--VSLive Buzzword Glossary---------
Ajax
Thursday - 9:00 AM
A Day of ASP.NET Ajax
(Post-Conference Workshop - extra fee)
Another acronym, this one stands for "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML." (This move from three letter to four letter acronyms makes me worried. There are only 17,576 three letter acronyms but moving to four lets marketing types confuse us with almost half a million.) According to Wikipedia, "Despite the name, the use of JavaScript and XML is not actually required, nor do the requests need to be asynchronous." Why am I not surprised?
The idea behind Ajax is that a web page can retrieve data in the background without slowing down the rest of the page loading. This is why you see a lot more animations and videos on web pages these days.
Azure Services Platform
Monday - 8:30 AM
Keynote Address
Monday - 10:15 AM
A Lap Around Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform
Monday - 12:30 PM
Developing and Deploying Your First Azure Service
Tuesday - 4:00 PM
Windows Azure: Is the Relational Database Dead?
Thursday - 9:00 AM
A Day of Windows Azure
(Post-Conference Workshop - extra fee)
The sub-buzz at Microsoft is, "Build new applications in the cloud." More buzzwords. See "cloud computing" in this article.
Azure is a collection of internet services that "can be consumed" (you can write code to use the service in your program). This product is still a "CTP" so don't plan on writing any production code today unless you have a contract for support from Microsoft on the side. (See "CTP" in this article.)
Azure services are hosted in Microsoft data centers and you can use web protocols such as HTTP, REST, SOAP, and XML. At the present time, only .NET applications are supported, but Microsoft claims that lots of other technologies will be supported in the future. Azure Services are currently organized in four subcategories:
- Live Services - Application resources such as a Silverlight API. (See "Silverlight" in this article.)
- Microsoft SQL Services - Why have a database in your data center? You trust Microsoft with your data don't you?
- Microsoft .NET Services - Your .NET Framework in the cloud. Think of this as a library of commonly used software that you'll need to make all this work such as authorization and networking.
- Microsoft® SharePoint® Services & Dynamics® CRM Services - Mainly a future plan right now, this gives you the ability to access services that are a little more traditional but "in the cloud." (See "Microsoft Dynamics CRM" in this article.)
Cloud Computing
Monday - 8:30 AM
Keynote Address
A red-hot marketing buzzword, this is actually less than you might think. What it really means is that you get computing services from the Internet, rather than from your own internal network data center or local computer. The 'cloud' is that irregular shape that has been used in Internet diagrams for years. Another marketing term that means about the same thing is "software as a service". 'Cloud computing' might be considered to be different because information is usually thought to be permanently stored on the Internet and only temporarily on clients.
CSLA .NET
Thursday - 11:30 AM
CSLA .NET for Silverlight
CSLA is "Component-based Scalable Logical Architecture." It's a third party application development framework originated by Rockford Lhotka and primarily documented through his books. He's been perfecting his idea since VB 6 but it has only been called CSLA since being ported to .NET.
CTP
Monday - 8:30 AM
Keynote Address
Community Test Preview - Microsoft's way of saying, "Not ready for prime time quite yet, use at your own risk."
Dublin
Wednesday - 11:30 AM
Codename "Dublin": Windows Application Server
First, there was BizTalk Server. Now, to make sure you're not understanding things too well, the Microsoft marketers renamed it as Windows Application Server. (They're maintaining them as different products - for now. Microsoft is now calling BizTalk an "integration server" - whatever that is.) Dublin will add extensions for WCF and WF. (See "Windows Communications Foundation (WCF)" and "Workflow Foundation (WF)" in this article.) Don't get too excited, Dublin won't be released after Visual Studio version 10 and the .Net Framework version 4.0 are released.
Entity Framework
Tuesday - 10:00 AM
Entity Framework Tips & Tricks
More completely, the "ADO.NET Entity Framework," Microsoft claims that this product "eliminates the impedance mismatch between data models and languages." And I always thought impedance was a measure of resistance in AC electrical circuits. It just shows how little I know.
The goal of the ADO.NET Entity Framework is similar to many other products ... to let you write your code against a conceptual model rather than an actual data store and eliminate the need to know the specifics of the data store and reduce future maintenance when the data store changes. It's based on an architecture called "Object-Relational Mapping (ORM)."
But it's not working out quite as well as Microsoft hoped. Beta testers have actually started circulating a 'no confidence vote' petition to convince Microsoft to address problems. You can find a lot of heavy duty criticism if you surf the web a bit.
F#
Monday - 3:30 PM
An Introduction to Microsoft F#
Here's the skinny directly from Microsoft Research:
"A succinct, type-inferred, expressive, efficient functional and object-oriented language for the .NET platform."
So why do we need another language? Maybe we'll find out.