web, there is no desktop Web, and there is no tablet Web. We view the same Web just in different ways. So how do we do it? By getting rid of our fixed-width, device-specific approaches and use Responsive Web Design techniques. This session will focus on what is Responsive Web Design and how you can use its 3-pronged approach on your current apps today which will also adapt for new devices in the future.

WebMatrix is a free offering that provides everything you need to build Web sites using Windows. It streamlines Web site development and makes it easy to start Web sites from popular ASP.NET and PHP open-source apps. It includes IIS Express (a development Web server), ASP.NET Web Pages (a scripting friendly Web framework), and SQL Server Compact (an embedded database). Come to the session to learn about this awesome new tool.

SharePoint 2010 is a premier BI portal solution. In this session you will learn how business users can be empowered to create self-service analytic applications by harnessing the power of SharePoint. Topics cover an introduction to the Chart and Status List Web Parts and the three SharePoint service applications: Excel Services, Visio Services and PerformancePoint Services. Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services is also introduced. Numerous compelling demonstrations will explore how sophisticated dashboards can be assembled using the Office productivity tools and designers, and SharePoint Web Part pages.

This session is intended for the IT architects and technical leads responsible for the design and implementation of backups of SharePoint, the SharePoint disaster recovery solution, and high availability planning. You will learn about the different components of a complete backup of SharePoint, how to achieve high availability for SharePoint, the different options for data protection in SharePoint and how to select a data protection strategy to meet organizational requirements.

Ever want to build cool, compelling interactive dashboards using PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint 2010. In this session, a seasoned BI TSP will share his tips and tricks on how to use some of the advanced features of Dashboard Designer to build some cool dashboards for your custom demos and POC’s.

Dell and Microsoft have continued to grow in delivering Unified Communications to the corporate world. Over the past few years Dell has emerged as one of the leading provider of services to implement Lync Server 2010 as more than just your IM, Presence and Live Meeting replacement. Lync Server 2010 has become the new player in the telephony (PBX) replacement provider throughout the world. .Lync Server 2010 has had major advancements in the telephony aspects. Included is the ability to set location profiles and E911 enablement. Join us as with dive deep into the infrastructure requirements and configuration requirements for E911.

System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2012 incrementally builds on the strengths of SCCM 2007 and adds entirely new functionality. This session will highlight both the improved features and the new functionality introduced in SCCM 2012 such as user centric management, Configuration Settings Remediation, Software Center & Application Catalog, Collection based settings, etc. Learn how to take advantage of the improved and new features of SCCM 2012 in your organization by attending this session.

If you are familiar with Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Office or Microsoft SharePoint 2010, but you have not had the chance to explore the broad and integrated Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities offered by across these products, then this two-part presentation will guide you through an end-to-end walkthrough of how these products come together to provide a complete platform to build powerful BI solutions. The focus of Part 1 will be the core BI concepts, SQL Server Reporting Services and PerformancePoint Services.

In part 2, we will continue to review other Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities offered by Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Office and Microsoft SharePoint 2010. You will learn about Excel Services, and PowerPivot V2 with the inclusion of Microsoft SQL 2012. Finally, we will discuss the architecture viewpoint of how these products should be used to provide a robust platform that can help proactive decision making and business performance monitoring.

In this session we dive into some of the new Business Intelligence capabilities that are being introduced in SQL Server code-named "Denali". We’ll start with the new Business Intelligence Semantic Model (BISM) and shown how BI developer scenarios are enhanced in Visual Studio 2010 and deployed to the new Tabular version of Analysis Services. You will then learn about the new self-service BI scenarios leveraging the BISM along with Project Crescent, a new interactive web based authoring and data visualization tool that is tightly integrated into SharePoint 2010.

A look at the technologies available today in SQL Server 2008 and 2008R2 (maybe a dash of 2005). The 2 main technologies will be failover-clustering and Database mirroring. Get to know and understand how to configure and maintain the 2 different High-Availability solutions as it does play a bigger role in the SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn (hint hint).

In this session we talk about the new high availability solution that is being introduced in SQL Server 2012. The session provides an overview of AlwaysOn and introduces the key new features and capabilities that will help businesses achieve the high availability SLA for mission critical applications. The session is the first part of a three-part series. It is highly recommended that you attend both the sessions to get a complete understanding of how your business can benefit from AlwaysOn.

This is a must-see session for anyone who is comparing VMware with Microsoft's virtualization offerings. We will review Microsoft's technology compared to VMware, focusing on what differentiates the two technologies. The session will also cover effective strategies for integrating Microsoft virtualization into datacenter environments, and review one company's experience with implementing Microsoft virtualization. If you need to know how the Microsoft virtualization stack compares to VMware's, this is the session for you!

Are you prepared to change the way you look at availability? Have you thought about how SharePoint works with Hyper-V Live Migration or vMWare's vMotion? As you architect your SharePoint-based farm virtually, knowing how to structure it correctly, and leverage both physical and virtual elements effectively is a must. In this session, we’ll cover how and when to use virtualization availability features, Windows Failover Clustering and SQL Server technologies and the impact of combining them. We’ll also discuss how you can combine features of SharePoint, SQL Server and Windows Server to help your SharePoint-based environment be available 24x7 365 days a year.

Do you have Hyper-V deployed? Are you looking to deploy in the next few months? In this session you will learn from our Real World Deployments. Review best practices on the following: • Virtual Switch Configuration • High Availability • VLAN Trunking • Performance Monitoring • Disk Configuration • Hyper-V Optimizations • Performance Baselines • Dynamic Memory • and more! If you are serious about getting it right the first time this session is one that should not be missed.

Are you struggling with new expectations of high availability for your workloads? Have you been told by upper management that Exchange, SQL Server, Web Services are critical applications and need to have a 4 hour or less Service Level Agreement. Is it possible to achieve a Multi-Site DR solution with Microsoft System Center and Hyper-V? Yes it is! With Microsoft System Center Technologies you can accomplish this economically. Microsoft Enterprise Core Infrastructure Licensing + Microsoft System Management Suite (SMSE/D) licensing include all of the tools necessary to complete this out of box. In this session you will learn how to provide a highly available infrastructure with tools that you might already have licensed and not even know it.

Apps have sparked a lot of market interest and buzz. Windows Phone also brings together a captivating experience for work and play. In this session we’ll take a deep dive into key business scenarios that Windows Phone enables today. Come to this session to learn why Microsoft may have a competitive advantage over other mobile OS platforms. Learn how Windows Phone and Microsoft collaboration solutions like Exchange, SharePoint & Lync offer great integration for the enterprise and offer great connectivity experience for end users.

Windows Phone is a different kind of phone, architected to put the focus on end users while enabling developers to build compelling, connected experiences that enhance the phone. Peer under the covers to see how the architecture evolved to deliver powerful functionality for users and developers: enabling rapid seamless transitions between applications; delivering continuous user experiences in the background; combined Silverlight/XNA in a unified UI; sharing data between phone and applications; sensor fusion for integration of the physical and virtual worlds; and many more. Along the way, we will demonstrate how Microsoft brought together these features to deliver experiences that are responsive and battery efficient.

In the past year, we’ve worked with hundreds of developers and designers interpreting the "Metro" design system for their own purposes. We’ve seen great interpretations, and others that aren’t so great. In this session, we’ll share with you the foundations of great Metro application design for Windows Phone, and how to use them to build outstanding applications that will stand out and get noticed… for good reasons. We will also be providing some general best practices for building great mobile experiences.

As any developer or IT pro would know, different solutions lend themselves perfectly to certain platforms. But now, there’s one more platform to keep in mind – the Cloud platform. The services that make up Windows Azure can be used independently or composed together to build a variety of applications. In this session, you’ll go under the hood and explore different scenarios and how they make use of Windows Azure services. You’ll also learn about the various Windows Azure Toolkits and samples that you can use to build your next Cloud application.

If you are a developer and have even thought about developing Windows Phone lately, you likely already know that every app and game that is installed on consumer Windows Phone 7.5 devices comes from the Marketplace. This is new to the traditional Windows Phone ecosystem prior to version 7, and while in some cases this does introduce a change for developers and users, there is a lot of reasons why this change is a great one. In this session, we go through both the consumer and developer/publisher experience on the Marketplace and strategies for distributing your app and game both publicly and privately. We will also provide an overview of our Marketplace presence around the world and what new countries have been introduced with the release of the new 7.5 (formerly codenamed “Mango”) update. Finally, we will provide you with strategies on how to increase the popularity of your applications and games and (if you are charging a price for your masterpiece) how to make more money.

If your team is like most organizations, a majority of your testing is still performed as manual tests. Historically, manual testing has had little or no structure, process, or good tooling available to help streamline and improve this important part of development. A large focus of Visual Studio 2010 has been to improve this situation by introducing a rich set of tools to be used to better manage and organize your manual testing process. In this session we will take a look at the Microsoft Test and Lab Manager (MTLM), see how it can organize and streamline your testing process. A big goal for the Visual Studio team was to drastically reduce the amount of “no-repro” bugs that occur as part of the testing process. With MTLM the testers can create bugs quickly and attach extremely rich information to the bugs that ensure the developers will be able to easily repro and diagnose the cause of the bug.

As technology becomes more pervasive, residents expectations are changing in terms of how we deliver and provide services to them. Over the past several years, Edmonton has become a national and global leader in the use of social media, open data, and other open tools. We now need to look beyond using these tools and determine how we can work as one government to most effectively meet residents needs through the proper application of open government technology.

During the last decade the focus of most IT organization was cost reduction, however the challenges facing IT this decade have changed, and although cost reduction is important, the expectations of Business is changing from cost eduction to productivity of the entire company. The advent of Enterprise cloud services has enabled businesses to be able to rapidly enable new ventures without committing scare capital. The need of business to be able to analyze real time streaming social media information to achieve competitive advantage and the recent very public security breaches have made business managers much more concerned about risk management. These three major business pressures have changed significantly the work that IT is expected to accomplish. During this session William Dupley HP Canada’s Chief Solutions Officer will describe the new foundational, strategic and transformation work that IT organizations will need to do to capitalize on the cloud.