Denver is having a Big Event

It's been quite awhile since I made a Microsoft Event.  This one coming up at the end of the month has 2 tracks and both of them look excellent.  But don't rely on my word, check it out yourself at the Microsoft Events Site.  Below is the agenda per the MS site:

The Big Event!

Do you miss the old Dev Days events?  Do you wish that you could attend a TechEd or PDC, but don’t have the time or budget to get to one?  Well the Big Event is for you.  Come spend a day with us as we delve into developer and architect topics during the day.  With a mix of some your favorite local presenters as well as some from Redmond.  Here is the agenda for the day:

Keynote

Patterns and Practices

Microsoft has invested heavily in producing guidance, application building blocks, and software factories to help developers and architects build solutions in a high quality and predictable manner.  Peter Provost, a senior development lead from P&P will be joining us to discuss where much of that investment has produced and how you can get started with their products. 

Developer Track

Exposing and Consuming Data in the Microsoft Stack

The way in which we work with data is changing drastically... for the better.  In this session Rob Bagby will discuss a few of the technologies we, as developers, will be taking advantage of in our applications.  Rob will discuss how the ADO.NET Entity Framework allows us to easily expose an application-centric data layer to your application.  Rob will then discuss various means of exposing and consuming that layer, including LINQ and ADO.NET Data Services (formerly code named ‘Project Astoria’).  This session will be largely demo driven.

Office as a Developer Platform

Nearly all of us use Office in our day to day activities, but we rarely think about it as a platform for development.  This session will cover how you can start to incorporate Office into your application development activities and keep you from feeling dirty afterwards. 

What’s New in Visual Basic 9

There are a great number of new features in the latest version of Visual Basic, such as XML Literals, Object Initializers, Anonymous Types, Type Inference, Extension Methods, Lambda Expressions and much improved Intellisense. In this session we'll go over the major new features in Visual Basic 9, and how these new features can help you write applications much more rapidly than ever before. We'll take a look at how these features tie into Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and how working with XML in Visual Basic provides ultimate performance and productivity.

Architect Track

Why the User Experience Matters

Many of us who are great developers and architects are not very good at designing  the user interface, it is often an afterthought in building out a solution.  In this session we will cover the reasons why we should be paying more attention to the UI and what mistakes are commonly made that inhibit application adoption.

Agile Development at Microsoft

Over the last couple of years the Patterns and Practices team has fully adopted agile methods for development.  They even rebuilt the interior of their building to support this methodology.  In this session Peter Provost will discuss how Microsoft adopted agile and the lessons learned over the years.

The Live Platform

Live is much more than search and Virtual Earth.  Come hear more about the service based building blocks that Microsoft has released that you can use on you application development efforts – in many cases with no licensing fees!