Web development has taught us that designers and developers can certainly work together, but can their tools. Shawn Wildermuth will take you through the lessons learned in the designer-developer relationship and how Microsoft’s design tools can help make the relationship even stronger.

Silverlight is Microsoft's new cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in for building Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and offering immersive media experiences in the browser. Version 1.0 features a XAML drawing engine, a JavaScript API, and rich media and streaming support. This session introduces the Silverlight 1.0 programming model and provides developers with the knowledge they need to begin leveraging Silverlight today.

Silverlight is Microsoft's new cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in for building Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and offering immersive media experiences in the browser. Version 1.1 features the same XAML drawing engine and rich media and streaming support as 1.0, and it extends the Silverlight programming model to support .NET in the browser, complete with generics, isolated storage, networking, threading, and other features of the .NET Framework. Join the fun as Jeff dives into Silverlight 1.1 and explains how to leverage it to the fullest to build a whole new generation of Web applications.

The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit is a set of controls and extenders designed to help ASP.NET developers easily integrate rich client UI features into their Web applications. As a community effort, the toolkit contains controls written by Microsoft and non-Microsoft developers who have joined forces to create a powerful, shared-source library for all to use. Learn how to speed up your development by integrating toolkit components into your applications.

Go below the surface of ASP.NET AJAX and see how the Microsoft AJAX Library and the ASP.NET AJAX server controls come together to create a rich platform for developing more immersive, responsive and interactive Web applications. Learn about how ASP.NET AJAX uses JSON serialization and the JavaScript proxies that are created for accessing Web services. The Microsoft AJAX Library provides an asynchronous request lifecycle; learn tips for working with the UpdatePanel control and ways to deploy scripts for greater performance.

Virtual Earth is jam packed with cool visuals, great usability features and a killer SDK. We will walk through some of the great features of the SDK and demonstrate some cool functionality and crack open the code behind it. Then we will demonstrate a practical application of Virtual Earth within the Enterprise. To assist a sales department with retail store coverage we will develop a route planner and location finder based on data from The Nielsen Company. The application will plot out all of the locations to be visited by the sales person for a particular retail chain based on geo code information provided by The Nielsen Company.

Join Rockford Lhotka, creator of the popular CSLA .NET framework, and Anthony Handley, user experience specialist at Magenic, as they present their real-world experiences building applications using WPF and Silverlight. How realistic is it to build a business application using WPF/Silverlight today? Fresh off their latest project, they’ll tell you what was easier than expected, what was harder than expected and their overall impressions of the tools and technologies available to you today.

Discover Expression Blend and create compelling UX for the Windows client: Draw and animate with vector and bitmap graphics, and add media and 3D. Create interfaces using standard or custom controls and rich layout. Use templates to get the look you want and bind to data for visualization and interactivity.

See how Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 takes Web development to the next level. See a demo-filled tour of all improvements in Visual Studio around ASP.NET and AJAX development. Topics covered include a new standards-based design surface for XHTML and CSS, Intellisense for javascript, tools for ASP.NET AJAX, and more.

Wouldn’t it be nice to just point at a database and tell a wizard-driven tool: read all the table schemas and generate the plumbing code needed to produce the commonly-required web pages to Edit, Add, Insert and Delete rows? Wouldn’t it be great to have a way – once you’ve sucked those rows into memory – to query and search them with a SQL-like approach, regardless of whether the row data originated in a database, an XML document or any common collection type? LINQ is a technology being released in early 2008 that does just this.

In this session, Richard will explore LINQ: he’ll show you what it is, how it works and – most important – how to leverage it in a web application. You’ll learn how you can easily apply it to create common web application plumbing quickly and easily.

Why is it that you can charge a premium price for all of your design services, but when it comes to your clients’ most critical visual communication needs, all you have to offer is a low cost PowerPoint template? Sure, you can try and talk them into a custom presentation built with Flash, but convincing them to pay thousands of dollars for something they can’t maintain on their own is a tough sell. Well now there’s a solution that blends the best of both worlds…high-end rich media design meets quick and easy content editing.

In this session we’ll look at how to create broadcast quality visual experiences for your clients to deliver to their audiences, and how those experiences can break free from the outdated paradigm of the slideshow. By using a new presentation system it is now possible to design creative, on-brand, high-impact presentations that set your clients apart from their competitors and set you free from those nagging edit jobs that often come with custom projects. See how Starbucks and Microsoft have utilized this new technology to elevate their presentation game and learn how your firm can start selling the same type of high-end services to your clients.

Abstract forthcoming

Learn more about the projects coming from Live Labs, Microsoft’s incubation center for new internet technologies. From recreating the 3D world from digital photos with Photosynth to reimagining the way we browse the web on mobile devices with Deepfish, Live Labs is dedicated to improving and accelerating the evolution of Microsoft’s internet products and strategies through applied research and experimentation. Come see some of the unique new experiences the lab is enabling for internet users.

This session will explore techniques for building casual games using Silverlight 1.1. We will look at how to manage a game loop, sprites, input, scrolling, mixing Storyboard animation with custom code animation and using Expression Blend for design.

The release of Silverlight brings opens a lot of doors for Web developers for building rich internet applications, including sophisticated vector graphics rendering, streaming video support, and seamless browser integration. In order to make these flashy applications actually useful, however, developers need infrastructure for communicating with the server efficiently. For the 1.0 release of Silverlight, that infrastructure is the Web service support provided by ASP.NET Ajax with its automatic generation of client-side JavaScript proxies.

This session will go into depth on how to best leverage ASP.NET Ajax Web services from Silverlight, covering the details of JSON serialization, asynchronous callbacks, and the JavaScript integration in Silverlight. We will also look at the upcoming 1.1 release of Silverlight and its native support for Web service proxies using either JSON or XML serialization with SOAP in its client-side CLR implementation.

The May 2007 ASP.NET futures release contained two intriguing controls: asp:Media and asp:Xaml. Intriguing because they are the first server-side controls released to incorporate Silverlight content as part of the control rendering. The asp:Media control makes it trivial to drop a video into an ASP.NET page, complete with a choice of eight different player skins, and the asp:Xaml control makes it easy to incorporate a Silverlight Xaml file into a control embedded on a page. What’s especially useful about both of these ‘preview’ controls is that they make it simple to incorporate Silverlight content into a traditional ASP.NET page without worrying about the details of creating the Silverlight control by hand, or associating (or even writing, in the case of the asp:Media control) the accompanying xaml file.

This talk looks at how these two controls are implemented, and walks through a sample implementation of a similar control using the ASP.NET Ajax framework to provide users with a clean ASP.NET interface to compelling Silverlight content.

For the past few years Architecture in the IT industry has largely focused on data centers, back end systems and services. While it is important to get these operational items right, none of them have ever closed a deal, made an important business decision, or created a new market. As these IT architectures mature, it is time to return the focus of architecture to where it can have the biggest impact and greatest value for the business: the user. The user, whether it be the CEO, middle manager or shop floor worker, has the ability to impact business in both positive and negative ways every day with every decision. Sessions in this track will present a variety of new ways of thinking about User Experience as it relates to Architecture.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is Microsoft’s latest incarnation of a UI Framework. This session will present what WPF is and what the concepts behind WPF are to give an architect enough knowledge to work with the development teams and decide when to use what.

In this session, Ed and Grant will highlight many of the lessons they learned when developing the enterprise-level WPF reference application, Tangerine. Tangerine is an asset browser built using the data provider model to browse the Amazon online catalog. Additionally, they will discuss the Software Release Status application currently under development. This project management tool uses the power of WPF to visually represent the status of your software projects using data from your Team Foundation Server. You'll get an inside look at the interaction between development and design, and gain insight into practical solutions for common problems.

Silverlight is a cross platform runtime enabling a subset of WPF XAML to reach customers on Windows and Mac OSX plaforms. With Silverlight, you'll be able to build rich, interactive experiences that run in major Web browsers on major platforms as well as on mobile devices. Join us to discuss the Silverlight feature set, the Silverlight Media story, targeted platforms and browsers, the developer experience, and to see how to build a basic media player. This session leverages Expression Media Encoder, Expression Blend, and Visual Studio.

On 7/7/7 for the LiveEarth event, we went live with one of the very first Silverlight 1.1 alpha applications: the Conservation International Carbon Calculator. Through integration with Silverlight 1.1, Virtual Earth, and MOSS 2007, the application walks the user through calculating their own personal or family carbon emissions, and teaches them about the ways they can offset those emissions. In this session, we'll take a developer-focused look at what it took to build this application, what the alpha did well, what challenges we faced, and what we might keep the same or change if we started from scratch today.

Whether you're animating 2D objects, simulating 3D environments, or creating broadcast-style video experiences, this session shows you the ins and outs of how to create stunning looking sites and Web experiences with Silverlight and Microsoft Expression Studio.

This session will focus on the core features & functions available in Silverlight today and how you can leverage this exciting new technology to create some very compelling Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s). We will walk thru a gallery of demos that showcase the power of Silverlight and then do a brief deep-dive to explore how these effects are accomplished using the tools & technology.

Silverlight is Microsoft’s new platform for building browser-based Rich Internet Applications. Most real-world applications do not exist in isolation but need to interact with the outside world. Your application may need to mash up data from public Web APIs such as the ones for social networking sites, Live.com services, and a variety of others, or from custom services specific to your app. In order to do this, you may need to use a variety of wire protocols and formats such as XML, JSON, RSS, Atom, SOAP and REST, be able to talk to services both within and across your domain, and support a variety of authentication mechanisms. This session will present a detailed preview of upcoming Silverlight features and of associated Visual Studio tools that will enable you to interact with all these service types in a natural and easy way, and will give you the opportunity to provide feedback to help make these features even better.

In this session we'll take a close look at how the Dynamic Language Runtime enables C#, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby code in the same application. We'll cover a little theory and background - dynamic languages, duck typing, meta-programming - while staying focused on working code. The "how" and "why" of dynamic languages on .NET will become clear as we examine a Silverlight application and cross issues such as server-side integration, DOM integration, and the benefits of speaking multiple languages

Security has always been a top concern for Web developers, and Ajax hasn’t made our lives any easier. Learn about some of the most common vulnerabilities, how Ajax affects security, and how you can protect your applications.

When Web Services and the .NET Framework made their debut, early adopters envisioned a world where re-usable Web Services could be easily discovered, shared and combined into composite applications. Web Services proponents keep pushing the envelope, and now a slew of brand name Web sites, including Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook and MSN/Windows Live, sport Web Services interfaces.

But where's the futuristic construction kit for hooking them together and creating "mashups?" Enter Microsoft Popfly, a Web browser-based development environment that quite possibly could do for Web mashups what Visual Basic 1.0 did for Windows: make the programming easy and accessible to new developers by eliminating the plumbing and grunt work.

In this session we'll cover the basic how-to of using Popfly, get an understanding for the universe of "blocks" (Web Services wrappers) available now, and discuss interesting ways of combining them. We'll continue by looking at how to customize your mashups by writing JavaScript code or modifying the code generated by Popfly. We'll finish by investigating how to modify the blocks themselves and create blocks that expose your own Web services.

This is the kind of stuff that makes programming fun. So come and see what it's all about.

The Windows Live Platform provides a number of offerings that can be used in interesting ways to provide great user experiences: Silverlight Streaming, Virtual Earth, Live Search, just to name a few. In this session, we’ll review examples of sites built on these offerings, focusing primarily on the usage scenarios.    (A more API-level view of the offerings will be covered in the following session: Lap Around the Windows Live Platform)

Windows Live provides a wide range of experiences to millions of users world-wide. Many of these offerings are beginning to be exposed to developers through a variety of web controls and service APIs. In this session we’ll walk through available developer offerings and illustrate the mechanics of specific controls and APIs. Services that will be covered include: Silverlight Streaming, Windows Live Contacts, Windows Live Spaces, Virtual Earth, Live Search, and Windows Live ID.

Why Expression Web? See some of the things Expression Web can do to make creating cross browser websites easier with its sophisticated CSS tools and standards based output.

Come learn about Microsoft’s new Astoria project that enables you to make your data available over the Web through a simple REST interface and using open formats such as plain XML, JSON or even RDF. We also discuss the underlying entity framework that makes it easy to model, publish, and program against your data over the Web.

Brad opens the show with a few deep thoughts and special guests MLB, ComponentOne, and Lightmaker

Customer demands for richer UX, multi-platform support, and higher quality video are continually factors in cost of delivery. Learn how Silverlight, Ajax, Expression Studio, and Internet Information Services and Windows Media Services in Windows Server 2008 together can improve the end-user experience while reducing the cost of video and rich media delivery for companies of all sizes. This session is intended for anyone involved in the creation, management, and experience of digital media on the Web.

What does it take to be a Web Professional? Does it mean knowing our software tools and technologies as perfectly as possible? Surely that plays a role in professionalism, but looking at other professions, it’s clear that those of us working the Web have vast and varied measures of what makes a professional. Join Molly in this interesting discussion about evolving best practices, ethics and other aspects of a truly professional community.

In this session, gain insight into the design and development features that you can now use confidently to achieve cross-browser design. You’ll learn about CSS selectors that are now useful in progressive design; PNG transparency; and the techniques available to make sure your work looks great in IE6 and other browsers, too.

Experience thought leader and author Lou Carbone will change the way you think about customer experience forever. His message to business leaders and professionals is simple: Create customers that come back and customers that tell others, by connecting emotionally with them through the experiences you deliver. Carbone urges business to focus on managing experience "clues", conscious and unconscious, because experiences are what customers value most. He stresses that the world has moved from making and selling to sensing and responding—a dynamic change that requires new competencies. Through illustrations from Fortune 100 clients, Carbone will share how the systematic design and delivery of experience clues can have immense impact on customer value, loyalty and the bottom line.

Mono provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix. Sponsored by Novell (http://www.novell.com), the Mono open source project has an active and enthusiastic contributing community and is positioned to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications. The Mono Project recently announced Moonlight, a Mono based implementation of Silverlight. Come chat with Miguel de Icaza, the founder of the Mono project, about Moonlight, Mono and Silverlight.

This talk will focus on the problems of bringing real time visibility to physical objects and processes by using RFID. The use of RFID technology to track products through the supply chain was promoted by MIT’s Auto-ID Center and the concept of the 5 cent tag encouraged companies such as Wall*Mart and Gillette to spearhead RFID adoption. However, to be useful in a supply chain we need to be able to answer the questions of What (Identity), When (timestamp), Where (location) and Why (business context). The problem extracting higher level (business) events from the voluminous data is a key issue, since even today 70% of the data in ERP systems is unused. The problems of Discovery (where do I find the service I need) and Track and Trace in the Pharma supply chain will be used to highlight some of the issues. The Auto-ID Labs are building a simulator based on the Robotics Studio CCR and DSS to test out some of the fundamental questions of data processing, security, and event coordination. To handle over 1 million facilities MIT turned to Microsoft Research and their Robotics Studio product for the technology to handle massively threaded environment needed. The demonstration will show around 1 million threads being handled on a laptop. The actual simulator uses WCF to distribute the simulation across machines. The demo will also show work helicopter born RFID readers and wheeled robots that are being trained using Robotics Studio and XNA gaming environment and GEO-EPC location service available via http://auitoid.mit.edu and http://epcis.mit.edu and http://epcis.mit.edu/GeoEPCVE . A number of MS technologies are being used such as LINQ, XNA, Robotics Studio, WiMo, Virtual Earth, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server and Domain Specific Language.

IT Departments in today’s enterprise are consistently being asked to do more with less. But how do you accomplish such a feat? One of the often overlooked areas is that of user experience. Bad user experience can cause employee frustration and it costs money in ways not initially thought of. Lost employee productivity hours, increased helpdesk calls, cost of mistakes in financials. Microsoft’s platform today offers both designers and developers a chance to speak the same language. The result is increased end user satisfaction, loyalty, and cost savings to IT.

After Tim O’Reilly’s article “What is Web 2.0” in 2005, there has been considerable buzz around Web 2.0 technologies and the companies that use them. From the open platform Facebook to the rich user interfaces of web mail clients like Microsoft Exchange, the architecture of web applications is changing rapidly. While other companies have begun to see potential business value in Web 2.0 technologies, there is still uncertainty on how to integrate those technologies into corporate activities. How can you balance corporate security needs without negating the architecture of participation that is important in Web 2.0 applications? Where is the line between internal and external applications? What can we learn from the most successful public Web services and does it apply to our internal SOA? Josh will discuss lessons learned and best practices around collaboration, rich user experiences, and data syndication from existing Web 2.0 application architectures. We’ll also provide guidance how current Microsoft platform technologies like AJAX for ASP.NET, SharePoint Server 2007, and WCF can be used to turn those lessons into a practical corporate Web 2.0 architecture. Finally we’ll take a look at the next generation of Microsoft technologies like Silverlight and Visual Studio 2008 and discuss how architects can design and deploy applications beyond the current Web 2.0 experience.