Deeper in .NET 2008 was a huge success!  If you were there, blog about it or upload photos or let everyone know what you thought.  If you have any suggestions, please let us know.

Also, we will be updating this page with speaker presentations, and other notes from the show.  So if there is something you missed, let us know and we will do our best to add it here.

See below, in the session summaries, for presentation materials.

Here is a tentative schedule of the day's events.  For more information about speakers or session details, please keep reading.

Jason Beres is the Director of Product Management for Infragistics, the world’s leading publisher of presentation layer tools.  Jason is one of the founders of Florida .NET User Groups, he is the founder of the Central New Jersey .NET User Group, he is a Visual Basic .NET MVP, and he is on the INETA Speakers Bureau.  Jason is the author of several books on .NET development, including the recently published Silverlight 1.0 from Wrox Press.  Jason is a national and international conference speaker; he is a frequent columnist for several .NET publications, and keeps very active in the .NET community.  (Back to Agenda)

Charlie Calvert is the Community Program Manager for the Microsoft C# team. While working on outreach and bridge building to both external and internal teams through the web and live events, Charlie focuses his technical energies on LINQ and core C# language scenarios such as generics. He has a degree in Journalism and Computer Science from the Evergreen State College. The author of ten technical books which have sold well over 100,000 copies, Charlie currently lives in the Seattle area where he enjoys outdoor activities such as hiking, sailing and skiing in the mountains.  (Back to Agenda)

Richard Campbell is one of the co-founders of Strangeloop Networks and today serves as product evangelist, introducing the company's unique story to advisors, investors, patent attorneys, beta-customer candidates, potential employees, etc. Richard has more than 30 years of high-tech experience and is both a Microsoft Regional Director and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP). He has consulted with a number of leading North American organizations; Barnes&Noble.com, Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson Health Care Services, Reuters, Subaru/Isuzu and the U.S. Air Force. In addition to speaking at conferences around the world, Richard is co-host of the ".NET Rocks!, the Internet Audio Talk Show for .NET Developers" (www.dotnetrocks.com) podcast and the host of "RunAs Radio, the Internet Audio Talk Show for IT Professionals" (www.runasradio.com) podcast.  (Back to Agenda)

Mark Miller is a C# MVP with strong expertise in decoupled design, plug-in architectures, and great UI. Mark is Chief Architect of the IDE Tools division at Developer Express, and is the visionary force behind productivity tools like CodeRush and Refactor!, as well as the DXCore extensibility layer for Visual Studio. Mark is a member of INETA and a popular speaker at conferences around the world and has been writing software for over two decades.   (Back to Agenda)

Scott Wisniewski is a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft. As a self described “programming language geek”, Scott has a passion for programming languages and software development tools. As a member of the VB team his primary responsibilities are the implementation of Visual Basic Compiler and IDE features. For the Visual Studio 2008 release he implemented several, including “auto add-imports”, extension methods, and nullable types. Scott is also a contributor to the VB Team Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam) , and has written several articles for MSDN Magazine. He has a BS in Computer Science from the University of WI-Milwaukee, and prior to joining Microsoft wrote business software for the financial services industry. You may contact Scott via email at scottwis@microsoft.com.   (Back to Agenda)

The Scaling Habits of ASP.NET Applications
with Richard Campbell

As our ASP.NET Web applications become more and more successful we switch our focus from adding features to performance, scale, and management. Richard has been in the lab studying the scaling habits of the average domestic ASP.NET solution and has emerged to discuss his findings (no applications were actually harmed during the capture of this data). Come and learn where ASP.NET stumbles and how to get it back on its feet. In this session you will learn about the web acceleration equation, identify common ASP.NET bottlenecks, explore solution alternatives, uncover the secret sauce, and determine a reasonable strategy for scaling ASP.NET applications.  (Back to Agenda)

Presentation download: Slides

Notes from the show: Don't forget about the Strangeloop contest for a Zune.  The secret code is “acceleration“.

The Essence of LINQ with C# 3.0
with Charlie Calvert

Explore the essential technologies that establish LINQ as a unique and important new tool for developers who want to query data. By looking at a series of code samples, attendees will learn that LINQ is integrated, unitive, declarative, hierarchical, extensible, transformative, and composable. These principles illustrate why LINQ has quickly been established as an important new development tool. Other topics covered in the talk include deferred execution, lambda expressions, extension methods, expression trees and the IQueryable and IEnumerable interfaces. The new language features found in C# 3.0 will also be covered. These include automatic properties, object initializers, collection initializers, and type inference. The goal of the talk is to give developers a practical understanding of why LINQ is useful, and how it can be used to improve our development process.  (Back to Agenda)

Presentation download: Links to slides and demo

The Science of Great UI
with Mark Miller

Explore the how and why of great UI. If you believe you're not an artist, that UI is merely subjective, or that a great UI is not worth the effort, then this session is for you. We'll learn how to measure UI quality, covering user models, entry points, orienteering and discoverability, with tips and code samples for the WPF and .NET developer sprinkled throughout. Regardless of whether you're building WPF applications or the traditional WinForms or Web ones, you'll learn how to reduce visual noise, lower barriers to entry, enhance clarity and in general make your applications a pleasure to use. It's all about making your customers happy, and this session will show you how.  (Back to Agenda)

Presentation download: Slides

Building Next Generation Web applications using Silverlight 2.0
with Jason Beres

Silverlight is arguably the biggest shift in Microsoft strategy on the web since IE was introduced over 10 years ago.  With the reach of cross platform and the richness of the .NET framework, the future of building Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) has never been more exciting.  In this talk, you will learn about Silverlight 2.0, the platforms, tools and technologies you can use to build Silverlight applications, and how it differs from the full Windows Presentation Foundation platform in .NET 3.0 from a feature perspective as well as performance and deployment.  You will learn how code-behind in Silverlight works and how to bind data, you’ll see how use technologies like Windows Communication Foundation with Silverlight and how animations and transitions in the platform can add that extra user experience your applications need to be great.  Jason's latest book is also based on Silverlight.  (Back to Agenda)

LINQ Internals with Visual Basic 9
with Scott Wisniewski

Language Integrated Query, or LINQ, is one of the most exciting new features in Visual Basic 9.0. By unifying access to data with a familiar, declarative query syntax, LINQ stands to revolutionize the way data-intensive software is written. In this talk we will dive under the covers of LINQ, showing how to write a custom LINQ provider from the ground up, starting only from first principals. In addition to providing deep insights on the inner-workings of several new VB features, this talk will also show how to quickly and easily LINQ-enable existing applications, regardless of what data-access mechanisms they use.  (Back to Agenda)