Prairie Developer Conference West - Calgary, Alberta

Workshops

All workshops will be held on Monday, March 12th at the TELUS Convention Centre. You can save 50% off a workshop when you bundle it with your conference pass or workshop-only passes can be purchased for $299.99!

Windows Phone 7 Developer Workshop with Bil Simser

The mobile world is upon us and building applications for Microsoft’s latest mobile platform, Windows Phone 7, is as powerful and easy as it can be ever. The platform makes it one of the richest mobile platforms on the market and the combined power of Visual Studio and Expression Blend makes creating applications for it one of the easiest platforms to develop for.

This workshop will walk you through the entire process of building applications for the Windows Phone 7 platform in Silverlight and C# including:

  • Tools of the trade
  • Getting up and started in with your first app in 15 minutes (or less)
  • Databinding, Data storage, and the MVVM Pattern
  • Creating the rich mobile experience by designing the Metro way
  • Monetizing your application and publishing to the Marketplace
  • Tricks of the Windows Phone Gurus
  • Designing with Expression Blend
  • Mango, Mango, Mango

This hands on workshop is recommended for any developer regardless of skill level or past experience with building applications for the mobile platform. Experience building in Silverlight is helpful and experience building any application in C# is preferred.

Planning and Initiating an Agile Project with Steve Rogalsky

Planning and initiating any project can be a challenging task. When starting an agile project the focus, activities, and output changes significantly from traditional projects. It can be challenging to understand what practices should be used and what deliverables should be produced to allow the project to start quickly and on a firm foundation. This workshop will help you understand who should be involved and the differences between traditional and agile project planning and initiation. Working in teams, you will receive hands-on practice in planning and initiating an agile project using techniques such as:

  • Agile Visioning (Starting with Why)
  • Agile Chartering
  • Planning, organizing and prioritizing through User Story Mapping
  • Personas and User Scenarios
  • Techniques for generating user stories
  • How to write good user stories
  • Agile estimating techniques
  • Prioritizing user stories
  • Light weight risk assessments

This hands-on workshop is recommended for all roles and team members.

Creating Powerful Build and Deploy Processes with TFS Build with Dylan Smith

In this day-long session we’re going to focus on unleashing the power of TFS Build to create a powerful fully-featured automated build and deploy for a sample application. We’re going to get down into the guts of the tool including an in-depth look at customizing Build workflows, creating custom build activities, and most importantly discuss a lot of best practices around creating valuable build and deploy processes. We’ll also get a chance to bring TFS Lab Management into the mix, and setup some virtual testing environments, and extend our build processes to automatically deploy to the various environments.

Some of the common questions that I hear that we’ll be covering are:

  • What’s the role of MSBuild now that TFS Build is Windows Workflow based? When should I be using MSBuild vs Workflow?
  • How do I test custom build activities?
  • How do I auto-version my assemblies via my build process?
  • How do I auto-deploy my application to a testing environment as part of my build?
  • How do I upgrade my old TFS 2008 Builds?
  • My build takes forever, what can I do?
  • What type of things should I do in a CI Build vs Nightly Build?

At the end of day you’ll have a solid understanding of how TFS Build works, how to deploy and configure it in your organization, and how to create customized builds to meet your team’s needs. Not only that, but you’ll hopefully have a new understanding of the immense power of rich build system tailored to your project.

Microsoft Workshops

We have two free workshops provided by Microsoft! Seating is limited though!

AzureCamp

This is a day-long workshop showing you what Azure and developing for the Cloud is all about. Also – it’s FREE! That’s right, whether you attend the conference or not, you can come to this fantastic day long workshop and not pay a penny. Microsoft is even covering breakfast and lunch!

For more information, including how to register, visit our blog post here.

Microsoft IT Virtualization Boot Camp

SOLD OUT!