Wintellect is sponsoring DevWeek 2010, Europe's leading independent conference for software developers, database professionals and IT architects. While we won't be exhibiting this year, Jeffrey Richter and Jeff Prosise will be presenting several sessions you won't want to miss. If you are attending be sure to join them:

To view a full conference agenda click here.

Monday, March 15th DevWeek Pre-Conference Sessions:

Living the Silverlight Lifestyle (and Loving It!)                                                                                        WORKSHOP REF: M4
Jeff Prosise
If you’re envious of all the fun your Silverlight friends are having and are worried you’re too late to the party, don’t fret: our Silverlight pre-conference workshop will get you up to speed in a day.
You’ll learn about XAML, CoreCLR, the Silverlight BCL, controls, data binding, templating, networking, isolated storage, and a whole lot more.
The time has never been better to join the RIA revolution!

Tuesday, March 16th DevWeek Conference Sessions: 

11:30 - Track 1

CLR and C# v4.0
Jeffrey Richter
In this talk, we’ll take a look at the changes in CLR 4.0, the base class library, and in C# 4.0. CLR topics include side-by-side support, improvement for interoperating with COM and native code, garbage collector/debugger/profiler improvements, and exception handling. We’ll then discuss new BCL classes including BigInteger, Tuple, code contracts, and improvements made to other classes. Finally, we’ll talk about improvements made to the C# language including dynamic, optional & named parameters, and generic covariance and contravariance.

11:30 - Track 3

What’s new In Silverlight 4
Jeff Prosise
Silverlight 4 is just around the corner, and it’s chock full of new features including printing support, webcam and microphone support, support for out-of-browser apps with elevated permissions, MVVM commanding support, and much, much more. Join the fun as Jeff leads a guided tour through the next version of Silverlight and peels back the covers to reveal features and enhancements that promise to make Silverlight 4 the most exciting version of Silverlight yet.

16:00 - Track 1

The performance of everyday things
Jeffrey Richter
There are many constructs that programmers use every day: arrays, mathematical operations, field access, finalization, string concatenation and interop, manipulating collections, calling methods (instance, static, virtual, interface, methods, via delegates, via reflection), just to name a few. The CLR and C# provide numerous techniques of working with these constructs and few programmers are familiar with the various techniques as well as the performance of one technique versus another. In this talk, Jeffrey will examine these commonly-used programming constructs, discuss how the CLR implements them internally, and how the CLR’s implementation affects their performance.

16:00 - Track 3

Power Silverlight programming: 10 tips for writing great apps
Jeff Prosise
If you think Silverlight is the greatest thing since sliced bread, you’re not alone; other developers are jumping on the bandwagon, too. As such, it is increasingly difficult to build Silverlight apps that stand out from the competition. In this action-packed session, Jeff presents ten ways to use Silverlight to build the better mousetrap. Don’t come if you’re happy writing mediocre applications!

Wednesday, March 17th DevWeek Conference Sessions: 

9:30 - Track 1

Generics, anonymous methods and iterators
Jeffrey Richter
In this talk, Jeff looks at the internals of some C# 2.0 features that programmers use every day. For generics, he’ll talk about all the changes that had to happen to the CLR and compilers to make them work. He’ll also go into how the CLR creates type objects of generic types and memory and performance issues when using generics with reference types versus value types. Constraints and the odd behaviours they exhibit will also be discussed. Then, we’ll go into anonymous methods, what the compiler lets you do and not do as well as how the compiler implements closures. Finally, we’ll discuss C# iterators and how collection classes use them to return their ordered set of values. Iterators are a very heavily used feature in making C# 3.0’s Language Integrated Query feature work, and iterators you create can integrate with LINQ.

9:30 - Track 3

Cool graphics, hot code: ten visual effects to make you the envy of your peers
Jeff Prosise
Silverlight is known for amazing browser-based UIs, but great graphical effects don’t happen by accident. In this demo-laden session, Jeff presents reusable eye-candy effects complete with samples and code libraries that will have you building eye-popping UIs tomorrow. Guaranteed to make you the life of the next Silverlight party!

11:30 - Track 1

Automatic memory management (the garbage collector)
Jeffrey Richter
The CLR manages the creation, lifetime, and destruction of all managed objects by way of the managed heap and its garbage collector. In this session, we’ll explain how the managed heap and the GC work. The difference between a reference counting GC and a reference tracking GC will be explained and why the CLR uses a reference tracking GC. The GC ensures that memory leaks do not occur, memory corruption does not occur, and also simplifies the .NET API due to the reduction of memory buffer negotiation. This session will also focus on features offered by the GC such as finalization and explicit object cleanup as well as techniques for improving performance. 

11:30 - Track 3

Can you keep a secret? The biggest little-known features in Silverlight
Jeff Prosise
So you think you know Silverlight. But how well do you really know Silverlight? Did you know, for example, that Silverlight 3 features two very different HTTP stacks and that one of them can be used to circumvent the most frustrating limitations of Silverlight networking? Did you know that ComboBoxes can be virtualized for high-performance? Or that the BCL now includes support for CPU metrics? Join the fun as Jeff takes you on a backstage tour of Silverlight and presents it in a way you’ve never seen it before.

14:00- Track 1 

Exception handling
Jeffrey Richter
Exception handling is an elegant and structured mechanism for reporting and recovering from errors in your software. In the .NET environment, exception handling is not just an option-it’s the only way to do error handling! In this session, we’ll describe how exception handling works in .NET, as well as successful design patterns for use in your software. You’ll learn how to apply exception handling to the various types of code that you write, from reusable components to application software. A large focus will be spent on best practices and guidelines so you learn how to use exceptions effectively and efficiently. Performance issues will also be addressed.

Thursday, March 18th DevWeek Conference Sessions:

Understanding thread synchronization – Part 1
Jeffrey Richter
This talk will explain the mindset behind proper thread synchronization. It will first cover the primitive thread synchronization constructs including volatile memory access, interlocked APIs, events and semaphores. We will go into the pros and cons of each. Then, we will discuss the various hybrid thread synchronization constructs including mutual-exclusive locks, reader-writer locks, and various new locks that are introduced in .NET 4.0. Jeff will also explain his own lock, the ReaderWriterGate, which Microsoft purchased the patent rights to.

11:30 - Track 1

Understanding thread synchronization – Part 2
Jeffrey Richter
This is the second part of the two-part talk detailed above.

14:00 - Track 1 

Building dynamically extensible applications and components
Jeffrey Richter
Today, more and more applications are being implemented as small shells that compose their features by loading separate components implemented by various companies. In this talk, you will learn how to build applications that can be extended with other components discovered at runtime. First, you’ll learn how to use AppDomains which provide many features such as assembly unloading, security sand-boxing, and configuration settings. Then, you’ll learn how to use reflection to dynamically load types and create objects in another AppDomain. Finally, we’ll focus on how to get the host objects to communicate efficiently with the add-in objects. This talk will also address issues related to versioning of the host and add-in components.

Friday, March 19th DevWeek Conference Sessions:

Use Threads Effectively to Build Responsive and Scalalbe Software                                                  WORKSHOP REF: F1
Jeffrey Richter
CPU manufacturers are not able to squeeze more speed out of CPUs; instead all CPUs are becoming multi-core. The only way applications can gain high performance and scalability is by effectively using threads.
In this full-day talk, we’ll discuss the basics of threads (creating them, context switches, scheduling, properties, and debugging). Next, we’ll discuss the CLR’s thread pool, how it is architected and how to write applications to leverage it. Finally, we’ll focus on asynchronous programming models allowing you to build responsive, scalable, reliable applications and components making extremely efficient use of system resources.
Time will be spent on threading architectures and a lot of sample code will be shown.