Lewies Blog

A few months back, I noticed that the team lead had signed up for a conference (Event Code: 1032281417). It was a conference concerning the launch of SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 & BizTalk Server 2006. I had tried to go ahead and sign up for it myself since it was free. The last software launch that I had been to was about eight years ago. I found the website and saw that every city that was being visited was sold out.

Today the team lead came to me and asked me if I was interested in taking my managers place next week since he was going to be out of town. Can you believe it? Just my luck! Yes, yes, yes, oh-yes mam. I do believe that I would really like to go thank you.

I looked over the ticket again and again reading all the little details. There weren’t many of course. It was just a printed web page with a bar code on it and the title of the conference. It was hard to contain my excitement. It was an all day event scheduled for next Wednesday at the Washington Convention Center.

I went to my managers office to thank him for the opportunity to go. He was glad that I could make use of it. He was also wishing that he could go, because he wanted to walk away with complimentary versions of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 given out to all participants. That just raised my excitement further.

Ever since my MSDN subscription expired, I couldn’t get into the website to get my software registration keys for VS.Net 2003. This has deterred me from reinstalling my system to clean up all the junk that has accumulated on it over the years.

The agenda itself looks very interesting.

Join Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer* and key Microsoft Executives for the launch of Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005, SQL Server™ 2005, and BizTalk® Server 2006! This all-day event offers an opportunity to learn how the Microsoft application platform offerings enable organizations to gain better business insight and deliver faster results by easily connecting people, processes, and information.

Launch provides technical education for developers and database administrators in an environment designed for personal interaction with industry experts. In addition, this event showcases the technical evidence, customer success stories, and partner offerings that demonstrate the business value of these tools.

Highlights of this event include:

• In-depth technical education sessions, hands-on labs, and direct contact with development and database experts
• Attend structured training or hang out in the community area to get your specific questions answered
• Meet the Microsoft Visual Studio and SQL Server development teams for informal Q&A
• Network with like-minded professional developers and database administrators
• Hear about innovative products, solutions, and services from key Microsoft partners
• Walk away with complimentary versions of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005
• Celebrate after the event at a party featuring special musical guests*

7:30–9:00 A.M.	REGISTRATION Continental Breakfast available		COMMUNITY Partner Pavilion Ask the Experts Lounges: Theater and 1:1 Area Microsoft Learning: Technical Self-Assessments Microsoft Dynamics (formerly Microsoft Business Solutions) Microsoft Mobile and Embedded (TBD) Microsoft Windows Server Coding4Fun (TBD) Peer Networking User Groups
9:00–10:30 A.M.	KEYNOTE SESSION Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer* and Key Microsoft Executives
	DATA PLATFORM TRACK	DEVELOPER TRACK	COMMUNITY Partner Pavilion Ask the Experts Lounges: Theater and 1:1 Area Microsoft Learning: Technical Self-Assessments Microsoft Dynamics (formerly Microsoft Business Solutions) Microsoft Mobile and Embedded (TBD) Microsoft Windows Server Coding4Fun (TBD) Peer Networking User Groups
10:45–12:00 P.M.	Building Highly Available Systems with SQL Server 2005	Visual Studio Team System: Managing the Software Lifecycle with Visual Studio 2005 Team System
12:00–1:30 P.M.	BOX LUNCH
1:30–2:45 P.M.	Architecting Scalable, Flexible and Secure Database Systems with SQL Server 2005	Design and Development Tools for Building Mission-Critical Applications
3:00–4:15 P.M.	Delivering Business Insight with SQL Server 2005	Web Development
4:30–5:45 P.M.	Managing and Monitoring with SQL Server 2005	Smart Client Application Development & Deployment

*Nov. 7, San Francisco kick-off event only.

DATA PLATFORM TRACK
The Data Platform Track provides an in-depth look at the many new features of SQL Server 2005 that make it the most available, scalable, and secure database on which to build your mission-critical enterprise systems. In addition you will see how this latest release of SQL Server 2005 integrates with Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio Team System, and BizTalk 2006 to further increase your ability to meet the most demanding needs of your business. Throughout the day you will learn how to design, deploy, and manage these systems with SQL Server 2005 while also learning how to extract extra value by using the Business Intelligence features in SQL Server 2005 and the integration between SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and BizTalk 2006.
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Building Highly Available Systems with SQL Server 2005
With SQL Server 2005 you have several new technologies you can use to reduce both planned and unplanned downtime, provide solutions for disaster recovery, and provide greater system availability to your end users. This session will show you how you can use:

• Peer-to-Peer Replication to improve availability and scalability;
• Partitioned file groups to enable partial database availability during recovery;
• Online index operations to reduce planned downtime; and
• Snapshot Isolation Levels to facilitate improved concurrent access.

We will also give you a preview of how you can use the upcoming Database Mirroring technology to provide fast automatic database failover simply and cost-effectively.
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Architecting Scalable, Flexible and Secure Database Systems with SQL Server 2005
SQL Server 2005 is set to change the way database systems are built. With SQL Server 2005 you can architect solutions that are more secure, more scalable and more flexible. In this session, you will see, how you can use:

• SQL Server 2005 security enhancements to be more secure;
• SQL Service Broker, and Native Web Services to achieve greater scale; and
• Query notifications and cache coherency to improve both scale and performance.

You will also see how you can exploit new choices in data representation (relational or XML) and language support (T-SQL, CLR, XQuery) to build, and deploy more robust and flexible database systems.
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Delivering Business Insight with SQL Server 2005
Business Intelligence is the process of extracting new information from your existing data. This information is used by decision makers at all levels of your organization to make better informed choices. SQL Server 2005 offers powerful functionality that will enable you to better leverage the value of the data stored in your organization. This session will provide you with a glimpse of what you can achieve. Attend to see how you can:

• Quickly and easily integrate data from just about any data source;
• Deliver a rich and manageable analysis platform for OLAP and data mining; and
• Offer powerful structured and ad hoc reporting capabilities to your end users.

Watch as SQL Server 2005 “Integrates, Analyzes and Reports.”
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Managing and Monitoring with SQL Server 2005
You work hard keeping today’s complex data systems running reliably. It takes proactive design, and consistent maintenance and monitoring of the system to maintain optimal performance. With SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio Team System 2005 you have a powerful new set of tools to help you detect and resolve problems faster and sooner. This session will provide you with practical examples of how you can:

• Use code analysis to identify potential SQL injection errors;
• Validate an application’s production readiness using customizable business rules;
• Establish a proactive monitoring and response system using SQL Agent;
• Proactively monitor resource usage and quickly troubleshoot performance using Profiler and Dynamic Management Views; and
• Manage a large population of database servers using Microsoft Operations Manager.

You can apply these tools today to better manage and optimize the performance of your data systems.
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DEVELOPER TRACK
The Developer Track provides a comprehensive look at the new Visual Studio 2005 product line—including those features found in Visual Studio Team System. Throughout the day new features are introduced and explored using real-world scenarios. The majority of the content will be presented in the product with limited use of PowerPoint. While these sessions are linked by a common theme they are designed to be stand-alone, allowing you to freely “mix and match” community area activities.
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Visual Studio Team System: Managing the Software Lifecycle with Visual Studio 2005 Team System
Visual Studio 2005 Team System is an extensible life-cycle tools platform that significantly expands the Visual Studio product line and helps software teams collaborate to deliver modern service-oriented solutions. This session spotlights key features of Visual Studio 2005 Team System and demonstrates how integrating this product into the development process reduces the complexity of delivering high-quality, fully tested applications.

Introduced in this session is the Whidbey Rocks demo application that will be used throughout the developer track. The software developers at Whidbey Rocks use Visual Studio 2005 Team System to orchestrate the construction of their concert ticketing and promotion system, which includes Web applications, smart client applications, SQL Server 2005 databases, and BizTalk Server 2006 integration. The presentation incorporates five roles: project management, infrastructure architect, application architect, developer, and tester. While most of the actual development will be performed in the subsequent sessions, this kick-off session will allow us to explain the goals of the software, set up the team project, select a methodology, identify the team, design the architecture, and send out tasks to each of the team members to construct individual components of the application.
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Design and Development Tools for Building Mission-Critical Applications
SQL Server 2005, BizTalk Server 2006, and the .NET Framework 2.0 offer a compelling platform for building mission-critical service-oriented applications. This session introduces the features of Visual Studio 2005 that enable developers and development teams to build high-performance, secure, and reliable solutions using innovative designers, advanced code profiling and analysis tools, and an enterprise-ready platform. Among the highlights: how to use Visual Studio 2005 to incorporate SQL Server 2005, BizTalk Server 2006, and other operations infrastructure early in the design process.
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Web Development
Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 combine to form a rich platform for building, testing, and deploying state-of-the-art Web applications. ASP.NET 2.0 is replete with new features, from data source controls and master pages to membership and role management services—features that reduce the amount of code required to create a typical Web site by up to 70%. Visual Studio 2005 features an all-new Web development interface that speeds the development process while offering a rich design-time experience and seamless integration with Visual Studio 2005 Team System.

The primary goal of this presentation is to introduce developers to ASP.NET 2.0’s most compelling new features and to the Visual Studio 2005 features that support them. A secondary goal is to demonstrate some of the ways in which Visual Studio 2005 Team System can benefit Web developers, and to drive home the message that ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and Visual Studio 2005 Team System offer a compelling upgrade to Visual Studio 2003 and ASP.NET 1.1. An important take-away is that these products are second to none when it comes to building scalable, high-performance, Web applications.
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Smart Client Application Development & Deployment
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 greatly simplifies the development and deployment of smart client applications targeting both the Windows and Microsoft Office platforms. The smart client application is characterized by simple deployment, access to the application in network connected and disconnected states, and a rich end-user experience at minimal developer cost. This session demonstrates how to create smart client applications using Visual Studio 2005, ClickOnce, and Windows Forms 2.0. ClickOnce is Microsoft’s new deployment technology which combines the power of Windows-based development with the flexibility of Web-based deployment.

The central message of this presentation is that end-users and developers alike prefer software that provides a rich user experience with easy to access features and updates—software that enriches and simplifies the user’s experience in the most natural way for the task at hand. Supporting themes are rapid application development as well as a natural maintenance cycle, including maintenance and updating of tool-generated code such as typed-datasets. In addition to the development lifecycle, another theme of this session is the deployment lifecycle with easy updates for subsequent versions of your applications to the clients’ machines.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 5th, 2006 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Employment, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.