We, at Microsoft patterns & practices, are hosting our flagship event in October – The Symposium. Here’s a quick preview of what’s coming.

Rock-star keynotes by:

Half day hands-on developer workshops:

On Oct 18th afternoon, there will be three workshops that attendees can choose from on the following topics:

· Windows Azure Guidance

· Enterprise Library and

· Prism

Technical Speakers:

Technical sessions topics (so far):

Web

• Idea: a session on the results of the Microsoft/JQuery collaboration (templates for example) and how customers are using JQuery with ASP.NET MVC and Windows Azure to build engaging Web experiences.
• Idea: a session on development and unit testing patterns when using ASP.NET MVC (like testing routes for example). This talk could also provide a sneak peek into ASP.NET MVC 3.

Cloud

• Confirmed keynote: Yousef Khalidi, a Distinguished Engineer on the Windows Azure team, will deliver a keynote on October 20th on the current and future state of the on-premise and off-premise Windows Azure platform. Abstract forthcoming.
• Confirmed: Half-day hands-on workshop: the Cloud Guidance team in patterns & practices will deliver a hands-on workshop on how to get the most of the Azure platform. Abstract forthcoming (soon).
• There are plenty of other options for sessions about the cloud. I’ll post some of our other ideas in the near future. In the meantime, I’m interested in what you would like to see. Perhaps something like connectivity with ...

Windows Phone 7

• Confirmed keynote: Charlie Kindel, a General Manager on the Windows Phone 7 team, will deliver a keynote on October 21st on the developer experience. Abstract forthcoming.
• Idea: given its mobile nature and its ability to always be connected, a session illustrating how best to use the Azure and Phone platforms together would be mega-useful. Other areas p&p has been working on is push notifications and how to take advantage of specific features like geo-location awareness and how to hook into the camera and audio features of the phone.

SharePoint

• After having delivered three different sets of SharePoint guidance, there is a lot we can talk about. Some of the options include exposing and consuming data to/from SharePoint, testing and development practices, a broad overview of the changes in SharePoint 2010. Let us know.

Parallel

• Confirmed: Parallel Programming with Design Patterns and .NET – Ade Miller
  Multi-core and HPC technologies are rapidly moving into the computing mainstream, allowing us to develop applications with improved performance, increased responsiveness, and reduced latency. The many established design patterns in this space can help developers and architects reuse proven approaches to solving many types of problems using parallelism. This talk covers many of the key patterns and gives examples of how they can be implemented using the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 libraries. This talk is aimed at experienced software developers who are relatively new to the parallel computing space but expect it to become more important to their work.

Enterprise Library

• Confirmed: Half-day hands-on workshop: This relatively-advanced workshop will focus on the patterns and implementation of EntLib’s provider model to show how it reduces coupling and facilitates testing. This is a great choice if you’re using EntLib today. – Grigori Melnik, Chris Tavares
• Open-space session on the new features of EntLib 5.0.
• Open-space session on the future direction of EntLib.

Inversion of Control

• Idea: How would you feel about a duo session between 2 heavy-hitters in the dependency injection space? We’re thinking one speaker can cover the preliminary principles, background and concepts to make sure everyone is on the same page and the other speaker can follow it up with implementation details.

Rich client

• Confirmed: Half-day hands-on workshop: The infamous David Platt, accompanied by members of the Prism team, will cover the latest Prism release in an overview of the major parts of the project. Abstract forthcoming.
• This is another space that we have the opportunity to talk about a lot of different things from patterns to implementations and we’re talking to some rock star speakers on possible topics.

Visual Studio

• Confirmed keynote: Jason Zander, Corporate VP of the Visual Studio team, will be delivering a keynote where he discusses the new features of Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server and how they improve the experiences for .NET developers and architects. Abstract forthcoming.
• Confirmed: Session on Feature Builder. The patterns & practices team has valued the automation and consistency that can be achieved through extending the developer’s tool box. Feature Builder is the latest incarnation of such tooling and is easily the most compelling offering to date. This session will focus on how easy it is today to bend Visual Studio to your will. Abstract forthcoming.

Agile Practices

Here are some of the titles we are currently considering:

• What has changed in Agile
• Behavior Driven Development and Executable Specifications in .NET
• Patterns of Healthy Scrum Teams using Visual Studio and TFS
• Be a Better Developer with Coding Katas
• Effective Test Automation Strategies

There are other sessions that are under consideration. Be sure to stay tuned for them - check the Symposium page on MSDN or follow the Symposium on Twitter or the event on Facebook.

Also, let us know what else you would like to see at the Symposium and we’ll try to accommodate.

Look forward to seeing you there!