For more than 30 years developers have been building enterprise software for small computers like the PC. Arguments are frequently made that the tools, plumbing and platforms makes building software easier than we ever dreamed. And many of today’s software architects will argue that building software is more difficult than ever because of the complexities of integration and the myriad of choices in solution architecture.

Now, a reinvigorated focus on user experience with rich client and rich internet application (RIA) developer technologies have created even greater opportunities for the creation of awesome applications. When you couple that with the advent of multi touch capable hardware at consumer prices and the high level .NET APIs to leverage multi-touch capabilities, we have the start of the new age of software focused on the Natural User Experience (NUI). NUI applications manifest in “new” platforms and developer technologies such as Windows 7, Surface, WPF, The Windows 7 Mobile phone and Silverlight and all can leverage innovative capabilities like Multi-touch, Cloud and parallel computing.

This demo focused keynote will take an amusing look at the past and take an impressive look at some of the best software being built today and into the immediate future.

The new version of SQL Server is already available on the market whether we are ready or not. This session intends to answer questions (from a developer perspective) such as:

Why should I care about SQL Server 2012?

What is a ColumnStore Index?

What happened to the Business Intelligence Development Studio?

What is and why do I need SQL Server Express LocalDB?

Transact-SQL and Extended Events improvements? What kind of improvements?

How about unstructured data?

Is that all?

We will also take a brief look at the Microsoft certification program and Official Curriculum for SQL Server 2012.

What is Chickens Can't Fly? What are Xbox LIVE games on Windows Phone 7? What went wrong and what went right?

A session about working with Microsoft Game Studios and Development Team and Technologies.

The architecture of a real world .Net project that was the technical answer to the client’s desire of implementing the “UK’s biggest, funnest game ever”.

In this session you will explore this architecture and be introduced to web frameworks and technologies that are used such as Telligent Community (leading community platform in .NET), WCF RESTful API (security especially), Sitecore (among the best .Net CMSs), CDN (Akamai) integration and more.

Building complex application in metro style require more than user interface. Background tasks open a new universe and give us the ability to run code when the application is suspended or closed.

During this session you will discover not only when and how to use background tasks but also what limitation we have when we use them.

You are working on a new complex system, and you want to make sure that you discover potential problems before you release it to the customer. Or you deployed your application and after a while the performance starts going down. What do you do? How do you find out what is going on? What tools do you have available? Come to this session to find out!

Web standards are at a point where they push us to consider replacing native client applications on PCs and Mobile devices. This way we can leverage our previous knowledge, saving us from building the same applications over and over again on different platforms.

HTML5, CSS3 enables us to create very rich and engaging web applications through animations and media. But most web applications still require page refreshes when moving from page to page, causing them to fall short of their native counterparts.

In this session you will learn how to build rich web applications that part from the traditional page refresh model. You will gain an insight into how to accomplish this with highly modular JavaScript, CSS and HTML code, both on PC and Mobile devices.