A full day seminar featuring Jesse Liberty from Liberty Associates, Inc and OReilly Media. This workshop is being coordinated by Dr. Yi-Ching Kao, Assistant Professor in the MIS area at the Lubar School of Business, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.

Overview

This workshop is focused on Microsoft’s new development technology, .NET 3, and how it fosters true n-tier development. We will zero in on the three key pillars of .NET 3: Windows Presentation Foundation (and its underlying markup language, XAML); Windows Workflow, as the new business layer; and Windows Communications Foundation, as an example of contract-based programming.

Topics

TOPICS XAML and WPF Until .NET 3, web applications were written with “markup” languages such as HTML, while Windows applications were not. We may have dragged controls onto forms, but the creation of the controls and their properties were managed by the development environment or were instantiated them programmatically at runtime. .NET 3 changed all that with the introduction of XAML (pronounced "zamel" to rhyme with "camel"). XAML is (almost) an acronym for eXtensible Application Markup Language. There are two key things to know about XAML. First, it is a mark up language for creating Windows applications, just as HTML is a mark up language for creating web applications. Second, every XAML object corresponds exactly to a CLR object, so anything you can create declaratively in XAML, you can create programmatically in C# and vice versa. We will use XAML to build simple WPF applications Workflow Microsoft’s Windows Workflow Foundation is a programming framework that enables the creation of reactive programs designed to respond to external stimuli. It is an implementation of an important new idea that has found its way into programming recently. Programmers, seeing the power of runtimes, are now starting to ask for the incorporation of design as data in the same way type definitions are available as data. Runtimes have shown the value of machine readable representations. The question naturally arises, Why can I not easily and simply model control flow, logic constructs, concurrency, and other design-time constructs as data in the same way I can model methods, fields, and classes? The answer: there is no good reason not to be able to do that. WCF We will be examining the new WCF technology specifically as it works with WPF and Workflow to foster true n-tier applications. The thrust of this discussion will be that .NET 3 finally fosters the creation of separation of presentation, business, and data layers in a way that .NET 2 struggled with and, to some degree, made difficult.

About the speaker

Jesse Liberty, a Microsoft MVP, is the author of Programming .NET 3, Getting Started with .NET 3, Programming ASP.NET, Programming C#, Programming Visual Basic 2005, and a dozen other bestselling books on software development as well as dozens of on-line and in-print articles. He has been a featured speaker at many leading industry events and on .NET Rocks and other radio and internet podcasts. Wikipedia hs recognized him as an expert in .NET. Liberty has been a VP for Citibank, a Distinguished Engineer for AT&T, and a software architect for PBS/Learning Link. For the past decade he has provided contract programming and training through Liberty Associates, Inc., and can be reached at www.jliberty.com where he provides a private support forum for his books and articles, and links to his technical and political blogs.

Who should Attend?

This workshop is targeted at current .NET 2 programmers, computer science students, C++, C#, VB.NET, and Java programmers, and anyone interested in the future of software development (either web or Windows) on the Microsoft platform.

Coordinator

Dr. Yi-Ching Kao, Assistant Professor in the MIS area at the Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, will coordinate this workshop.