Cloud computing is being viewed as the one of the most important concepts in IT going forward. In the last couple of years it has moved from high-level concept to a technology that is now seeing mainstream adoption. In this half-day workshop we will begin by discussing the what, why and how of cloud computing. After we have covered the fundamentals of cloud computing, we will dive deep into the Windows Azure platform. This will include a discussion of various building blocks, features, and tooling. Next, through a series of demos we’ll review a variety of features of the platform and patterns that can help you move your on-premise workloads to the cloud. Finally, we will discuss the economics of cloud including cost and SLA. What we expect of you is that you have a basic awareness around .NET and experience building web applications. What you can expect from us is a half-day bringing you up to speed on the essentials of building applications on the Azure platform. Vishwas Lele is an AIS Chief Technology Officer and is responsible for the company vision and execution of creating business solutions using the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform

Ever wanted to learn how a professional, high-end, media-heavy, interactive site is built from start to finish? In this boot camp the senior team from award-winning User Experience Agency, Effective UI, will walk you through how they built an incredible new site for a very demanding organization. The project has not yet launched but it will be live before MIX. (Microsoft: Trust us, it is AWESOME!) The team will cover everything from initial UX consulting and requirements gathering to project management, design iterations, media development (video, audio, 3D), Silverlight development, HTML5, JavaScript, ASP.NET, Azure hosting, content management, to meeting client expectations. This is a boot camp that you do not want to miss!

Although CSS3 rendering varies between browsers and HTML5 hasn`t reached the candidate recommendation stage yet, they're already the hot, new buzzwords and some intrepid front-end developers are already creating sites with them. Are these new techniques ready for prime time on the web? What happens with older browsers? In this session, Stephanie demonstrates the latest HTML5 structural elements, form markup, and ways of presenting audio and video; then she adds cutting-edge CSS3 features for easier implementation of visual effects, enhanced typography, color treatment, and object effects -- all with a focus on satisfying your cravings for tomorrow`s technologies through practical implementations today. Welcome to the next generation of web design!

In this half-day workshop of demos with a few slides tagged on ;-) we’ll take a tour around the landscape of Silverlight applications. We’ll dig into the core platform capabilities, the tooling and we’ll dive into some of the patterns and frameworks that you’ll work with in getting data in and out of your Silverlight applications and onto the screen. We’ll demonstrate how to solve real problems using the core Silverlight features as well as the latest features in Silverlight 5, to get you ready for the upcoming week at MIX11! What we expect of you is that you have a basic awareness around .NET and Silverlight. What you can expect from us is a half-day bringing you up to speed on the essentials of building applications with Silverlight.

In this boot camp we will take a comprehensive look at everything from simple shape and image drawing, to advanced techniques for building interactive experiences and games. We will also look at available tools to streamline development, and share some helpful tips on implementation, performance, and optimization. Lanny McNie and Shawn Blais are senior developers at gskinner.com, a leading interactive production shop focused on providing cutting-edge experiences in HTML5, Flash, iOS, and Android.

jQuery has become one of the most popular JavaScript libraries for building rich, interactive, cross-browser Web sites and applications. In this session, Joe Marini will show you how to get started using the power of jQuery and its sister library jQueryUI to build your next-generation Web applications. Whether it’s animation, dynamic formatting, AJAX, or complicated UI, jQuery has the features you need to help tackle your hardest Web development problems.

SharePoint is the leading business application platform for sharing and collaborating. Silverlight 4 is the perfect tool for bringing SharePoint to life. Demand for developers who can create rich SharePoint applications using Silverlight is off the chart. Come learn how to build interactive SharePoint applications using Silverlight 4, JQuery and OData. Understand how designers and developers can work together using Expression Blend, Visual Studio, sample data, and data binding against SharePoint Lists.

In this workshop you’ll see a complete Windows Phone app built from the ground up. We’ll walk from File > New Project all the way through app submission in the marketplace. You’ll learn all the tips and tricks required to make your app feel like a native app, from smooth page transitions to highly performant progress bars. You’ll leave with a fully functional app that you can start customizing with your own data and submit to the marketplace for instant global reach.

Do you want your app to integrate with one of the world’s leading photosharing site? The Flickr for Windows Phone 7 app is a full featured mobile application that is pushing the boundaries of UX design and is 100% built on Flickr's API methods that are available for developers. This talk will introduce the mobile app, highlight some of the complex design decisions, and provide insights into the Flickr API methods. Attendees will learn how to enrich their applications using Flickr's rich content via the Flickr APIs.

Ever wonder what it takes to create a top game for Windows Phone 7? Rob will show you how easy it is to get XNA programs running, whether you are a C# and Visual Studio newbie or a grizzled veteran of .NET. You will find out how to use the touch and accelerometer sensors and how to add a smattering of physics to your games. All the demos will be provided with full source so you can take them away and use them to begin creating your own games based on the abilities of this wonderful device. If you want to know how to take game ideas and give them life then this session is for you. And you might be in danger of winning the odd prize. Which should be exciting.

The infographics bug has bitten, and now the web alive with tightly kerned upper-case Helvetica and scatter plots to showing us everything from what a billion dollars looks like all the way through to how hard it is for singer songwriters to make a living. In the midst of all the nonsense, there have been some significant changes in design trends that can make company dashboards or analysis tools more powerful. This session will 1. Explain the goals of data visualisation and the benefits for business 2. Walk through some great examples of stunning, but most importantly, *useful* visualisations of data sets that will leave attendees better equipped to tackles mountains of data in their applications. and 3. Present case studies showing companies getting a real return on investing in their data. This session will be driven by real practical examples, and will be of interest to designers, application owners, and web developers. Also, it will be fun :)

Over 500 million users! That is the universe for your app. So “learning Facebook” is critical. Come learn how to use the Facebook C# SDK built in cooperation with Microsoft and Thuzi, a Facebook Preferred Partner. Thuzi will also share lessons from creating Facebook promotions that have been architected to handle over 10,000 signups an hour. We will show how to build Facebook applications with .NET using ASP.NET MVC, Web Matrix, Web Forms, Silverlight and WP7 and how to host them on Windows Azure.

In the past year, we’ve worked with hundreds of developers and designers interpreting the "Metro" design system for their own purposes. We’ve seen great interpretations, and others that aren’t so great. In this session, we’ll share with you the foundations of great Metro application design for Windows Phone, and how to use them to build outstanding applications that will stand out and get noticed… for good reasons.

Welcome to the Orchard Project – a free, community-focused, open source CMS built on .NET and designed meet the needs of developers, designers, and end-users alike. In this talk, we’ll build a site from the ground-up using Orchard’s admin panel and flexible module and theme system. We’ll look at the available ecosystem of modules and themes in the Orchard Gallery, and take a peek “under-the-hood” of Orchard to demonstrate how you can write your own custom extensions, widgets, and more. We’ll also delve into the Orchard’s template system in detail, demonstrating how you can create a highly-customized look-and-feel for your site. We’ll end by actually shipping our totally customized Orchard-based application to a live site.

Let’s say you are in love with Silverlight, .NET and the power of Visual Studio. Then one day you hear the world talking about HTML5 all at once. Why? What’s that thing? In this session you will understand what HTML5, CSS3 and ECMAScript 5 are through the lens of a XAML and C# developer. You will learn to use the best of both worlds to build your next beautiful applications. Expect a lot of technical demo and samples!

Today, there is a lot of hype about the cloud. In this session we’ll cut through the hype and buzzwords and give you a practical introduction to the Windows Azure Platform. You’ll see several demos of common scenarios so you can understand how to start using the cloud today with your web applications. You will also learn about the new features and services that have been released in the last year and will be announced in the keynote.

WebSockets, an emerging specification being standardized by W3C and IETF, will enable web browsers as well as client applications to open a bi-directional, full-duplex communication channel with a remote host. In this session you will explore the scenarios that will be available to HTML5 developers in the near future and you will learn more about the low level details of the APIs and protocol, including its benefits over the traditional long polling approach. The HTML5 Labs team will walk you through the implementation details and source code behind the client and server components of the Web Sockets prototype and will share their firsthand experience in working with the new standard.

Typography in digital experiences is unavoidable, and for years it was a fight we mostly lost. Today, however, technology is on our side! High resolution screens, an expanding library of open fonts and new flexibility in nearly every UI technology have made digital typography more fun and more interesting than ever. We'll cover all aspects of working with digital type: everything from choosing complimentary typefaces to licensing, rendering and a system for layout and sizing. We all love type. Come to this talk to learn why!

In 2010, the MIX session "Understanding the MVVM pattern" helped you to understand the basics of this very important pattern used in Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone 7 applications. Building on this foundation, this year’s session will show you with a lot of code samples how to build complex interactive applications using proven best practices and powerful tools. Laurent Bugnion, a user and promoter of MVVM since the early days, author of “Silverlight 4 Unleashed” and of the acclaimed MVVM Light Toolkit, will help you to deep dive in MVVM and explore topics such as navigation, showing dialogs, collecting user feedback, handling multiple views and viewmodels, and more.

We all want to make piles of money with the next great phone app. In order to have that great app, you need to be prepared to continuously refine features and improve your users’ experience. Knowing which features are really being used, how often, and in what combinations are what will unlock the door to true user-centered design and development; the break-out WP7 developer will be the one who most efficiently navigates through shifting market dynamics and deployment gotcha’s inherent in any emerging platform to focus on the features and form-factors that most appeal to their users. Thanks to an agreement between Microsoft and PreEmptive Solutions, Windows Phone 7 developers have free access to a mobile analytics service that monitors and measures application adoption, feature usage, user behaviors, and even exception reporting for both Silverlight and XNA applications. At the end of this session, attendees will know how to instrument their application and track those features most important to their success including how to configure offline-caching, automate opt-in logic, and exception reporting. With effective mobile analytics, there’s simply no excuse for not knowing exactly what your users care most about.

This session will share the lessons learned working with the first one hundred Windows Phone premier applications. This includes common challenges and difficulties experienced. We'll deliver detail on what we learned.

Heard about Microsoft Surface 2? In this presentation we will introduce you to the new Microsoft Surface Hardware and explain how you can write applications for it. By the end of the presentation you will have learned how to use the Microsoft Surface 2 SDK to write an application that bridges the physical world we live in to the virtual world on the Surface. We will also discuss what it takes to write an application that targets both Microsoft Surface Hardware and Windows Touch Enabled Devices. And of course, you will learn tricks of the trade, like how to write an application right away using the new Microsoft Surface Input Simulator. We will focus on WPF development, but anyone with an interest in Natural User Interfaces should be able to follow and enjoy the presentation.

Most people using Windows Azure are using ASP.NET and PHP, but Windows Azure is much more general than that. Steve Marx will show how he built a few web apps (including his blog) that run on Windows Azure and don’t use .NET or PHP. Server-side JavaScript, Ruby, and Python will be the most prominent examples.

As a consumer web startup, you spend a significant portion of your time raising awareness of your brand and driving traffic to your site. But, what happens when you succeed? How do you scale instantly from on-boarding 1 new user an hour to 1 new user every 5 seconds? MyWebCareer operates one of the most sophisticated and complex platforms on Windows Azure. For each new users that registers, our data discovery engine runs dozens of searches in real-time against 10 different 3rd party API’s. Add to this the subsequent data normalization, entity, link and semantic analysis and career scoring and you have a platform that requires some pretty hefty processing power. Learn how MyWebCareer found out at 6pm on a Thursday night in March 2011 that they’re on the front page of Mashable.com and how they scaled within 20 minutes to support the resulting spike in traffic and data processing.

Learn how you can make your sites faster directly from the Internet Explorer Performance Team. These are the same guys who brought you GPU accelerated graphics and compiled JavaScript with Internet Explorer 9, and they’re going to share their favorite 50 best practices for web developers. This session will provide an inside look into browser performance, discuss why common web best practices are important, and then go deep into how to get the most from new HTML5 capabilities including Canvas, Audio, Video, SVG, local storage, and more.

Microformats are simple HTML design patterns for adding semantics to your web content. With additional semantic meaning, your content becomes more findable, extensible, standards-compliant and usable. And when built on a solid foundation of Plain Old Semantic Markup (POSH), your content also becomes more accessible. Emily Lewis, author of Microformats Made Simple, will discuss the benefits of microformats, as well as tools and resources to help you start publishing right away. But the focus will be on the practical application of microformats using POSH: link-based microformats, XFN, hCard and hCalendar. Emily will also discuss what HTML5 means for microformats, particularly microdata and the new semantic elements.

The Microsoft platform for delivery of video and rich media experiences has fundamentally changed and grown significantly since the introduction of Silverlight and IIS Media Services several years ago. Come learn about the encoding tools, digital rights management components, transcoding services, player development frameworks, analytics tools, content management systems and other tools and frameworks which comprise the Microsoft Media Platform (MMP).

The Natural User Interface (NUI) is a hot topic that generates a lot of excitement, but there are only a handful of companies doing real innovation with NUIs and most of the practical experience in the NUI style of design and development is limited to a small number of experts. The Microsoft Surface MVPs are a subset of these experts that have extensive real-world experience with Microsoft Surface and other NUI devices. This session is a panel featuring the Microsoft Surface MVPs and an unfiltered discussion with each other and the audience about the state of the art in NUI design and development. We will share our experiences and ideas, discuss what we think NUI will look like in the near future, and back up our statements with cutting-edge demonstrations prepared by the panelists involving combinations of Microsoft Surface 2.0, Kinect, and other NUI devices.

Microsoft Research is working on several cool ways to make web applications faster and more robust. In this session, James Mickens will describe two projects that leverage JavaScript to improve web programs running on unmodified, commodity browsers. His talk will focus on Silo, a system that exploits DOM storage and AJAX to make web pages load more quickly. He’ll also describe Mugshot, a framework which allows developers to capture and replay JavaScript application bugs that users encounter in the wild. Neither project requires users to install a plugin or otherwise change their browser.

Want to be inspired by design and UX? Catch this "Inspiring UX" lightning session with four inspirational topics! UX Lightning sessions are a full hour session with 4 exceptional speakers each presenting 10 minute topics. Hear from Thomas Lewis speaking on "Why is that Monkey Not Wearing Pants?", August de los Reyes with "21st Century Design: a 10 Minute Manifesto", Corey Schuman with "Goodbye Mouse, Hello Touch", and Chris Bernard with "7 Things Developers and Designers Need to Know About UX.". This session is intended to open your minds to new possibilities with design.

How do you manage the dizzying array of input sources, ranging from traditional UI events and external service requests to new user interface touch gestures and device sensor detections, while keeping your Silverlight and Phone applications responsive? In this session, you’ll discover how the Reactive Extensions (Rx) library simplifies the programming model by letting you declaratively compose increasingly complex asynchronous operations over these diverse data sources. We will demonstrate some practical uses of Rx for Windows Phone 7 by building a dice playing game including responding to user interactions, creating gestures from the device’s sensors, and making Asynchronous service calls. In the end you’ll learn how to coordinate pushing data around using Rx.

Come learn how to use the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service as a key building block for your web applications. See how your applications can seamlessly work with LiveID, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and corporate identities - all from a single codebase. Watch the barriers to entry disappear, and behold the emergence of a simple way to deal with identity in your applications. It's guaranteed to be a show you won't want to miss.

JQuery turned the world on its ear. Do we still write JavaScript or do we just write jQuery? Damian will answer that question with new JavaScript techniques and AJAX as well as some jQuery plugin surprises up his sleeve. What are the best libraries and practices for using jQuery and JavaScript with ASP.NET? How should balanced applications be designed to make the best use of the power of the server and the power of the client?

The increasing diversity of Web-capable form factors—from phones to tablets to televisions—makes it challenging to build HTML experiences that best use the available screen real estate. New CSS features under development like CSS3 Grid, Flexbox and Multi-column will give designers the capability to control their designs without making hard assumptions about browser window size and screen orientation. This session will drill down into the capabilities of these emerging specifications and provide a hands on experience how you can preview them today using IE 10 Platform Preview 1.

While JavaScript has become one of the most widely used programming languages in the world, it has also unfortunately remained one of the most misunderstood programming languages. This session will give a thorough review of the core ideas in the JavaScript language, including topics such as objects, conversions, prototypal inheritance, and closures, as well as popular design patterns. We’ll also discuss the additions to the language coming with ECMAScript5 and how best to use them to create more scalable and reusable code. Whether you are new to JavaScript, or already a seasoned JavaScript user, this session is your opportunity to get a deep and focused understanding of the JavaScript language.

So you want to stream live and on demand video? But how do you create it, stream it, edit it, manage it and monetize it? Come and see how the Microsoft Media Platform Content Manager pulls together the end-end video workflow to allow you to accomplish all of these. From creating live streaming events, transcoding on-demand content, managing and publishing video, editing video or inserting mid-roll adverts, the MMP Content Manager does it all.

The talk will cover the overall architecture and algorithmic building blocks of the Kinect device, especially the audio pipeline. We will present the opportunities it opens for building better human-machine interfaces, new user experiences, and other potential applications. No specialized signal processing background is required. The presenter is the creator of most of the audio algorithms in the Kinect pipeline.

Learn how to build Windows Phone 7 applications that are backed by scalable cloud components hosted in Windows Azure. This demo-focused session will cover the end-to-end experience and address how to tackle issues such as authentication, storage, and notification using the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7.

Oh yes. Building web applications on the Microsoft stack continues to evolve. There’s lots of great tools to leverage, but it can be difficult to keep up with all the options. In this technical and fast-paced session, you’ll learn from Scott Hanselman how the pieces fit together. We’ll look at ASP.NET MVC 3, MvcScaffolding, Entity Framework Code First (Magic Unicorn Edition), SQL Compact 4, jQuery and more. We’ll also see how many times Scott can say “unobtrusive” in a single talk. You’ll leave this session with a clear understanding of the technology options available on the Microsoft Web Stack. What’s changed since PDC? What direction are we doing? Let’s see what we can build in a PowerPoint-free hour with the Microsoft Web Stack of Love.

If you’ve seen the demos for Internet Explorer 9’s hardware accelerated graphics, you are probably excited to learn the details of HTML5 Canvas. With all major browsers supporting HTML5 Canvas, a scriptable 2D drawing context, Canvas is quickly becoming the natural choice for graphics on the web. In this session, you will learn advanced Canvas concepts (including the origin-clean security and the Canvas Drawing Model), understand when to use Canvas versus SVG and get a deeper look at how the Internet Explorer team solved interoperability issues as we implemented the specification. You will learn to build HTML5 Canvas websites through best practices and lots of code samples.

The mobile Web is here, it’s huge, and your business can’t afford to ignore it. Mobile users have come to expect their favorite Web sites to give them a great mobile experience – otherwise, they find new favorite sites that do. In this session, Joe Marini, Principal Program Manager for Internet Explorer on Windows Phone will take you through the design and experience principles you need to consider when creating your mobile Web presence, teach you about the exciting new HTML5 capabilities that Internet Explorer 9 on Windows Phone 7 will support, and show you how to give your sites the next-generation features you need to engage your users on their smartphones.

The first complete implementations of the first revision to the JavaScript, I mean ECMAScript, Standard in 10 years are now coming online. This talk will introduce the new, mostly good, parts.

Windows Phone 7 was only the beginning. Later this year we’ll release a new version of Windows Phone that will unlock new capabilities for developers. In this session, we’ll provide give you a preview of what’s coming, and how to prepare.

Whether using MVVM or building data driven browser based plug-in experiences, Silverlight 5 addresses many of the top Data asks. See how it becomes easier to build, maintain and debug with Silverlight 5 features such as Implicit Data Templates, Custom Markup Extensions, Binding within Style Setters, TextLayout, Printing, DataContextChanged, RIA Services or Databinding Debugging within XAML. Learn how Silverlight 5 enhances your productivity and users with rich internet deployed applications.

Interested in doing something about the lack of women in technology? Join us for the fun, interactive luncheon where we'll use LEGOs as a medium for envisioning and implementing micro-actions. We provide the food and LEGOs, you provide the ideas. Sound like fun? Join us on Wednesday, April 13 during lunch from 12:30pm to 2:00pm in South Seas IJ upstairs on the 3rd floor; food will be served. We welcome both women and men who are interested in working on this problem.

Microsoft Media Platform Video Editor, formerly known as Silverlight Rough Cut Editor, is a web based video editor that can be used to visually create Smooth Streaming Composite Manifests or edit decision lists (EDLs). In this session we’ll do a brief overview of the Video Editor as review for those in the audience that are completely new to it but will mainly rely on last year’s session as a starting point so we can dive into the plans for version 2 of the tool, what we’ve done so far, what we’re planning for future sprints, and how you can get involved in this open source and community based tool.

You already knew you could run your .NET-based applications on Windows Azure, but did you know you can encode videos in Windows Azure with Expression Encoder, use Memcached, run multiple web sites in a Web Role, and more? Steve Marx will show you ten things he’s done with Windows Azure that may surprise you, along with the technical details of how each was accomplished.

Steve Sanderson delivers KnockoutJS in this lightening talk. Learn how the Knockout library builds on advanced jQuery and JavaScript techniques to make even the most complex data-filled HTML forms a breeze. We’ll see jQuery, jQuery templating, JSON and live data banding applied wto the MVVM pattern with Knockout, combined with ASP.NET to produce results that need to be seen to believed.

There is no mobile Web, there is no desktop Web, and there is no tablet Web. We view the same Web just in different ways. So how do we do it? Sitting next to HTML5 is its friend CSS3 with its support for Media Queries. Media Queries let you customize your web experience based on parameters of display, device, properties and more. If you are a designer or front-end developer, come to this session to explore the sheer brutality of CSS3 Media Queries.

Umbraco is a developer friendly, open-source CMS that is built 100% on .NET. Today Umbraco powers over 85,000 sites. Now deploying Umbraco sites to the cloud with the Windows Azure Platform is also fast and easy. Using the Windows Azure Accelerator for Umbraco it is simple to deploy our pre-configured cloud-drive image along with local SQL Server (and SQL Express) database schema and data to SQL Azure. What’s more, we can use the support for Full IIS in Windows Azure to host multiple Umbraco instances on a single Windows Azure instance – thereby reducing the costs to run Umbraco sites in a scalable and highly available cloud environment. In addition you will hear about some real-world Umbraco users that have leveraged the Windows Azure Accelerator for Umbraco to create a repeatable cloud-deployment process that saves them time and makes deployment a breeze.

For years web developers have used hacks, sweat and black magic to bend HTML and CSS into submission and now with Internet Explorer 9 F12 Developer Tools it just got a whole lot easier. In this session you will discover how you can use the new F12 Developer Tools to solve the most mysterious client side web development problems, fix compatibility issues and increase site performance. Using live demos we will investigate and experiment with the tools to demystify the inner behaviors of the browser, giving you the skills you need to build better websites.

Sky Sports is delivering a ground breaking video experience for their UEFA Champions League coverage using Deltatre’s Data Integrated Video Application (DIVA). In this session Jim will present a case study on how DIVA uses Silverlight and Smooth Streaming to go well beyond simple video delivery by leveraging very rich synchronized meta-data overlays. The result is an interactive, immersive, and engaging experience that shows the future for live sports consumption on the web.

Over the past couple of years, no technology has been hyped as much as the cloud, but even with so much hype, it is amazing how little is understood about its practical application in the enterprise. In this session, we will discuss the top 10 reasons why a business of any size should seriously consider moving to the cloud. We will also demonstrate how you can leverage DotNetNuke, the leading open source web content management system for ASP.Net to design and deploy feature-rich business websites on Windows Azure.

One of the most exciting new features coming to the next version of Windows Phone is the ability for users to switch quickly between running third party applications. Learn how this is going to work, and how to get your application ready now for this new functionality. This will be a detailed, live coding session.

Come see how simple it can be to develop dynamic, data-centric JavaScript applications with WCF RIA Services. Our new jQuery dataSource plug-in offers a rich, client-side cache and a simple programming model – enabling dynamic data editing and visualization with jQuery templating, data-linking and jQuery UI.

Come along to this session to get an overview of the new video and audio tags from the HTML5 specification. Discover how to use them to play media in modern browsers and on mobile devices. Learn the most advanced techniques and best practices, including encoding optimizations, custom skinnable players, full screen workarounds, seeking settings and fallback scenarios for legacy browsers.

By now, you’ve heard about pinned sites in Internet Explorer 9. And, you’ve probably even used them yourself. But, did you know that this feature can help increase site visits and engagements by as much as 50%? In this session, you’ll hear stories of Pinned Site implementations by some of the most popular websites on the web today. You’ll also discover how to support pinned sites with a few lines of markup. Finally, you’ll learn best practices that will help you deliver an awesome experience to your visitors.

Today, Kentico CMS is in use by almost 6000 websites in 84 countries as an on-premise or hosted solution. Delivered as a Visual Studio solution, Kentico CMS includes 34 out of the box modules all on top of a SQL Server backend. Do you need to build a highly available and scalable website for your business? In this session we will answer that question using Kentico CMS to build a rich and compelling website using Windows Azure.

Using the easy to learn and expressive to use Razor view engine with Umbraco allows you to create dynamic sites super-fast with clean markup and managed content. Using no special tools we look at how simple it is to add Razor markup to our Umbraco site to access Umbraco content and manipulate it for our desired output. Taking it a step further, we look at using the free Microsoft WebMatrix IDE to work with our Umbraco site and access an incredibly rich array of Razor functionality.

WebMatrix is a new, free, web development tool from Microsoft that provides a suite of technologies that make it easier to develop websites. It enables a developer to start a new site by browsing and downloading a fully functional app template from an online gallery of web applications, or alternatively create and code a website from scratch.. Razor is a new scripting engine that ships as part of WebMatrix which is designed to minimize the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing code, enabling a compact and expressive syntax which provides a clean, fast and simple development experience. Razor is the native syntax for Web Pages and the new default view-engine for ASP.NET MVC, but it was also architected so that it could be hosted by other Applications. In this session we will explore the new Razor syntax, the power of reusable components known as Razor Helpers, and how the largest open source project for ASP.NET, DotNetNuke, has provided deeply integrated support for Razor as an alternate method for developing plug-in extensions.

Bola is a successful social game published by Three Melons - now Disney Corp - in different social networks including Facebook and Orkut. This session will present a highly-scalable, flexible, Azure-based architecture design that supports more than 10 million users with spikes of over 1.2 million daily active users and 80,000 concurrent sessions with 50 matches playing simultaneously from more than 120 countries. We'll analyze considerations of storage and performance tuning using Memcached, custom monitoring, maintenance and the incorporation of Celebrata tools as part of the solution.

In this release, we are taking Windows Phone Developer Tools to the next level which will help you being more productive in building highly performing Windows Phone applications. In this session we will talk about new sensor support in emulator, deep dive on Windows Phone Profiler and much more.

JavaScript is one of the most widely used general purpose functional, dynamic and prototype-based object-oriented programming languages on the web with considerable amounts of JS even running outside of the browser in other hosts. The language has matured and is currently in version 5 (officially, this is known as EcmaScript 5). Where did it come from? What problems was it initially designed to solve? How has it managed to scale to so many different usage scenarios? What are these scenarios, exactly? What does EC5 add to the language and what specific problems do these new additions solve? What's missing from the language? How will it evolve? How general purpose is JavaScript, really? The folks who will be on stage can answer all of these questions, but most importantly, YOU will drive the panel with your own questions. What do you want to know? What's the most burning question you have in your mind related to JavaScript? Answers await.

Designers can be crafty too! This "Crafty UX" lightning session is packed with four topics on how to apply design skills to technology. UX Lightning sessions are a full hour session with 4 exceptional speakers each presenting 10 minute topics. Hear from Sara Summers speaking on "10 Minute UX Ninja", Nathan Moody with "Conceptual Design Tactics and Techniques", Robert Tuttle with "Phidgets and Real Time Sensor Data Visualization", and Guido Rosso with "Prototyping Interfaces with Motion Graphics". Attendees will learn from these experts how to take design concepts and apply them.

Speed up Web Applications using the new Windows Azure AppFabric Caching service. This session will cover concepts, scenarios, and features of the Caching service through a great many samples and demonstrations. We’ll talk through different approaches to optimize new and existing applications through new ASP.NET session state and page output providers that leverage the Caching service, as well as ways to directly use the cache APIs to store and retrieve data. After attending this talk, developers will be able to make their Windows Azure applications match increasing demand with increasing throughput by using the skills they’ll learn in this session.

Ready to take your visuals to another dimension? Silverlight 5 gives you a direct path to the GPU with a powerful immediate mode 3D graphics API. This talk provides an overview of the new features and general 3D graphics concepts, then gets technical exploring the new APIs. You will learn how to integrate 3D into your application and put the fundamentals to use by drawing 3D geometry, shading with color and texture, and creating animations. With these skills you will be on your way to differentiating your applications with high impact visualizations.

Steve Sanderson comes all the way from England to share the new MvcScaffolding package, now built into ASP.NET MVC 3. What was once a crazy dream on stage at PDC is now open source and baked into the product. We’ll scaffolded out a basic CRUD site using the release of Entity Framework Code First, then quickly move beyond the basics and extend scaffolding itself with additional custom packages that you can make yourself! Advanced EF scaffolding! Why not WebForms Scaffolding or Knockout Scaffolding? The skies the limit as Steve pushes NuGet and PowerShell to the max.

Script#, a C# to JavaScript compiler, brings the power of Visual Studio and .NET Tools to build a productive development model for creating, testing and managing applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript along with popular frameworks such as jQuery. This session provides a hands-on look at using Script#, shares success stories and experiences from real-world use, along with a project road-map.

Fiddler is a popular and extensible web debugger used to debug traffic from any web browser or client, including applications running on Windows Phone 7. In this session, we’ll use Fiddler to debug common web application problems and explore how Internet Explorer 9’s features interact with the network. You’ll see how Fiddler’s new Import / Export architecture can be used to interoperate with captures in the HTTP Archive Format and captures collected by the Internet Explorer 9 F12 Developer Tools. We’ll dive deep into the powerful enhancements made to the AutoResponder, and use it to debug issues even while working offline. The latest features in the standalone FiddlerCap capture tool will be demonstrated, and I’ll conclude by explaining how to integrate the FiddlerCore library into your automated testing processes.

No matter how many departments your organization has, to your customers, it's all the same business. They expect a cohesive experience across all touch-points with your company, regardless of whether it's related to advertising, customer service, social presence, or the actual product or service you provide. The satisfaction of your customers, and thereby the success of your organization, depends in no small part on your ability to create a cohesive and consistently high-quality cross-channel experience. In this presentation, you will gain a better understanding of the different ways your customers might interact with your business. We will show how you can map out these touchpoints and help drive the creation of a cohesive experience across the various channels. We will show you how to navigate the political waters within your business to implement a true cross-channel design, which will build great experiences for your customers, regardless of how they are engaging with your business.

Windows Phone is a different kind of phone, architected to put the focus on end users while enabling developers to build compelling, connected experiences that enhance the phone. Peer under the covers to see how the architecture evolved to deliver powerful functionality for users and developers: enabling rapid seamless transitions between applications; delivering continuous user experiences in the background; combined Silverlight/XNA in a unified UI; sharing data between phone and applications; sensor fusion for integration of the physical and virtual worlds; and many more. Along the way, we will demonstrate how we brought together these features to deliver experiences that are responsive and battery efficient.

All input is evil! Protect your application and provide great user experience in your Silverlight application. Learn about the synchronous and asynchronous validation techniques Silverlight 4.0 offers and see how to implement these techniques in the most effective way with MVVM. Customize your validation feedback with Expression Blend for the maximum experience.

We’ve tried it all in our pursuit to create the next runaway software success — fancy processes, expensive tools, powerful computers, bigger budgets, smaller budgets, swankier offices, ‘expert’ consultants, astrology, rabbits’ feet, you name it. But it seems like most of us still fail. We ship late. Our products suck. Our employees quit. Our customers hate us. Why? In "Back to Square One," Nishant Kothary will attempt to answer this elusive question by expanding on insights shared in his prior highly-rated talks, "A Website Named Desire" and "The Elephant in the Room." Much like previous years, this talk will draw from fields like philosophy, psychology, economics, art, even religion, to find its answers. But the $64,000 question is — Will there be pictures of puppies this year? You'll just have to drop by to find out.

In its fifth version, Silverlight enables developers and designers to work together to build more impressive and complex applications than ever before, but with great power comes great responsibility. Come learn the tricks to keeping your Silverlight applications smooth and responsive and the tools to light your way should you find yourself in trouble.

The Windows Azure CDN is used by Microsoft to deliver content for many services that you use, including Windows Update, MSN Video, and Bing Maps. This powerful tool is now available for you through a simple configuration option in the Windows Azure platform. In this session you will learn how to get started using the Windows Azure CDN to serve up blobs, videos, and dynamic content. If you want to speed up your web experiences, then you should attend this session.

It’s out and it’s better than ever. Phil Haack will present an in-depth look at all the latest improvements in ASP.NET MVC 3. Razor syntax, global action filters, better support for dependency injection. All this and more…will the fun ever end?

Nobody likes sluggish web interfaces that get stuck when interacting with servers and services. Asynchrony has become the way of life to enhance user experiences. The A in AJAX pinpoints this observation precisely. Moreover, the sheer amount of asynchronous data sources is overwhelming: stock tickers, Twitter quotes, RSS feeds, you name it. Unfortunately, the programmability story for each of those sources differs significantly, with little to no unification or compositionality. Got tired of writing cumbersome code with plenty of callbacks, tedious logic and tricky error handling? Enter the Reactive Extensions, a library to seamlessly compose all kinds of asynchronous “reactive” data streams using LINQ-style query operators, available for both .NET and JavaScript (RxJS). Come and learn how Rx will make your life as a web developer easier when dealing with the asynchronous reality of modern web programming.

In this session, Aaron Gustafson will introduce you to Web Standards Sherpa, a new resource from the Web Standards Project. The goal of Web Standards Sherpa is to "provide helpful, pragmatic and up-to-date advice on best practices for web professionals everywhere" via brief, focused instructional critiques of existing websites (most of which are submitted for critique by the site's audience). Aaron will introduce you to the people behind the website and walk through some of the ways the site distills the best practices discussed into digestible tidbits that you can put to use right away.

As the final months ticked down toward the Kinect for 360 worldwide release last November, Microsoft Xbox launched an extensive in-home field study in North America, Europe, and Japan. The study aimed to discover specific ways to optimize the out-of-box and first use experience, to learn how Kinect for Xbox 360 would perform in a wide variety of homes, and to observe how its revolutionary interactions would play out in the wide range of physical, family, and social settings that users call home. In this talk, Blink Interactive Research Director John Dirks will describe the agile user research techniques used to test build iterations, discuss lessons learned from the field, and reveal some of the improvements built into the initial Kinect experience as a result. You will learn how motivated teams can rapidly translate user research findings into impactful design changes.

As announced at Mobile World Congress, Windows Phone will soon have support for the multitasking of third party applications. In this session we’ll provide a full overview of how this is going to work, and how you can prepare your applications today.

So you have a team of developers… And a nice architecture to build on… How about making that architecture easy for everyone and getting developers up to speed quickly? Learn all about integrating the managed extensibility framework and ASP.NET MVC for creating loosely coupled, easy to use architectures that anyone can grasp.

Should designers code? Or is is okay for one to specialize in visual design and expect others to build their vision? As we get farther and farther away from the days of the "webmaster," and become an industry of specialists, are we losing some of the beauty, efficiency, and innovation that can be found at the point where design and development intersect? Jeff Croft, hybrid designer and developer, makes the case that the best web products will always be created by designers who understand the building blocks of the web: the code.

Mads Kristensen dives deep into practical and real world examples and war stories of optimizing ASP.NET applications. See how to use features within IIS and ASP.NET to measure and adjust both new and existing web applications. We’ll also focus on optimizing the communication between the browser and the web server, on the wire, where some of the greatest performance gains can be achieved. You’ll leave with practical, pragmatic and specific tips you can put into practice on the flight home!

We are collecting more diverse data than ever before and at the same time undergoing a proliferation of connected devices ranging from phone to the desktop, each with its own requirements. This can pose a significant barrier to developers looking to create great end-to-end user experiences across devices. The OData protocol (http://odata.org) was created to provide a common way to expose and interact with data on any platform (DB, No SQL stores, web services, etc). In this code heavy session we’ll show you how Netflix, EBay and others have used OData and Azure to quickly build secure, internet-scale services that power immersive client experiences from rich cross platform mobile applications to insightful BI reports.

We love HTML5 so much that we want it to actually work – in an interoperable, predictable manner across all browsers. In this session you will learn the current status of HTML5 and the Open Web Platform and what will take to bring it to a Recommendation. You will also preview the next emerging standards and understand Microsoft implementation approach through prototypes. Finally ride the DeLorean at 88mph and discover some of the work being done by Microsoft with the W3C on what will lead into HTML6.

Is your web app drowning in a sea of JavaScript? Has your client-side codebase grown from "a snippet here and there" to "more JavaScript than HTML"? Do you find yourself writing one-off snippets instead of generalized components? You're not the only one. Learn about a handful of strategies you can use to keep your JavaScript codebase lean, modular, and flexible. We'll cover all the major pain points — MVC, templates, persisting state, namespacing, graceful error handling, client/server communication, and separation of concerns. And we'll cover how to do all this incrementally so that you don't have to redo everything from scratch.

Microsoft Media Platform Player Framework, formerly known as Silverlight Media Framework (SMF), is Microsoft's premiere video player framework. The open-source Player Framework now boasts a feature set that includes stereoscopic 3D support, health monitoring, advertising, Windows Phone 7 support and much more. Dive into the newly added features and hear about our plans for the future!

Accessing the sensors of a device is one of the most compelling aspects of programming for a device. In the next version of Windows Phone, we’ll be expanding what you can access, to include the live camera feed, and we’ll be improving and simplifying sensor access across the device. In this session we’ll give you all the details on how this works.

The Silverlight team focused on building a runtime environment and set of class libraries that was specifically tailored for Windows Phone. In the next version of Windows Phone, they have taken the lessons of the past year, and substantially improved the framework and runtime from top to bottom. In this session we’ll give you the low down on what you’ll see later this year, and how to prepare for it now.

Come learn how Mono can help every one of your current projects: from our C# compiler as a service to running your .NET code on iPhone, Android and Mac. All demos will feature our amazing MonoDevelop cross platform IDE. Come to be energized and fall in love with .NET all over again. This is your second honeymoon. Do not miss it.

Nearly 20 years into this industry -- one that we mostly just made up as we went along -- it's time to ask, what exactly is our craft? What do we do and how well do we do it? Byron will ask questions about a professional ethos, values, and ongoing growth from the early days to now and the future. He'll also share inspiration, throw out some challenges, and engage in a conversation about our careers on the Web.

As live and on-demand online video distribution grows so does the need for meaningful and timely analysis of consumption and quality of service. Microsoft Media Platform Audience Insight is a composeable collection of technologies that enables media publishers, application developers, business decision makers and technical support staff to gain real time insight to media streaming applications. Audience Insight provides real time visibility into digital media related events, for example video starts, DVR actions and advertising delivery. These events are correlated and grouped to produce sets of KPIs to inform real time decision making and contextual business analysis. This session will review the architecture behind Audience Insight and will demonstrate how to gain insight for massive scale video distribution scenarios.

Been wondering how to tweak that extra bit of performance out of your WP7 app? Come learn how to analyze the performance of your Windows Phone application and make it faster using top techniques and the new profiling tools.

This session will be jam-packed with demos and guidance on lighting up web experiences using SQL Azure, Microsoft’s suite of cloud database services. Using Visual Studio we’ll go through the steps to quickly architect cloud data-driven web user experiences in ASP.NET MVC3 that also scale for high volumes of users and data. Next, we’ll demonstrate how SQL Azure quickly and powerfully extends user experiences farther – spanning mobile devices, AJAX experiences with jQuery, and synchronized data with on-premises applications.

The HaaHa show is back. Join Phil Haack and Scott Hanselman as they dig deep into the new open source NuGet package management system. Phil will play the part of an Open Source library publisher and create NuGet packages live and publish them on stage. Scott will be the Open Source consumer and use Phil’s libraries. Will the tables turn as Scott starts submitting patches? Anything can happen in the world of open source.

At home and work, the way we experience the web (share, search and interact with data) is undergoing an industry-changing paradigm shift from “the web of documents” to the “web of data” which enables new data-driven experiences to be easily created for any platform or device. Come to this session to see how OData is helping to enable this shift through a hands-on look at the near term roadmap for the Open Data Protocol and see how it will enable a new set of user experiences. From support for offline applications, to hypermedia-driven UI and much more, join us in this session to see how OData is evolving based on your feedback to enable creating immersive user experiences for any device.

Everyone wants to jump into HTML5 but how do you use the cool features of this new specification while ensuring older browsers render your web pages as expected? This is where polyfills and shims come in. In the session, you’ll learn how to use specially crafted JavaScript and CSS code that emulate HTML5 features so that you can take advantage of HTML5 today without breaking your sites in older browsers.

Later this year, Windows Phone will support the creation of third party applications that can continue to play audio in the background when the user switches away to do something else. In this session, we’ll dive into exactly how this is going to work. This will be a detailed, live coding session.

Bend your mind and relax your senses in this "Mind Bending" UX lightning session, packed with four topics on how to think outside of the proverbial design box. UX Lightning sessions are a full hour session with 4 exceptional speakers each presenting 10 minute topics. Hear from Sean Gerety speaking on "What Software can Learn from the World of Magic", Arturo Toledo with "Extending the Human DNA with Design", Rick Barraza with "What Brains, Football and Hobbits teach us about Designer & Developer", and Robby Ingebretsen with "Farming for Ideas: How to Be The Most Creative You". Attendees will learn from these experts how to rethink design and UX.

There’s tremendous excitement and enthusiasm around mobile application development, and with good reason; recent studies show that > 35% of cell phone users in the US use mobile apps daily. The opportunities are enormous, but how do you stand out amongst all the competition? Windows Phone provides several distinctive characteristics (like our trial API) that developers can leverage in order to build applications that stand out and provide unique and compelling experiences.

Windows Azure Storage provides a scalable and reliable storage service in the cloud for blobs, tables, queues and drives. In this session we will quickly show you how to use storage through the REST-based programming model - whether your applications are running in Windows Azure or elsewhere. We will also share several best practices for optimizing Windows Azure Storage.

Web application developers today are facing new challenges around how to expose data and services. The cloud, move to devices, and shift toward browsers are all placing increasing demands on surfacing such functionality in a web-friendly manner. WCF's Web API makes it easy for developers to expose their services and data to a broad set of clients and to take advantage of rich emerging web standards like Web Sockets.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) integrates with the HTML5 and CSS features to unleash some of the most beautiful experiences on the web. In this session we’ll explain what is SVG and when you should consider using it instead of other alternatives. We’ll show you how to create content that is interoperable across browsers and devices. We’ll cover common pitfalls to avoid, as well as look at the best SVG tools and libraries available to developers. We’ll walk through code samples to learn first-hand how you can bring a high quality, interactive SVG experience to your customers.

If you build sites with Silverlight and have been watching all the HTML5 hype with bemused skepticism, this session is tailored for you. I'll show you how Vertigo approaches modern web development, and more importantly, how we talk to our customers about it. I'll cover how we balance HTML and Silverlight, the tradeoffs of going HTML over native for mobile apps, and strategies for ideal compatibility across many browsers. We'll analyze the latest browser statistics, review the state of the spec, and discuss how to answer clients who want rich sites, but want it "HTML5 compatible". With all the buzz around this topic, you have a good reason to be skeptical; I want to help you be more informed about where to invest your energy and grow your practice.

With Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360, you are the controller. The system senses the 3rd dimension (depth) of the players and the environment, and revolutionizes the experience of how a player interacts with games and entertainment. With its broad availability and low cost, many researchers and practitioners in computer science, electronic engineering and robotics are leveraging the sensing technology to develop new ways of interacting with machines. The NUI era is upon us. In this panel, Kinect device and game creators will converse with NUI researchers and scientists, focusing on some of the principles behind the Kinect sensing technology and reflecting on the potential for computers that can "see" in 3-D. What does this mean for how humans and computers will communicate going forward? With vision, computers are better able to understand user intention, learn from what they see and reason about what the user really wants to do, all without responding to events streamed from mice and keyboards. The audio/voice recognition technology advancements in Kinect plus accurate 3-D sensing help make natural user interaction with computers real. Technology is starting to become invisible. What does this all mean? What do you want to know? This is an interactive panel which means attendees will be encouraged to ask questions when they have them in mind to help drive the conversation. So, come prepared with questions and ask whatever you want.

The XNA Framework vastly simplifies the building of cool interactive games on Windows Phone, and in the next release, we’ll be making it even better by adding full Silverlight/XNA interoperability. In this session we’ll show you just how this will work, and how it can unlock a whole new world of end user scenarios for XNA and Silverlight developers alike.

It’s pretty obvious by now that geolocation is a heavy player in the next wave of applications and APIs. Now is the time to learn how to take advantage of this information and add context to your own applications. In this session we’ll look at geolocation at every layer of the stack – from open protocols to operating system APIs, from the browser to Windows Phone 7. Building a compelling geo-enabled experience takes more than simple coordinates. In this session we will introduce the basics of determining a user’s location and then delve into how to make geo data a useful addition to your application instead of a bolt-on “me too”.

During MIX11, the Channel 9 team will once again be broadcasting live to the web, in Smooth Streaming HD, with full interactivity, eight hours straight, for two days in a row. In this session, we’ll walk you through our ever-evolving best practices and give away some of the secrets we’ve stumbled upon along the way. You’ll learn about choosing the right transmission path, onsite vs offsite encoding, IIS Media Services, MMP Player Framework, production workflow, the “joys” of screen capture, encoding best practices, content planning, disaster/backup plans, the perils of lip-sync testing and strategic bathroom break placement.

It seems that far too many people come to jQuery thinking that their previous knowledge with object-oriented languages like C# or Java will help them be successful at client-side scripting. In many cases, you can be successful with this approach, however, the more JavaScript you write you will inevitably find yourself uncovering strange bugs because you didn't take time to learn JavaScript properly. This session is targeted for developers that use jQuery, but haven’t invested adequate time to learn some of the foundational JavaScript concepts that differ from C#. If you would like to avoid some of these common mistakes when bringing your existing expertise to JavaScript, then please join me as I try to explain some of the differences.

If you want to create applications for Windows Phone that stand out from the rest, you should be using Expression Blend. Come to this session to learn how to take full advantage of the rich platform features, efficient workflow and tools to showcase your unique design skills.

ASP.NET is greater than WebForms, just as ASP.NET is greater than ASP.NET MVC. As MVC evolves so does WebForms. Join Damian Edwards for a tour of new features in the next version of ASP.NET WebForms, some of which you might recognize as friends of the ASP.NET MVC world. Learn more about Routing, Model Binding, optimizing CSS and JavaScript, advanced control templating techniques, and new thinking around how to structure applications using your favorite Web Framework.

Come and learn about ‘datajs’. datajs is a new cross-browser JavaScript library that enables better data-centric web application by leveraging HTML5 browser features and modern protocols such as OData. It's designed to be small, fast, and provide functionality for structured queries, data modification, and interaction with various cloud services, including Windows Azure.

In the war chest of the web developer, there is Photoshop, HTML, JavaScript, and, of course, CSS. While CSS started off with a minor role, it is increasingly taking over. This session will review the latest and greatest of CSS3, how we can apply it to projects right now, what benefits can be had, and what we can expect to have available to us in the future as CSS continues to take over the world!

You are building apps for the iPhone/iPad, yet you remain curious about what the cloud can offer. Is it possible to deploy scalable, mobile Web applications on Windows Azure? How about storing data in the cloud? Is it possible to use the cloud for push notifications to the device? In this session you'll learn how to integrate iOS applications into an existing Windows Azure infrastructure, and what types of applications other organizations are building. You'll walk away confident in knowing how to extend your existing applications to take advantage of features on the device together with services in the cloud.

Windows phone has the unique ability to provide the end user direct access to the information they care most about, via Live Tiles. In the next release of Windows Phone, we’ll be substantially improving how this infrastructure works in order to make it easier than ever for developers to create dynamic, compelling experiences for end users.

The phone is not a tiny desktop. We thought porting a desktop Silverlight application to WP7 meant selecting a feature subset and reformatting screens to a smaller footprint. That’s doesn’t work. Some of the data are the same; some business operations are the same. But what the user does on a phone is different. Tasks may take seconds; they cannot take minutes or hours. Input must be minimized. We had to re-design to meet realistic phone user goals and behaviors. This session reports our lessons learned and offers guidelines for an effective phone application design.

“Cocktail Flow” and “SurfCube 3D Browser” - two of the top applications in the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. Both have received feedback like “my favorite part of this app is showing it to all my buddies who have iPhones, Android phones, or Palm phones.” This talk is a unique opportunity to hear the real story of these apps, how they made it to the top of the charts and what happened since their launch. Cocktail Flow is arguably one of the most beautiful apps out there, with elegant, colorful graphics that is still faithful to the phone’s Metro design. Bálint Orosz, the designer of Cocktail Flow explains his thought process when designing the app and the lessons learned during development. SurfCube managed to reinvent mobile web browsing, and has found the balance between eye-candy and usability. András Velvárt shares the secret of how the buzz around SurfCube was created, and shows the effect of being featured in Engadget and other online publications. Hear how bugs and listening to user feedback influenced the sales and the roadmap of SurfCube!

Ever wondered what it takes to make the award winning, wildly successful products people can’t stop talking about? We drudge through tight deadlines, endless revisions, and constant pressure to "get it right." But how do we know what the right experience is if we’re not sketching, experimenting and testing the possibilities? In this session, we’ll learn to summon the brightest ideas, prototype through problems and examine ways to stitch innovation into the product development process. Next, transfer our insights into powerful, collaborative concepts to share and test with clients, teammates and users alike. Then put the power of Expression Blend with SketchFlow to work validating your ideas in the language of interface. Learn how to quickly validate ideas, DIY user tests, prototype task flows and sketch your way to the best development process and most impactful user experience with SketchFlow.

Learn how to design a great user experience for SharePoint 2010. As a web developer, you will learn simple techniques for branding your SharePoint web sites and Master Pages using CSS3 and HTML5. Also see how to easily transition from basic to advanced techniques to quickly add value to your web designs. Understand how to extend your designs into IE9 and Silverlight to provide the best end to end experiences.

Windows Azure DataMarket provides data sets from public and commercial data sources, spanning weather, sports, social media, financial and retail. With consistent data formats and licensing, and delivered via open protocols, DataMarket provides developers the ability to create innovative new applications for the web and devices. We’ll use .NET and Visual Studio to acquire DataMarket data in real time to build applications with ASP.NET and Windows Phone that recompose existing DataMarket feeds into new and existing applications, or mashing it up with your application’s information to create new data-driven user experiences to make them more interesting, more insightful, and more fun.

Many of the popular OData services, including Netflix, Twitpic and Facebook Insights were built by reusing their existing web API with an OData service. Implementing this type of OData service is not simple but it’s also not as hard as you might think. In this session, you’ll learn how to build similar services that wrap different types of data sources using the WCF Data Services Toolkit. We’ll take a look at the implementations for several of the popular services as examples of how to use the toolkit to create new OData services.

We present two exciting technologies that greatly lower the barrier to creating rich, immersive content. “Rich Interactive Narratives” (RIN) enables weaving together compelling multimedia stories incorporating interactive technologies such as Photosynth, Bing Maps, and Pivot. “3D Scanning Using an Ordinary Camera” enables anyone to quickly create a realistically textured model from just a few photos of an object. These technologies leverage Microsoft’s Silverlight and XNA development platforms, as well as the latest work from Microsoft Research.

The next version of Windows Phone will provide third party developers built in ability to create, manage, and access local structured data. This session will provide a complete overview of these features, and how to use them.

Looking to unlock more advanced capabilities in Silverlight? Silverlight 5 adds significant features including Multiple Windows, Unrestricted File Access, P/Invoke, Group Policy, 64-bit, and HTML support. This session will dive into the features, their APIs, and the scenarios these features can enable.