Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser and cross-platform web-centric programming API which allows you to integrate extremely rich UI islands into a standard web application. Using Silverlight, developers can inject multimedia (video, audio, etc), user interactivity (games, gadgets) and other visual enhancements into their designs. This course examines the role of the Silverlight SDK and the numerous surrounding technologies (JavaScript, ASP.NET, XAML) and development tools (Microsoft Blend, Visual Studio 2005/2008 templates) used to build Silverlight-enabled web content.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is an API used to build distributed applications using .NET 3.0 and higher. WCF was designed to expose the current multitude of Windows remoting APIs (web services, MSMQ, TCP, peer-to-peer, etc) from a single unified toolkit. In this course, attendees will examine the overall WCF programming model, binding choices, host options, security issues and the use of declarative markup to specify the underlying infrastructure.

You will learn to use the new .NET Framework 3.5 feature, Language Integrated Query (LINQ) to easily create complex data-independent queries. In addition, you’ll learn about the new language features added to Visual C# in Visual Studio 2008 in order to make LINQ possible. You’ll start by working through a quick overview of LINQ, and how it applies to working with collections of objects, retrieving data stored in SQL Server, and creating XML content. Subsequent topics introduce new LINQ-oriented language features, LINQ to Objects, LINQ to DataSets, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to XML, and LINQ to Entities. By the time you’ve completed the course, you’ll have a good understanding of how to construct LINQ queries to work with data and how Visual Studio 2008 supports LINQ.

While more and more companies are practicing “Agile” software development, there is still a great deal of misunderstanding and confusion that surrounds the term.  This one day lecture class will cover the basics of Agile development using Scrum, including

* Product, release and sprint planning
* The product backlog
* The roles of the Scrum master and product owner
* The importance of demos
* What it means to be done with a task in Scrum

The instructor has participated in numerous Agile projects in a wide variety of organizations, and will include a discussion on common pitfalls and barriers to Agile adoption as well.

This one day course will provide a hands on look at setting up a Continuous Integration process using freely available tools from beginning to end. Students will learn the theory and practice behind establishing a Continuous Integration process, including setting up a build script, running unit tests, setting up an automated build/test server, and capturing reporting information for the whole process.