Microsoft Conference Sessions

What I’m currently watching / listening to:

Recently finished working my way through the sessions of the Silverlight Firestarter 2010. Next: TechEd 2010. I attended and enjoyed many sessions there, but now it is time to fill in the gaps and listen to all the other sessions that I wanted to attend.

03/14/11 How to Boost Your Search Rankings Introduction and walkthrough of using the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit. Has some good info about WordPress, and as I now have to become a WordPress hacker, was great.
03/14/11 Pushing the limits of Windows with Mark Russinovich Not that I ever actually need this information – I just think it is cool to know. Processing DOCX files really doesn’t take much in the way of resources. Note to self: review this talk when doing transforms on extremely large Open XML documents. There are some funny moments in this talk, so there is entertainment value. 🙂
03/14/11 The Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework I watched / listened to this session some months ago. It is a ‘must watch’ for Silverlight developers.
03/11/11 The Roadmap for Media with Silverlight While I don’t expect to be installing / configuring media servers, this stuff is fascinating.
03/11/11 Performance Tips for Silverlight Windows Phone 7 Performance. Listened to this session twice. Many years ago, I did a lot of graphical user interface development. Someday, I’ll have time to do some Silverlight development, and it is going to be fun. And of course, I expect that I’ll be blogging about what I’ll be doing.
03/11/11 Profiling and Performance Tips Another session on performance. Listened to this session twice.
03/08/11 Installation best practices This session is entitled ‘tips and tricks’, but really should be ‘best practices’ IMO. Really good session.
03/06/11 Tips and Patterns using MVVM and Service Patterns with Silverlight and WP7 Best intro to MVVM that I’ve watched or listened to.
03/06/11 Building Feature Rich Business Apps Today with RIA Services Database applications using Silverlight
03/05/11 Data Binding Strategies with Silverlight and WP7 Basic data-binding intro.
03/05/11 Building Compelling Apps with WCF using REST and LINQ Silverlight + WCF. Great info on debugging WCF. Also good info on authentication/identity.
03/05/11 Silverlight Firestarter Keynote w/ Scott Guthrie Silverlight 5. Cool demos. Telerik Facedeck. IIS Media Services. Fast playback with pitch fixing will be cool for screen-casts.
03/01/11 Principles of Microsoft Silverlight Graphics and Animation I particularly liked his explanation about how to create particle systems. The examples presented in this talk would be great places to start when playing around with building more sophisticated Silverlight systems.
03/01/11 Building Web Applications with Microsoft SQL Azure Good talk
03/01/11 Building Web Applications with Windows Azure Storage
03/01/11 A Modular Approach to Development Process Great presentation, thought provoking. Note to self – watch again sometime.
03/01/11 Patterns of Parallel Programming Until now, my Open XML programs have been IO bound. However, recently purchased 3 Intel SSDs, and want to examine if I can better take advantage of quad core machines.
03/01/11 The Zen of Architecture Another fantastic session by Juval Lowy. Everything he knows about architecture condensed into 75 minutes.
03/01/11 Open Data for the Enterprise One of the many sessions I watched around OData (which is very cool)
03/01/11 Best Practices: Creating OData Services Using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Data Services Another good OData session.
03/01/11 A Database Developer and DBA Perspective: LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework vs Stored Procedures This is a fantastic session that highlights differences between LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework, and provides a lot of pros and cons about the three approaches.