Well, I get to be one of the lucky people that gets to go to the Microsoft PDC 2008 Conference in Los Angeles, CA on October 27-30. Since 1991, the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) has been Microsoft’s premier gathering of leading-edge developers and architects. Attend the PDC to understand the future of the Microsoft platform and to exchange ideas with fellow professionals. You’ll learn about upcoming products, meet Microsoft’s leaders and top engineers, and write some code.

At this year's conference, Microsoft will be giving a 160GB external USB2 hard drive with all of the bits from the conference to each attendee instead of a collection of DVDs as in the past. It is even rumored that a Beta version of Windows 7 will be included as well.

Channel 9 on MSDN has been producing a series of Countdown to PDC 2008 videos to help everyone get a great overview of what to expect this year at PDC. Here is just a few of the videos that you can watch about the upcoming conference:

• This is the Software + Services PDC: Mike Swanson
• By Developers, for Developers: Don Box and Chris Anderson
• Building Block Services, John Shewchuk
• Extending the Data Platform to the Cloud: Dave Campbell
• Amitabh Srivastava: Corporate Vice President of Cloud, Infrastructure, & Services

MSDN Event (REGISTER)
4 hour MSDN Event where the presenters will cover 3 seperate sessions focusing on Visual Studio, WPF and Vista Security.

Peabody Hotel Little Rock 
3 Statehouse Plaza
Little Rock Arkansas 72201
View Map

Session 1:  Demystifying WPF

Today’s applications need to do more than simply work.  They need to draw in the user, and provide a differentiated experience. This means moving beyond battleship gray forms, boxy UIs, and providing a positive user experience.  Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides powerful capabilities to develop a compelling user interface, the kind that makes an application stand out.  In this session, we’ll examine the core concepts of WPF such as layout panels, data binding, styles and control templates, and we’ll use them to develop an application UI from the ground up.

Session 2:  Ten reasons your applications will be more secure when deployed on Vista 

Reputations are tough to shake – particularly in the software industry. While Microsoft Windows has enjoyed great market share, especially in the desktop OS space, its industry position has made it a target for hackers worldwide. Microsoft leadership recognized the need to develop a security engineering approach that could withstand global Internet scrutiny, and Windows Vista is the first desktop operating system to embody this significant philosophy shift. Vista is built from end to end with security at the very forefront of the project. In this session, you'll learn 10 reasons why your application is more secure when it's deployed on Vista. We'll also cover new capabilities designed to protect memory, minimize privilege and provide resource-oriented access control, plus a plethora of additional security enhancements.

Session 3:  Developing Applications with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1

Service Pack 1 and Visual Studio 2008 introduce a wide variety of new features for targeting Windows, Office and the Web. This includes more controls, a streamlined setup, improved startup performance, fresh graphics features, improved AJAX support, and much more. We’re also introducing the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services, which are designed to simplify application data access by providing an extensible, conceptual model for data from any source, while enabling this model to closely reflect business requirements. Don’t miss this lively session and learn how to use these powerful new features in your applications
 

I blogged previously about some great Silverlight Tips of the Day that the Silverlight team has been releasing to help developers get started using Silverlight. Well, the team has released some new tips:

• GameFest 2008 - Silverlight Game Programming
• Tip of the Day #21 - How to work with Shapes, Brushes and Gradients
• Tip of the Day #22 - How to add Sound Effects, Music and Video to your Silverlight App.
• Tip of the Day #23 -How to Capture the Mouse Wheel Event
• Tip of the Day #24 - How to Apply a XAML Template to a Class
• 3D Simulated Terrain Tutorials for Silverlight Games
• Terrain Tutorial Part 1 - Creating a Scrolling Map
• Tip of the Day #25 - How to Build the XAP File to the Debug/Release Folders
• Tip of the Day #26 - How to Change the Output XAP File Name.
• Tip of the Day #27 - How to Change the Mouse Cursor

If you have worked with XAML outside of Visual Studio, you have probably wished that you could get Intellisense in your code. Microsoft Expression Blend is one of main tools that Microsoft expects developers to use when working with XAML. Blend doesn't have Intellisense for XAML either.

Stefan Dobrev has developed an addin for Expression Blend that will provide the auto completion and Intellisense in Expression Blend.

Stefan's code is based off another great free XAML tool called Kaxaml. Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content (kind of like XamlPad but without the gigabyte of SDK).

XamlPad is a basic visual editor for Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) and is installed with the SDK.  

I thought I would start posting a Virtual Lab Series with some links to some good virtual labs that I have found so that others might be able to make use of the labs. I also want to have the links posted somewhere as a resource for me to find later. I will try to add more of these posts as I find these labs.

I was able to find a good Virtual Lab to work with Windows Presentation Foundation on Visual Studio 2008. These virtual labs allow you to remote into the virtual environment to complete the lab and learn the option you have selected.

Event Overview  (90 Minutes)

• This lab provides an introduction to the development of a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) client with Visual Studio 2008.  Visual Studio 2008 has a rich set of features to support the language integrated query framework for .NET (“LINQ”), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and design of WPF Applications.
• Furthermore, you will see how Visual Studio 2008 designer is used to build a WPF Client application. You will also see how LINQ features can be used against a SQL database, access a WCF-based service after generating a Service Reference, and you will also be introduced to some of the new language features in C#.

You can view the lab and more information by clicking here.