The Prairie Developer Conference features 50 sessions accross four tracks, presented by industry experts!

For more information on our post-conference workshop with Donald Belcham, click here.

Which track sessions would you like to see?
All (50) Application Lifecycle Management (12) Developer Foundation (20) Database/Business Intelligence (7) Web/RIA (11)

Agile Development Practices: A Brief Introduction and How They Help Your Business There are a lot of people in the industry talking about “Agile”. Agile business practices, agile development practices, agile teams, agile project management. Basically agile, agile, and more agile. The problem is most of them don’t contain much substance, they’re just throwing around the latest/greatest buzz word because they know it’s what people are looking for. I’ve been working in an agile environment for the last 2 years, after 7 years of an old school waterfall development style. I plan to talk about all the main differences that a true agile environment makes to the development teams, business teams, project managers etc. Also the many other benefits that aren’t necessarily expected including improved relationships between the development and business teams, increased morale, and much more satisfied customers. Track: Application Lifecycle Management Style: Lecture Speaker: Chris Dagenais

Agile Estimating Using Planning Poker Agile estimating using Planning Poker. Come to a hands-on session on the how-tos of Planning Poker. The session will show you a new way to approach estimating as a team that will improve your estimating on any project. Track: Application Lifecycle Management Style: Chalk Talk Speaker: Steve Rogalsky Click Here for Session Materials!

Agile Estimation How do you estimate you projects today? Stick your finger into the wind? Yesterday's weather? Chaos theory? WAG? Spidey senses? In this session we'll explore a number of different estimation techniques you can use on your projects. We will also take a look at some tools you can use to help with your estimation processes. Track: Application Lifecycle Management Style: Lecture Speaker: Joel Semeniuk

Agile in Action Learn how Agile practices have been applied first-hand by examining a couple real-world projects, the problems they were facing, and the approach taken to improve them. This session will not be a typical intro to Agile; instead we will focus on the aspects of these projects that differ from your everyday Agile implementation. See how we applied KanBan to a project but didn’t adopt the common “branch-per-feature” model. See how we do rolling-wave long-term planning on a Scrum project with exceptional success. Ever tried to hold a Scrum retrospective only to find out nobody has anything interesting to say? Learn how we use retrospectives effectively and used the results to evolve our processes over time. Track: Application Lifecycle Management Style: Lecture Speaker: Dylan Smith Click Here for Session Materials!

Best Practices for Vertical Application Development While a vertical market application shares many of the same goals as a custom application, the bar is higher because the audience is both larger in volume and broader in scope, plus you usually have much less direct contact with the customer. This session examines some of the things to consider when designing and implementing a vertical market application. Track: Application Lifecycle Management Style: Chalk Talk Speaker: Doug Hennig

Chainsaw Project Management: Moving Towards Lean In A Waterfall World Moving from traditional waterfall-centric push project management to lean pull-based approaches takes more than putting a kanban board on a wall. Using a “real world” example, the audience is invited to help with identifying waste, maximizing flow and (perhaps most importantly at all) explore ways of getting buy-in from management and other stakeholders to whom this way of doing things is completely alien. Just for fun, we’ll try to use nice, easy to understand techie concepts and apply them to running projects: Refactoring (.... gradually change old ways of doing things, in small easy to digest steps), anti-corruption layers (... how to work with other parts of the organization who are in no position to try all this new-fangled stuff), etc. Track: Application Lifecycle Management Style: Chalk Talk Speaker: Robert Reppel

Introduction to Agile Agile? Scrum? Extreme Programming? Lean Software Development? Join us for an introduction to Agile and Lean techniques and why they are important to our industry. This presentation will look at the underlying philosophies and motivations of Agile and Lean techniques that are increasingly being used to improve the quality and success of projects. The seminar will give an introduction to Agile and Lean, describe why and how these methods can be successful, show some agile practices through hands-on exercises, and answer some frequently asked questions. Track: Application Lifecycle Management Style: Lecture Speaker: Steve Rogalsky Click Here for Session Materials!

Iterative Development: How it Works, Why it Works, Who it Helps Iterative development is a corner-stone of agile methodologies. I’ll talk about what iterative development is, how it is, why it’s better for the development and business teams, and why it’s also very hard to do... Concepts such as continuous integration, acceptance testing, feature fidelity, constant involvement from the product owner and project manager will be reviewed. Track: Application Lifecycle Management Style: Lecture Speaker: Chris Dagenais

Kanban and Scrumban The Japanese word kanban is a common term meaning "signboard" or "billboard" - and as of recently has been influencing Agile development practices around the world. Come and find out what Kanban is and how you might be able to use it on your Scrum projects. Track: Application Lifecycle Management Style: Lecture Speaker: Joel Semeniuk

Lean Thinking, Hefty Results Agile methodologies have redefined how our teams build software. Lean Thinking naturally frames and enhances our agile mindset by helping us understand and identify value and waste. In this session we dig deep into the fundamentals of Lean Thinking as it applies to building great software. See how various agile practices, from XP, Scrum, to FDD support Lean Thinking as well as how Lean management techniques such as Kanban can be used to enhance how your teams think about and produce software. Track: Application Lifecycle Management Style: Lecture Speaker: Joel Semeniuk

Successful Strategies for Parallel Development (or Branching and Merging Without Wanting to Kill Yourself) With remote teams being more of the norm these days, being able to support multiple teams working on the same code base without chaos ensuing is becoming more and more important. Learn how to correctly structure and manage your code repository to take the pain out of this potentially complicated process. Track: Application Lifecycle Management Style: Lecture Speaker: Aaron Kowall

Database Change Management with Team System As many teams move to more iterative, rapid-development paradigms for writing code (such as the Agile method), both software and database developers have an even greater need for tools such as version control. These tools can reduce the risks that are associated with team-based development. For developing software everybody is familiar with version control and similar tools that we use to manage change in code, but database development historically hasn’t had the same rigor applied or tooling available. By taking advantage of the available tools and integrating them into your development process you can gain significant benefits not only for the databases that you manage but also for the integration points between those databases and the software that interacts with them. In this session, you’ll learn how to use some of the tools available in Visual Studio Team System to design, build, and deploy your databases to development, test, and production environments – all with purpose and method instead of the more traditional madness that can be found in many shops in the wild. Track: Database/Business Intelligence Style: Lecture Speaker: Dylan Smith Click Here for Session Materials!

Incorporating Reporting Services into SharePoint Do you already have a SharePoint implementation and now you need reporting capabilities? Attend this session to learn about incorporating SQL Server Reporting Services into your existing SharePoint installation. We will discuss the reasons why you would want to do this, and how to install, use, and access SSRS reports from SharePoint. Track: Database/Business Intelligence Style: Lecture Speaker: Jessica Moss

Introduction to Query Tuning Mike will go over the basics of query plans, query IO statistics and profiler output as tools for tuning a query. We will look at what considerations to make when deciding whether to create an index and what it means to INCLUDE a column. This is more of an introductory talk than Mike’s previous talks, but there will definitely be something there for anyone who doesn’t tune queries every day. Track: Database/Business Intelligence Style: Lecture Speaker: Michael DeFehr Click Here for Session Materials!

Making Data Rain Down from the Cloud with SQL Azure During the course of the presentation you will be exposed to the Cloud based RDBMS, SQL Azure. You will learn about querying data, search, data analysis, data synchronization and the reporting capabilities that SQL Azure have to offer. We’ll also investigate how SQL Azure can interoperate with non .NET language such as PHP, Ruby and Python. Track: Database/Business Intelligence Style: Lecture Speaker: Cory Fowler Click Here for Session Materials!

SharePoint 2010 for Developers Abstract Coming Soon! Track: Database/Business Intelligence Style: Lecture Speaker: John Bristowe

Spoon Bending and Bullet Dodging with T-SQL Did you think you could dodge bullets with SQL server? Well if you learn some of these techniques, you won’t have to. Learn some of the things you never thought you could do with SQL server – Recursive CTE’s, Composable DML, The MERGE statement, efficient string splitting and concatenation, Row Numbering, Table-valued parameters, Query optimization & tuning. Will we have time for it all? Bring a snack… Track: Database/Business Intelligence Style: Lecture Speaker: Michael DeFehr Click Here for Session Materials!

Who Needs a Data Warehouse? The decision to incorporate a data warehouse into your company’s daily routine is not an easy process. This interactive session will discuss the benefits and disadvantages of having a data warehouse. As a group, we will present reporting and structural alternatives, as well as the pros and cons of building, maintaining, and using a data warehouse. Track: Database/Business Intelligence Style: Lecture Speaker: Jessica Moss

A Developers Guid to Virtualization Virtual machines are a great tool to run your development environment in. I’ll show you how to get Hyper-V working in a Windows Server 2008 R2 environment, how to create your own VM’s from scratch using dynamic and differencing disks, how to use a single OS VHD to support multiple VM’s, how to transfer a VM between different Hyper-V environments, how to take snapshots of your installation so that you may revert back to it at a later time, and finally how to boot your machine natively from a Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 VHD. Track: Developer Foundation Style: Lecture Speaker: Shane Sholdice

Advanced Dependency Injection Testability and decoupling are fine and dandy. See how to make dependency injection work for you through easy injection of logic to facilitate debugging, tracing, and even extensibility. You've gone beyond simply injection and you have complex scenarios like run-time selection of injection parameters, chained dependencies, and object life-time management. See how these scenarios can be achieved with an IoC container like Unity. Track: Developer Foundation Style: Lecture Speaker: Peter Ritchie

Advanced NHibernate Coming Soon! Track: Developer Foundation Style: Lecture Speaker: James Kovacs

An Introduction to Domain Driven Development Domain Driven Design is a vision and approach for dealing with highly complex domains that is based on making the domain itself the main focus of the project, and maintaining a software model that reflects a deep understanding of the domain thereby bridging the gap between business reality and code. In this session we will look at the fundamentals and core concepts of DDD. Track: Developer Foundation Style: Lecture Speaker: Shane Sholdice

Continuous Integration for .NET: The Next Steps You have setup Continuous Integration and have it working to build and test your application, but where do you take it next? The answer is additional testing, code analysis, and documentation. In this session you’ll learn about tools that add additional functionality to your CI process and in turn, help you produce applications with fewer bugs and are easier maintain. Track: Developer Foundation Style: Lecture Speaker: Craig Berntson

Conversations with Donald and Friends Often at conferences there are gaps in session content that you want to see covered. Here’s your chance to ask a selected panel of people their thoughts on the industry, specific technologies and anything else you can come up with. Track: Developer Foundation Style: Panel Speaker: Various

Designing for Success: Why User Experience Matters for your App As software developers, we love to solve problems. Too often, however, we start mapping out solutions using our favourite patterns and technologies before we fully understand the goal, or we focus on functional requirements and lose sight of the big picture. In this session we’ll cover the basics of what a User Experience approach brings to the table and how it can make a difference in the success of your application. Track: Developer Foundation Style: Lecture Speaker: David Alpert

Expression: The Parts You Care About Microsoft introduced the Expression Studio applications back in September of 2005 and has continually been seen as Microsoft's "designer" software by the developer community. As the software has matured, this "designer" software has started to include features that are tailored specifically to software developers. This session will be a introduction to version 3 of Expression Suite, with a focus on the tools that specifically apply to software developers. We will cover how each application (Web, Blend, Design, and Encoder) can be tools that give software developers the edge they need to have their applications stand out amongst the crowd. Track: Developer Foundation Style: Lecture Speaker: Dave Wesst

Getting Started with Continuous Integration Continuous Integration (CI) is a process where a server automatically builds and tests your application, then provides feedback on the results. By using CI you can produce better quality software. In this session you will learn how to get started with CI in a .NET environment. We will concentrate on using free or low cost tools. Track: Developer Foundation Style: Lecture Speaker: Craig Berntson

Hands on Test Driven Development The best way to learn TDD is to work with someone who knows TDD. In this Dojo style talk developers will work on their own computers to start writing code from the outside in with guidance from an experienced TDD developer. Track: Developer Foundation Style: Dojo Speaker: Dave Woods Click Here for Session Materials!

Introduction to Aspect Oriented Programming In all applications you will find cross cutting concerns. Those are pieces of code that don’t properly fit into one layer of the application, but instead are used by many of the layers. The canonical example of this is logging, but there are others such as performance monitoring and auditing. This session is going to discuss what AOP is plus look at some of the tools and techniques that can be used to implement it in your application resulting in a cleaner codebase. Track: Developer Foundation Style: Lecture Speaker: Donald Belcham Click Here for Session Materials!

nHibernate Dojo I’ll be covering NHibernate fundamentals, mapping with Fluent NHibernate, and querying with LINQ to NHibernate. This session is intended to be very interactive with attendees working examples on their own laptops and asking questions. Track: Developer Foundation Style: Dojo Speaker: James Kovacs Click Here for Session Materials!

ORM Fundamentals What is ORM (Object Relational Mapping) and what does it have to do with your applications? Come to this session to find out! We'll explain what ORM is meant to do, and go over the available tools like Entity Framework and NHibernate. If you've ever wondered what all the buzz is about with ORM, this is the session for you! Track: Developer Foundation Style: Lecture Speaker: Donald Belcham Click Here for Session Materials!

Real World Behaviour Driven Development Behaviour Driven Development drives you process towards keeping the focus on the stakeholder’s goals while discovering new features to achieve those goals. But... what does it mean in a .NET project to use BDD? What do I have to change? What tools are available? Can I use it for project with actual deadlines? How the quality will be improved? We are going to see a real world example from start to finish using BDD and TDD while answering all those questions. After the session you will have the foundation to apply BDD with confidence on any .NET project. Track: Developer Foundation Style: Dojo Speaker: Amir Barylko Click Here for Session Materials!

Refactoring Towards Sanity “Everybody shoved him I very nearly loved him I said hey listen to me Stay sane inside insanity ...” “Eddie’s Teddy” (Rocky Horror Picture Show) Working with legacy code is a fact of life. Re-engineering it all is costly and frequently impractical. This session takes participants through a minimalist example of how to carve “areas of sanity” from tightly coupled Big Balls Of Mud: Instead of re-writing the complete application, focus on the core domain. Gradually isolate key functionality from dependencies and side effects which affect the rest of the system, thus creating “safe” areas where code is under test, SOLID, etc. (Tools: Visual Studio & Resharper) Track: Developer Foundation Style: Dojo Speaker: Robert Reppel Click Here for Session Materials!

SketchFlow: Building Your App Before You Build Your App  Without gathering accurate requirements for a software project, it is near impossible to build an application for a client without the need to refactor and change features that were "clearly identified" in the beginning. Even with agile methodologies in place, code will still need to be written and rewritten until the client is satisfied. By utilizing the power of SketchFlow, developers can build a feature complete prototype of the application they will build for the client without having to write a line of code. This resource allows the client to "use" their application before you even build it, giving you accurate requirements on which you can base your development. This session will introduce the idea of SketchFlow, including what it is and how it works. We will cover how to build a prototype and discuss how it can e used to build all types of applications, regardless of the platform. Track: Developer Foundation Style: Lecture Speaker: Dave Wesst

Test Driven Development Patterns for .NET Developers Test Driven Development is a methodology that will help us to discover our model while improving the quality of our software. We are going to see different patterns to help us deal with day to day problems like constructor initialization, exception testing, combinatorial tests, database testing, and many others. Track: Developer Foundation Style: Lecture Speaker: AmirBarylko Click Here for Session Materials!

Using Modern Development Technologies with CRM Soap-shmope - CRM developers can use the latest development technologies such as LINQ, ADO.NET Data Services, AJAX, and Silverlight. With more code than slides, developers will see working examples of how to easily build applications that connect to Dynamics CRM using modern development technologies. The session will demonstrate where each of these technologies can be used with CRM effectively and give architectural guidance in the areas of scalability and security. Track: Developer Foundation Style: Lecture Speaker: Shan McArthur

VS.NET 2010 Team Foundation Testing Tools Abstract Coming Soon! Track: Developer Foundation Style: Lecture Speaker: Aaron Kowall Click Here for Session Materials!

What's New in Entity Framework 4 As Microsoft prepares to launch .Net 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 the long awaited sequel to Entity Framework 1.0 is now almost ready to be shipped. The second rendition is said to be a more complete and thorough product. The user community spoke and Microsoft Listened. This has led in many changes to this relatively young Object Relational Mapper, some say it is coming of age. This session will make direct comparison between versions. We will showcase the fallacies of Version 1 , explain how they were bypassed and then expose the fixes found in Version 4. This session will explore many of the new features: T4 Code Generation ,Model First Development,Pluralization,Persistence Ignorance,POCO,Code Only, and many more. Track: Developer Foundation Style: Lecture Speaker: Joel Hebert

When and When Not to use "Best Practices" Panel discussion on when best practices can be delayed or not used at all and when best practices are most important. Track: Developer Foundation Style: Panel Speaker: Peter Ritchie

A Busy Developers Guide to ASP.NET 4.0 Asp.Net 4 was recently released and with it comes a divergence of different facets that will affect the way you code in Asp.Net. We shall oversee the changes and expose some of the benefits ,fallacies andr caveats. We will look at and not limit ourselves to ViewState , SessionState, ControlId generation, Code Contracts, Site Priming and more. If you are an Asp.Net developer this session will allow you to quickly see what is new and to comprehend some of the more real world scenarios that apply. Track: Web/RIA Style: Lecture Speaker: Joel Hebert

ASP.NET MVC Quick Primer This session covers building a MVC site from beginning to end within a session. It covers Security, Design, Principals and Best Practices to allow the attendees to make an educated decision as to when and why to utilize the MVC framework in their professional lives. Track: Web/RIA Style: Lecture Speaker: Gus Emery

Cache-Money - High Performance Websites and Caching Optimization We have all spent a great deal of time working our web applications with our respective technologies. Often due to things like time constraints, new features and tight deadlines cause our applications bloat and slow down. This presentation will discuss common performance problems with applications (big & small) and how you can increase the performance of these applications with various optimization techniques and caching. Track: Web/RIA Style: Lecture Speaker: Nathan Bertram

jQuery Dojo In this dojo, I’ll take you on a tour of jQuery and show you that JavaScript is anything but a toy language. JavaScript is a powerful functional language and jQuery allows you to harness that power with truly amazing results. Come learn about selectors, effects, DOM manipulation, CSS, AJAX, eventing, and much more. Track: Web/RIA Style: Dojo Speaker: James Kovacs Click Here for Session Materials!

RESTing in ASP.NET MVC Framework This session is for the advanced developer looking to break into RESTful services utilizing the ASP.Net MVC framework. This session covers the building and designing of a RESTful service, the basis of why and how to utilize this type of service, and the best-practice architecture to help the attendee implement this in the real world. In the end, the attendee will come away with a good knowledge of REST service, and how to build one utilizing MVC 2.0/ASP.Net 4.0 and VS 2010. Track: Web/RIA Style: Lecture Speaker: Gus Emery

Silverlight and WCF in the Real World As Silverlight gains traction so is the need for it to communicate to external servers. Silverlight 2 saw the addition of some common WCF support. Here we will talk about the methods, limitations, and best practices for creating and consuming WCF Services. Track: Web/RIA Style: Lecture Speaker: Dave Woods Click Here for Session Materials!

Styling the Web for Fun & Profit The open web is alive and well; even in the age of Silverlight the most popular sites on the net are still built primarily with the front-end trio of HTML, Cascading Stylesheets, and Javascript. This session offers a round-trip introduction to Cascading Style Sheets with a focus on common front-end antipatterns and their best-practice alternatives. Along the way we'll take a graphical look at the box model, positioning, specificity, and how to support IE6 without breaking the web. Track: Web/RIA Style: Lecture Speaker: David Alpert Click Here for Session Materials!

Take it to the Skies with Windows Azure During the course of the presentation you will learn the benefits of cloud computing, and how to leverage the features of Windows Azure. We will start by creating a Web Role (Web Application) using the Developer Fabric to simulate the cloud environment on our local machine. Next we will upgrade our application and add the ability to store data using Developer Storage and modifying the Service Configuration file. We will also cover debugging an application in the cloud as well as creating a background process using worker roles. Track: Web/RIA Style: Lecture Speaker: Cory Fowler Click Here for Session Materials!

The Evolution of the Web, Web Standards and Why You Should Care Many programmers come from a heavy development centric background. Often programmers find themselves developing for the web without investing enough time on learning the basic about web standards, what benefit standards have to offer and pulling their hair out while writing css Track: Web/RIA Style: Lecture Speaker: Nathan Bertram

Using jQuery to Deliver a Rich, Interactive Web Experience Although there are many ways to deliver rich Internet applications, jQuery is a library that can be used to deliver the experience using only HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Being one of many web-based libraries, jQuery is one of the most popular and contains a number of plugins that can enhance your website with an amazing user experience. We’ll cover cross-browser development as well as mobile development and we’ll also compare jQuery to other JavaScript-based libraries out there. Track: Web/RIA Style: Lecture Speaker: Kelly Cassidy

What's New in Silverlight 4 Abstract Coming Soon! Track: Web/RIA Style: Lecture Speaker: John Bristowe