PDC Birds-of-a-Feather

Microsoft’s stance on open source has shifted dramatically.  Not only is Microsoft releasing an ever-growing stable of open source projects (including the DLR, MEF, and MVC), they’re even contributing back to the Linux kernel.  Has the open source movement has moved beyond controversy?  In this BOF, we’ll find out.  What are the new battles?  Who won the old ones?

We will discuss:
●    How you use (or when you avoid) open source in your work, and why. 
●    When to have an open source strategy.
●    Where do we take open source from here?

Co-Hosts: Miguel de Icaza (Mono Project-Novell), John Downey (Software Developer, Purdue University), Sara Ford (Microsoft), Peter Galli (Microsoft), Jackson Harper (Mono Project-Novell), Joseph Hill (Mono Project-Novell)

For more sessions, go to the latest list of BOF sessions for PDC09.

How to Build and Enrich Your Technical and Local Community

Whether you are involved in a strong vibrant community or want to start one we can all share our experiences. Here are some of the topics that we will cover.

• How to Build a Technical Community
• How to Enrich that new community
• How to Enrich Society with the Technical Community
• Open Discussion

Co-Hosts: Joseph Guadagno, Chris Woodruff

For more sessions, go to the latest list of BOF sessions for PDC09.

More and more development teams are turning to agile methodologies like Scrum, Lean, XP, FDD and others to improve their effectiveness. This session encourages learning from each other by sharing experiences on issues like:

• What methodologies teams are using and how they are working.
• Shedding old habits and the redirecting organizational commitments for success.
• Development techniques like TDD, mocking, BDD, Continuous Integration, TFD, and automation
• Experiences that have proven useful in your practice.

Co-Hosts: Mike Vincent http://www.mvasoftware.net and David Starr http://pluralsight.com

For more sessions, go to the latest list of BOF sessions for PDC09.

The Birds-of-a-Feather team announces another great BOF session for PDC09. Here’s a topic that is relevant to just about every software developer and architect: strategies for errors and exceptions.

Exception Management – Handling and Reporting Exceptions Effectively

There are many ways to handle exceptions in .NET. What do you do to ensure that exception information is not lost? How do you report exceptions to your end-user and to your system administrator? This BOF will explore various techniques for good exception management such as publishing exceptions and data-driven methods of reporting errors to end-users and administrators. Come share your techniques or challenges in this engaging discussion on exception management.

Host: Paul Sheriff (Tustin, CA), www.pdsa.com

Here is a list of all the BOF sessions that have been selected to date, and you still have time to propose a BOF discussion of your own.

The PDC BOF team is excited to announce we’ve selected another Birds-of-a-Feather session. We will continue selecting sessions as the PDC09 approaches, so propose a session today!

Claims-Based Identity

Are you interested in or currently building out applications that use claims-based identity? Come join others who are also working on similar systems and discuss your successes and pain points with federated identity. Let’s share our experiences interoperating with other systems, using Windows Identity Foundation (formerly code named Geneva Framework) and other frameworks, and so on. Are you using information cards? What do you think of the new direction CardSpace is taking? I’m sure we’ll have a lively discussion!

Host: Keith Brown http://www.pluralsight.com/keith

The BOF Team is please to announce the addition of the following session:

Should I Use Silverlight, MVC, or Web Forms for Web User Interface Development?

When ASP.NET was released Web Forms was the only choice for web user interface development. As .NET has evolved there are now several powerful technologies including Web Forms, Silverlight, and ASP.NET MVC which overlap making it challenging to determine the right combination for the best solution. You also have to consider WCF, AJAX, and potentially jQuery. Come join your colleagues to     share experiences on how to use each of these technologies to meet your user interface needs and create a powerful solution.

Co-Hosts: Ben Hoetling (Colorado Springs, CO) http://www.benhblog.com and Todd Anglin (The Woodlands, TX) http://telerikwatch.com

For more sessions, go to the latest list of BOF sessions for PDC09.