Marking the start of yet another edition of ITCamp

We live in a culture of fear. Every day some people are pushing us to be afraid of things, while others are feeding of our fears and anxieties. Fear paralyses us and creates immense problems. In the work place, we are continuously having to struggle with fear of change, fear of technology, fear of losing...

Frequently we are encouraged to overcome our fear or to conquer it. A few people have succeeded in managing fear – this means accepting it, living with it and turning it into a strength.

When is fear a positive force? How can fear be a motivating factor? How do you turn your fear into something which helps and guides you?

We spend much of our time collecting and analyzing data. That data is only useful if it can be displayed in a meaningful, understandable way.

Yale professor Edward Tufte presented many ideas on how to effectively present data to an audience or end user.

In this session, I will explain some of Tufte's most important guidelines about data visualization and how you can apply those guidelines to your own data. You will learn what to include, what to remove, and what to avoid in your charts, graphs, maps and other images that represent data." "We spend much of our time collecting and analyzing data. That data is only useful if it can be displayed in a meaningful, understandable way.

With major vendors working hard to ease provision of Hadoop, resulting in many Hadoop As A Service offerings; what’s the challenge domain in 2014 for Big Data engineers? If HaaS is a Highway; where does it lead and how do you travel on it?

In this fast paced, L300 hands-on session, Andy will demonstrate Hadoop in practice, using Microsoft’s Cloud technologies: Building a system from scratch to ingest information into HDInsight, query and report on that information.

This session presumes prior knowledge of Map Reduce technologies, Hadoop, HDFS and HCAT.

There’s a special Microsoft product that has come a long way since its first OS/2 version. Actually this year, the 12th version of the product marks 25 years from the start, 25 years of Microsoft SQL Server.

Over the years, we have seen many amazing and innovative technologies such as SQL CLR, Service Broker, Resource Governor or recently the cloud-based version of SQL Server. And each time we concluded that we have seen it all, another version came to surprise us. SQL Server 2014 is no exception and I guarantee that some of its features will know your socks off!

I will say just “In-Memory OLTP” and “Updatable Clustered Columnstore Indexes” and it should be enough. But there’s more than that! Come to this session to find out for yourself!

In this session we will look over the various ways .NET is collecting memory, tips how to help GC perform better and tools that will save your day.

This is a must attend session for those who still do not know how to troubleshoot memory issues. For the rest it is a nice refresh and new look of features in .NET 4.5. As usual there will be lots of demos.

The Internet of Things is coming upon us bringing a whole range of fundamental changes in the way we imagine, understand, and write services. One of the major trends we’re wittnessing is the breakdown of monoliths, and Microsoft’s web stack is among the candidates. With the new .NET framework and standards like OWIN, the world of web development is changing significantly.

We’re going to cover in this session some advanced scenarios involving ASP.NET MVC 5, WebAPI 2, OWIN, Katana (Microsoft’s implementation of OWIN), and, of course, Windows Azure (Windows Azure Active Directory to be more specific). And to make things more real, we’re going to demonstrate everything using a solution used by our team at HTSS-Genisoft in real-life production.

Technical Debt is usually referred to as something Bad. Most articles and books on the subject are about how to get rid of technical debt. But is debt always bad? When can it be good?

In this session we will see how to use technical debt as tool, and distinguish between good and bad debt. We will discuss about several types of technical debt we can have in our code, what are the acceptable levels of debt and ways to handle it effectively without having to pay a lot of interest.

A deep dive into the new features in SQL 2014, and how those can be used to increase the performance and reliability of transactional databases and multi-terabyte data warehouses.

With business globalization, organizations must rethink the way they do information exchange. Traditionally information exchange practices consisted of various arrangements of fragmented systems that don’t talk with each other, increasing business costs and security risks.

In this session I want to present a solution for information exchange using Microsoft Azure cloud platform and how this can be integrated with on premise applications and data centers.

Looking at the Windows 8.1 development platform, the streams and storage management are totally different from the past. Streams classes have changed, files and folders management is radically different and a new set of classes exist in the WinRT library to support the Windows Store application model and the new asynchronous paradigm.

After a brief overview of asynchronous pattern in WinRT, the session will dig into the new streams and storage APIs showing practical examples of use for modern Windows Store applications.

In this session we will have a look at all the new features brought by the Windows Phone 8.1 SDK and more important on how to design your applications to share the source code with the Windows Store applications. In this session we will have a look at all the new features brought by the Windows Phone 8.1 SDK and more important on how to design your applications to share the source code with the Windows Store applications. 

SQL Server Source Control - or a few words written, a few narrated and few recorded about of the code control, data sources and co-working developer and admin team with SQL Server environment.

The session will aim to bring the idea of ​​control data, code sources by using the tools of Redgate and their competitors."

Do you use crypto in your app? Then you're doing it wrong!

This presentation explores 10 ways crypto code gleaned from the Internet is wrong and insecure and what you can do to prevent the attacks.

Are you a .NET developer interested in crafting high-quality, modern web applications? I've got 30 tools I want to show you in just 60 short minutes. I'll introduce you to these 30 tools that I think will help make your software and life better.

Buckle your seat belts and come prepared to jot down some notes on the items that will be the most helpful to you. You might want to reference them later, because we'll be moving fast! 

In this talk we will take a look at what is coming in the not so distant future in Office 365. We will talk about how the new Office Graph will serve as the data substrate for a more social enterprise, how Codename "Oslo" is the first experience leveraging this data and users don't actually have to do anything different to leverage it and the new Groups across the Office 365 suite that are seamlessly integrated with Yammer to keep the conversation going across the workflow.

We will sprinkle in some Search Driven Publishing just to see something that you can use today. In this talk we will take a look at what is coming in the not so distant future in Office 365. We will talk about how the new Office Graph will serve as the data substrate for a more social enterprise, how Codename "Oslo" is the first experience leveraging this data and users don't actually have to do anything different to leverage it and the new Groups across the Office 365 suite that are seamlessly integrated with Yammer to keep the conversation going across the workflow.

We will sprinkle in some Search Driven Publishing just to see something that you can use today.

This session wil cover what Visual Studio Online is and present some of its features - how to create a produce backlog (live demo), team integration with code in the cloud, how to create/manage builds in the cloud (live demo), how to deploy from visual studio in the cloud to windows azure platform (live demo). The benefits of using application insights and it's features (live demo) Present what is Visual Studio online, present some features of it - how to create a produce backlog (live demo), team integration with code in the cloud, how to create/manage builds in the cloud (live demo), how to deploy from visual studio in the cloud to windows azure platform(live demo). The benefits of using application insights and it's features (live demo)

When Virtual Machine Manager 2012 was released a new feature named Service Templates was introduced, and it offered a way to automate the deployment of various scenarios like guest clusters for SQL Server, VDI, complex web applications etc. With the release of 2012 R2 Service Templates got an update and now you can create very complex deployments like Active Directory sites with scale out capabilities, full blown Lync Servers, multi-tier or single-tier Exchange Servers and even Sharepoint Servers.

This type of deployment can be used in normal infrastructures with virtualized workloads, Private Clouds or at a Service Provider level with multi-tenant infrastructures.

In this session you will learn how to design a Service Template in order to automate and deploy Active Directory VM’s with scale out possibilities, single-tier or multi-tier Exchange Servers and complex web applications.

This is the perfect session if you need to design a solution that needs to run over Windows Azure and needs to be available 24 hours every day, 7 days per week. We will discuss different concepts and solutions to have databases and/or public API’s available even if a part of cloud infrastructure will be down. Topics like automatically backups, failover mechanism, traffic manager and redundancy will be discussed.

Badly designed code is one of the highest price we pay as an industry. In many cases the cost of adding or changing features increases with the time we advance into the project. The bigger the project gets, the more complex it gets and the more costly it is to work on it, if it lacks structure.

In this session I will show from real world projects experience how to keep your team efficient and how to reduce the cost of change with what I call the Application Software Infrastructure. It gives the means to control the size and complexity in large projects. It assures code quality through structure rather than relying on discipline only. It documents the architecture into code and bridges this way the architectural diagrams and the code structures.

Microsoft released SQL Azure more than two years ago - that's enough time for testing (I hope!). So, are you ready to move your data to the Cloud? If you’re considering a business (i.e. a production environment) in the Cloud, you need to think about methods for backing up your data, a backup plan for your data and, eventually, restoring with Red Gate Cloud Services.

In this session, you’ll see the differences, functionality, restrictions, and opportunities in SQL Azure and On-Premise SQL Server 2008/2008 R2/2012. We’ll consider topics such as how to be prepared for backup and restore, and which parts of a cloud environment are most important: keys, triggers, indexes, prices, security, service level agreements, etc.

This session will focus on exploring the scenarios available for VDI Session based, where Azure IaaS can be used. We will show how to cloudburst an existing on premise VDI Session based deployment with Azure RDS, and how to transform an VDI Session based solution in an as-close-as-it-gets-to-DaaS solution. The session focuses on available tools for automation, monitoring, configuration and also the scaling features which you need to take into account

We assume you are already familiar with concepts like VDI and VDI Session based, DaaS, Azure IaaS, SCOM, AppController, CoreIO including ADDS, DHCP, DNS. This is why we will skip the intro pleasantries and get to the demo side of things fairly fast.

In the red corner, we have stress, overwork, costs, delays, frustrations. In the blue corner, we have predictabilty, structure, quality, job satisfaction. The battle continues...

How can we make things faster, better, quicker, cheaper? How can we hold on to our best people? How can we increase customer satisfaction while reducing time to market? Can technology help? Can management help? Can process really make us happy?

This presentation talks about the management and structure needs which should help you being more effective at your work, whatever that is. How to avoid “Agile” growing into fragile, how to avoid “lean” turning into anorexia, how to stop “process” becoming bureaucracy. How to stop your management turning into a homicidal maniac.

Are you a web developer that’s looking at becoming a mobile developer too? In this session, I’ll introduce you to mobile development using AppBuilder, Telerik’s cross-platform mobile development IDE. It helps you create real iOS and Android apps using familiar web development technologies like HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.

We will discuss how to leverage your existing web-development skills, using the Windows and web-based IDEs, navigation, cloud services, phone features like the camera and GPS, testing, debugging, and deploying your apps to the app stores. Are you a web developer that’s looking at becoming a mobile developer too? In this session, I’ll introduce you to mobile development using AppBuilder, Telerik’s cross-platform mobile development IDE.

It helps you create real iOS and Android apps using familiar web development technologies like HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. We will discuss how to leverage your existing web-development skills, using the Windows and web-based IDEs, navigation, cloud services, phone features like the camera and GPS, testing, debugging, and deploying your apps to the app stores.

The world around us is producing data at an enormous speed and in huge quantities. Processing this complex, multifaceted data, turning it into information and visualizing it to drive business decision making is the paramount challenge for today’s corporate software developers.

In this talk, I will demonstrate the unique data-driven capabilities of F# and how these can be used to connect to a multitude of heterogeneous data sources to obtain structured, strongly-typed data that can be processed in a functional style, and presented and visualized in stunning HTML5 output that is guaranteed to win everyone’s attention.

By the end of the talk, you will become familiar with CloudSharper, the world’s first online F# development environment, and will have mastered key data visualization techniques that will make you a better and more informed developer.

OpenStack is not only the leading open source cloud computing project, it also features one of the most advanced code review and continuous integration (CI) frameworks.

Since Hyper-V is one of the main compute options available in OpenStack, it required the development of a dedicated infrastructure for CI testing, which is hosted by Microsoft in Cambridge, MA and mantained by Microsoft and Cloudbase Solutions.

Building this infrastructure was no easy task: it features full Puppet based automation with almost 200 physical hosts, Jenkins, a KVM based OpenStack cloud that deploys nested OpenStack Hyper-V clouds, more than 2000 integration tests executed for each run, hundreds of times a day, LogStash and ElasticSearch logging running on Azure and more.

During this session we’ll be able to show how it works and to dive into all the technical and architectural choices we made.

Join Tim Huckaby in a discussion of the lessons learned in 7+ years of design, development and delivery of interactive software driven by NUI (touch, gesture, and voice). All the bad; all the good; and the tools, tips and tricks learned along the way that will help you in designing great natural interactive usability into your own software.

Way back in 2007, Microsoft shipped Windows Vista which was touch capable, but not touch usable. With Windows 7, Microsoft introduced NUI capabilities like Multi-touch native to the OS. Windows 8 is designed for touch. Hardware vendors are now shipping large form factor multi-touch capable HD screens with native Windows 7 & 8 drivers at a consumer price point. Couple that with other form factors including mobile form factors where multi-touch is the norm and the power of WPF and WinRT then you have compelling low cost high fidelity hardware and software solutions that are revolutionizing numerous vertical industries.

This session will also update you on the types of multi-touch capable devices available right now and those coming in the immediate future. And what is now capable with .NET and WinRT in the multi-touch kiosk and interactive digital signage space.

But, frequently touch capability is not possible or just doesn’t make sense. In many airports, for instance, you do not want to touch anything. It’s just not safe. Bacteria (and other pathogens) live on touch screens in public places and are a real threat. In sterile environments like a hospital touch is legally not possible either. That is where gesture and voice controlled software comes into play nicely. With Microsoft Kinect (and other 3D cameras) innovation solutions are not only possible, but ultra-cool…and come with their own myriad of usability issues.

This demo-heavy session was designed to show you a number of real NUI solutions and how they were built and all the usability problems they evolved through.

So you've learned what elasticity means and why it is important to consider scalability in your cloud application architecture. But how can you easily manage your code in order to implement all the theories around scalability?

During this session, I will talk and demo the most common patterns used when designing a cloud application: the valet key pattern, the sharding pattern, the materialized view pattern, the event sourcing pattern and the CQRS pattern.

Sharing code across platforms can be difficult - however a Microsoft Portable Class Libraries (PCL) allows you write code that can be shared between apps written for Windows 8, Windows Phone, Silverlight, and other .NET Platforms. You can even call PCL code from Android and iOS if you are using Xamarin.

In this session, you will learn to write code that can be used by both Windows 8 and Windows Phone.

I will then show you how to start the Cross-Platform Cloud Kit to quickly build an application that targets both platforms and how to publish each application to the appropriate store.

This will be a session based on demos, which will highlight how you can use PowerShell in managing and automating your IT infrastructure. We will put more emphasis on platforms like Hyper-V, Windows Azure IaaS, Active Directory, Office 365 and general OS management.

There are no specific prerequisites in order to assist, although it’s highly desired if you are already familiar with the PowerShell syntax.

Windows 8.1 includes several new defense-in-depth technologies to mitigate attacks against software and the operating system, many of which can be opted-in or used by developers targeting the platform in order to defend their own software as well.

In this session, you will learn about the internals behind these new technologies and mitigations, as well as how to opt-in and leverage the functionality inside your own applications, services, and drivers.

Since last year, Single Page Applications have grown exponentially in popularity and the framework of choice for many developers is Angular.js. In this session we will go through some of the features that make Angular such a popular framework so you can start using it in your own projects.

Writing quality software is hard! You always struggle with deadlines and feature requests. When it is finally done and deployed a whole new set of problems start to happen. Wouldn't it be nice if you can track how your application is performing in production?

Now you can do that! With Visual Studio Online Application Insight you can make sure the application is meeting the performance and availability expectations, analyze the call stack of a faulting function and get usage data for a web pages, Windows Store and Windows Phone apps. This session will go into in-depth details and additional tweaks of how Application Insights that you can start using immediately.

You may often hear people talking about intellectual property. But have you ever wondered what does it really mean for those software applications you develop either for your employer, for that overseas client or for your own IT start-up? Do you know how to protect it or how to effectively exploit it?

Think about a software application as a cake with many layers - the first one being the code (copyrighted or open source). Have you considered the legal implications of mixing "closed source" with open source?

This session will cover the basics of intellectual property tailored to the software industry and offer a few practical examples and insight.

The Roslyn project is the next generation of C# and VB compilers but paradoxically it is not interesting because of the new features that will come into the next versions of the languages. Microsoft opened the compiler APIs publicly allowing the developers to create programs and tools which takes advantage of the syntactic and semantical analysis of the code.

During the session we will see how the developer can use the compiler APIs to format the sources, compile or understand the code even when it still contains errors. One of the most interesting uses of these APIs is the creation of semantic rules to enforce at compile time like, for example, guidelines or even static business rules.

JavaScript has grown from a webpage toy to being used in large-scale deployments both on the server and in the browser. This rapid growth has outpaced the growth of the language itself, which lacks features that allow teams to communicate requirements and build applications safely. This session will be a deeper tour of TypeScript, a new language and toolset that makes it easier to write cross-platform, application-scale JavaScript.

TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. TypeScript adds optional static types, classes, and modules to JavaScript to enable great tooling and better structuring of large JavaScript applications. The TypeScript compiler is open source, cross-platform and open specification, and is written in TypeScript. The compiler outputs standard JavaScript that runs in any browser or any host.

Important amounts of information are circulating in big companies in order to conduct current tactical or strategic operations. Information systems implemented have a life cycle that provides functionality for a long time. However, from time to time current systems run outdated technology, so they must be replaced with others that provide more flexibility and functionality. The challenge is to ensure the transfer of data, information and functionality from an old system to another.

The subject of this presentation is to expose a success story in migrating data and information within the company OMV/Petrom, which involved the transfer of information content of the eRoom document management system to SharePoint 2010.

We detail the design stages of migration, triggering the process, its performance and the effective closure of the old platform. Each stage has a certain specific technical and managerial course also incidents that were successfully overcome in a project conducted over a year.

In this session we will discuss the features provided by Windows Intune and System Center 2012 Configuration Manager to manage mobile devices using Windows Phone, Windows RT, Android and iOS.

We will discuss the configuration steps and the integration between the two platforms using Windows Intune Connector.

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