Pre-conference: Pragmatic Application Design

Monday May 12th, 09:00 - 17:00
Location: Hilton Toronto
Room: Carmichael 
Cost: 399.00$ CDN

William R. Vaughn, Beta V Corporation    William (Bill) Vaughn is an industry-recognized author, mentor, and subject-matter expert. He’s been in the computer industry for over thirty years. He’s worked with mainframe, minicomputer, and personal computer systems as a developer, manager, trainer, marketer, support person, and writer. After 14 years at Microsoft, Bill stepped away to work on his new books and training seminars. His area of specialization is focused on data access and especially Visual Basic and SQL Server. He’s written six editions of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Visual Basic and SQL Server (published by Microsoft Press) and two editions of ADO.NET and ADO Examples and Best Practices for Visual Basic Programmers. There’s even a C# version, ADO.NET Examples and Best Practices for C# Programmers. Bill is a top-rated speaker and frequents conferences all over the world including VSLive, DevConnections, and PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server). He’s also written a wealth of articles for magazines such as SQL Server Magazine, Visual Basic Programmer’s Journal, .NET Magazine, and many others. Bill is currently working on new content focusing on the .NET Compact Framework and SQL Server CE as well as the next version of SQL Server. He’s available for consulting or custom training.

This series of sessions is designed to take a developer, architect or database administrator through the fundamentals and many of the more technical details and best practices used when designing applications using the .NET Framework, Visual Studio and SQL Server. This workshop is not about future or expected versions of Visual Studio or the unreleased tools and platforms you hear so much about—it’s about how to best use the existing, stable and trusted versions of the .NET Framework, Visual Studio and SQL Server. The sessions talk about real-world and practical solutions to the problems most companies face—especially smaller companies or smaller departments in larger companies that have to interface with existing data stores of all shapes and sizes.

William Vaughn has been mentoring, teaching, consulting and writing about .NET since its inception and about SQL Server since it was first brought to Microsoft by Sybase in 1989 about 16 years ago. His 11th and 12th books focus on these very subjects—Hitchhiker’s Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server (7th Edition) and Hitchhiker’s Guide to SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition—each attendee will receive a copy of the 7th Edition.

Each of the sessions is built around the content discussed in selected chapters indicated in the agenda shown below. No, Bill can’t discuss every detail of the 7th Edition—it’s over 1100 pages long. Most of the sessions are new—developed specifically for this workshop. We also plan to provide many of the demos in a form where they can be replayed on your own system back in the office.

We suggest that you try to read the chapters indicated in the session summary prior to the workshop so you can be prepared to ask informed questions and get the most out of your time spent in the sessions. The sessions move fairly quickly with plenty of demos and most importantly, time to ask questions and discuss the answers. Many of the demos are new—others are derived from the code samples included with the book.

Exploring Application and Data Access Architectures

Before charging off to create an application using Visual Studio and SQL Server, developers should have a firm understanding of the architectural choices and tools. The first session does just that. It walks through the basics of local database, client/server, multi-tier, ASP.NET and object-based architectures. We’ll discuss which makes sense based on the number of users to support, scalability (and what that means), security and existing code constraints. We’ll discuss which connection and query strategy makes sense for your application as well as the best tools and techniques to implement it. (30 minutes—Summarizes Chapter 1.)

• Understanding data access architectures.
• Choosing the “right” application architectures.
• Choosing the “right” database engine—where does the Compact Edition fit?
• Choosing the “right” data access methodologies.

Assuming you’ve come to this course to learn about SQL Server, you can’t really get started building an intelligent application if you don’t understand how SQL Server works. This next session makes that abundantly clear—going into just enough detail to help you build successful, high-performance applications with the least amount of hardware. This session also provides an overview of the tools included with SQL Server to help make the process of configuring, tuning, administering and testing your application easier. (75 minutes—Summarizes Chapter 2)

• Which version of SQL Server makes sense for your application—today and a year from now?
• Installing, configuring and running SQL Server instances.
• Understanding what’s different about SQL Express installations.
• Understanding how the query processor works—what makes queries fast and efficient?
• Understanding SQL Server security and the tools to configure it.
• Exposing SQL Server to the network—and why this is not always a good idea.
• Using SQL Server Management Studio including the object explorer and query editor.
• Optimizing queries with SQL Server Management Studio tools.
• Understanding how Stored Procedures can help (and hurt) performance.
• Using the SQL Profiler to monitor and tune application queries.

Many developers are “encouraged” to leverage existing databases when applications are first created but you’ll also need to know how to create new databases and populate the schema. This session shows how to use Visual Studio as well as SQL Server Management Studio to do so. We’ll also make it clear when the Visual Studio or Visual Basic Express Editions fall short. One of the most pervasive design decisions made by developers, architects and DBAs that use SQL Server is the use of Stored Procedures to help manage their data access applications. The next session makes it clear why this approach continues to be taken by over 90% of the serious applications in use today. Using Visual Studio’s Server Explorer we’ll see how to create, manage and debug Stored Procedures. (60 minutes–Summarizes Chapter 4 and 5.)

• Creating new databases, populating schema, setting rights and importing data.
• Creating and exploring databases via Data Connections.
• Using the Query Designer to build, test and tune queries.
• Creating, tuning and using step-through debugging with Stored Procedures and functions.

Visual Studio provides the developer with a number of code generators that try to make the process of accessing data easy. We’ll see how these IDE-based generators work and when they fail to complete the job. We’ll also see what happened to the last generation of code generators and the ones before that. (60 minutes—Summarizes Chapter 6.)

• Understanding the disconnected data model.
• Leveraging the DataAdapter and other code-generating wizards.
• Implementing strongly typed data classes using Visual Studio.
• Understanding the role of the Data Source, DataSet, DataTable, DataAdapter and TableAdapter.
• Using the Visual Studio IDE, wizards and designers to build and tune these classes.
• Building CRUD operations based on stored procedures.
• Building a simple application using drag-and-drop.
• Building a stored-procedure-based hierarchical application using the TableAdapter.

In a given month, there seems to be a never-ending flow of questions on getting connected to SQL Server. Given the newer, tighter security constraints I can understand why. This session focuses on the SqlConnection class and how to get it connected to SQL Server. None of the operations we’ve discussed so far can be accomplished without a working connection. It also spends considerable time on the Connection Pooling mechanism which seems to bring out a number of design and coding flaws. We’ll see how to eliminate both. (60 minutes—Summarizes Chapter 9.)

• Connectivity strategies—connect once or just in time?
• Understanding Multiple Active Resultsets and where (or if) it makes sense.
• Coding the ConnectionString and using the SqlConnectionStringBuilder class.
• Opening and closing connections—correctly.
• Understanding, tuning and monitoring the connection pool.
• Managing the SQL Server service instances in code.

Sometimes the tasks you assign to a TSQL executable are too much for SQL Server to handle on its own—especially considering that TSLQ is a query language that’s not really designed to perform sophisticated string or array manipulation or complex math calculations. This is where SQL Server CLR executables can be used to improve code and developer performance. This session walks through the process of deciding where CLR executables make sense and where they don’t. We’ll step through the process of building, testing and scripting CLR stored procedures, functions, user-defined types and aggregates. Along the way we’ll leverage what we’ve learned about tuning TSQL code to evaluate the performance of each technique. (75 minutes—Summarizes Chapter 13.)

• Where do CLR executables make sense?
• Choosing the right problem to solve.
• Building stored procedures and functions.
• Handling input and output parameters.
• Setting up a test environment using Visual Studio and SQL Server Management Studio.
• Executing CLR executables from TSQL and ADO.NET.
• Implementing a CLR User-defined type.
• Understanding CLR executable security.

Most of our applications create reports one way or another. Since the inception of SQL Server Reporting Services developers have had a new (and far easier) way to visualize the data stored in the database. This session shows how to setup and manage a suite of Reporting Services reports and invoke them from your Visual Studio-coded applications using the Report Viewer control. (60 minutes—Summarizes Chapter 14.)

• Understanding how Reporting Services works.
• Creating RDL reports with the Visual Studio Business Intelligence wizards.
• Managing Reporting Services reports with the Report Designer and SharePoint Services.
• Managing report security.
• Creating RDLC reports with the Visual Studio Report designer.
• Using the Report Viewer control to launch Reporting Services and locally hosted reports.
• Adding code to manage report and query parameters.

Agenda:
8:30 AM – 9:00 AM
Welcome and Registration

9:00 AM – 12:00 AM

• Exploring Application and Data Access Architectures
• How Does SQL Server Work?
• Leveraging the Visual Studio and SQL Server Data Explorers
• Building Data Sources, DataSet and TableAdapters

• Getting Connected
• Managing SQL Server CLR Executables
• Creating and Managing RDL-based Reports Using Visual Studio

Every attendees will get a free book from William R. Vaughn (Hitchiker's Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server).

Monday May 12th, 2008, 09:00 - 17:00
Location: Hilton Toronto
Room: Jackson
Cost: 399.00$ CDN

Kevin McNeish, Oak Leaf Enterprises, Inc.     Kevin McNeish is President and Chief Software Architect of Oak Leaf Enterprises, Inc, and a Microsoft .NET MVP. He is an INETA speaker in the U.S. and a speaker with MSDN Canada Speaker’s Bureau and is also a well known speaker and trainer throughout North America and Europe including VSLive!, DevTeach (where he serves as one of the .NET chairs), SDC Netherlands, and Advisor DevCon. He is co-author of the book "Professional UML with Visual Studio .NET", author of the book ".NET for Visual FoxPro Developers", has authored several articles for CoDe magazine and has been interviewed on the .NET Rocks! Internet Radio Show. He is the Chief Software Architect of the MM .NET Framework and spends about half his time on the road training and mentoring companies to build well-designed, high-performance .NET applications. He has also helped many developers transition to the .NET development platform in his highly acclaimed .NET training classes and highly acclaimed Kevin McNeish’s Guide to .NET video series.

.NET 3.0/3.5 introduces much-needed technologies that will have a tremendous impact on your .NET applications user interface, communication/interoperability, support of business processes, and management of digital identities. If you have seen presentations on these new features and are still mystified on what they are and how they are used, or even if you are new to the subject, this hands-on workshop is for you! This pre-con demonstrates practical, real-world use of these new features in a way that will allow you to understand and make full use of them in your applications. We will also look at .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 to see how these technologies have been extended and enhanced for the next release in 2008.

This pre-con covers:

• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) – The next-generation Windows presentation subsystem that provides visually compelling user interfaces
• Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) – Provides secure, reliable, transacted communication across technology boundaries
• Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) – Provides the ability to model and support a wide range of business processes
• Windows CardSpace (WCS) – Provides easier management of your digital identities

Attendees can bring their own computers to this workshop and work through samples that demonstrate the use of new .NET 3.0/3.5 features. You will need the following software loaded on your computer:

• .NET Framework 3.0
• Visual Studio 2005
• Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for the .NET Framework 3.0
• .NET Framework 3.5 – Beta 2 (optional)
• Visual Studio 2008 – Beta 2(optional)

Agenda:
8:30 AM – 9:00 AM
Welcome and Registration
9:00 AM – 12:00 AM
Introduction to WPF,WCF,WF,WCS
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Lunch (Not included)
1:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Sample Code and example with .NET 3.0

Monday May 12th, 2008, 09:00 - 17:00
Location: Hilton Toronto
Room: Casson
  Cost: 399.00$ CDN

Paul Nielsen, www.SQLServerBible.com     Paul Nielsen, SQL Server MVP, is a hands-on database architect and the author of the SQL Server Bible series from Wiley & Son. Paul leads SQL Server Bible Workshops and speaks at several conferences. Paul will be giving the welcome address at the Colorado PASS SQL Server Code Camp next week in Denver, and he serves on the PASS Board of Directors.

Learn how to develop high-performance databases with Paul Nielsen. The >Design and Optimization Best-Practices Seminar details each layer of optimization theory, so you'll know exactly how to develop, refactor, or tune databases for high-performance. I've packed all my favorite database design and development techniques into this intense practical seminar.