Microsoft and .NET Valley would like to invite you to come to the MSDN Freedom Roadshow in Scranton, Pennsylvania on November 14th, 2008. The event will be held at Scranton University in Room 405 of the DeNaples Student Center and will begin at 9am. A schedule of events can be found below.

To register for the event, you can use the link on the hompage of dotnetvalley.com or go direct to the MSDN registration page here.

Event Schedule

8:30 to 9:00 – Breakfast and Registration

9:00 to 10:30 – Windows Presentation Foundation Demystified

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.

10:30 to 12:00 – Implementing RESTful services with WCF 3.5

This session will focus on the new capabilities in WCF 3.5 for implementing REST architectures. We’ll examine the new webHttpBinding and see how to build services as resource endpoints, as well as how to map HTTP verbs onto WCF services. We’ll also see how to specify the format of data exchanged with the service and consume these services is Microsoft technologies like ASP.NET AJAX and Microsoft Silverlight.

12:00 to 1:00 – Lunch

1:00 to 2:30 – Exploring the ADO.NET Entity Framework

Abstraction in software development can improve flexibility, independence, and the ability to compose higher-level concepts.  The ADO.NET Entity Framework, now shipping as part of Visual Studio 2008 & .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1, helps you create models of your data that enable a familiar object-oriented programming experience. Entities map flexibly to data sources while providing insulation from schema changes at the same time. LINQ makes an appearance as well, using the familiar syntax we’ve seen with LINQ to Objects, SQL, and XML to query entities.

2:30 to 3:15 – A Developer’s Guide to Internet Explorer 8

The next version of Internet Explorer 8 is now in beta.  This session will examine all the new consumer features, but also cover additional points that are specific to you as a developer.  We’ll see how accelerators and web slices can be a differentiator for your company, see the new wave of compatibility features and options, and unearth the tools available for developers designed to aid in the confusion that is web development.

3:15 to 4:00 – UI, UX, U Confused?

One thing not missing from Microsoft’s development offerings is a choice of options. In this session, we’ll compare and contrast the various .NET technologies available for building client experiences (Windows Forms, WPF, XBAP, ASP.NET, Silverlight, and Windows Mobile) to give you some insight in to making the best choices for reaching your applications’ target audience.

4:00 – Wrap Up and Raffle