VSLive is a Microsoft sponsored conference for developers working with Visual Studio and .Net. The 2009 conference is February 24-26 in San Francisco (with workshop days before and after the sessions). Here are some of the sessions that WCF developers might be interested in.

Build Distributed Apps in .NET 3.5 SP1 (pre-conference workshop) by Rockford Lhotka

In this workshop you will learn how to design WPF, Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC and WCF service applications using a combination of object-oriented and service-oriented architecture and design principles. This workshop is about getting things done in .NET, leveraging your knowledge from .NET 2.0 to build performant, scalable and maintainable applications using the features of .NET 3.5 SP1. You'll see applications end-to-end, from the database through the business logic to the presentation layer, and you'll see how object-oriented techniques increase maintainability, while n-tier client/server and SOA complement each other to balance performance, scalability and decoupling of applications.

Managing Data with Silverlight by Billy Hollis

Silverlight 2.0 is fully data-enabled. Unlike the media-focused first version, you have many options to get data into and out of Silverlight 2.0 applications, LINQ capabilities to work with data on the client, and multiple choices for containing data on the client. This session will look at ways to get data into Silverlight, including ADO.NET Data Services and other REST-based services, WCF, and web services, and how each works end-to-end with data objects on the client to provide a complete and stateful data experience for the user.

An Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation by Robert Green

This session will provide an introduction to Windows Communication Foundation, and answer a number of questions such as: What is WCF? Why was it invented? How does it compare to Web services or .NET Remoting? How is it better than those? What is a service? How do I create one? How do I host one? How do I call one from my applications? What do I need to do to make sure clients and services can communicate? Once we answer these types of questions, you will be able to start creating your own WCF services and have a much better understanding of how to work with this promising new technology.

Code Name "Dublin": Windows Application Server by Aaron Skonnard

Microsoft recently announced a set of enhanced Windows Server capabilities code named "Dublin" that offer greater scalability and easier manageability around WCF/WF applications. Dublin extends IIS/WAS to provide a standard host environment for applications that use these core .NET technologies to simplify the deployment, configuration, management, and scalability of composite applications, while allowing developers to use their existing skills with Visual Studio, .NET, and IIS. This session introduces you to the new world of Dublin.

What's New in WCF/WF 4.0 by Aaron Skonnard

.NET 4.0 brings several improvements in the areas of WCF and WF, including improved REST capabilities, a new workflow model, seamless integration between WF and WCF, and a new visual designer. It also provides the ability to author completely declarative (XAML-based) Workflow services that can be more easily deployed, hosted, and managed. This session walks you through the various new 4.0 features and shows you how to write code using them today.

Understanding Transactions in WCF by Robert Boedigheimer

Transactions play an important role in keeping our systems in a consistent state, making sure that combined operations all succeed or all fail. When working with (web) services, transactions are more complex than within a single AppDomain. Fortunately, we have transactions support in WCF to help us manage this complexity. This session looks at how transactions work in WCF, the different transaction managers used by WCF in different scenarios, and of course how to use transactions in WCF.

Web 2.0 + WCF by Aaron Skonnard

WCF provides first-class support for building "Web" services that embrace REST design principles using standard Web protocols and data formats. This session illustrates how to build WCF services that support the HTTP uniform interface and different resource representations like XML, JSON, and Atom/AtomPub to enhance your Web 2.0 mash-ups. We'll specifically look at the new features in WCF, the WCF REST Starter Kit and ADO.NET Data Services.

Building RESTful Services using Windows Communication Foundation by Jon Flanders

REST is an architectural style for building services. It has been popular outside of the Microsoft development community for many years, and is quickly becoming the de facto standard inside as well. Microsoft has enabled this style of services with a new programming model and runtime enhancements in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) 3.5. This programming model enables developers to build services using a RESTful architecture. This session covers the basics of REST, how to build this type of service using WCF 3.5, and other features (such as AJAX/JSON, Feeds, and ADO.NET Data Services) that this web programming model enables.

Supporting POX/REST with WCF by Michiel van Otegem

For web services WCF uses SOAP by default and although this is a good thing for some scenarios, there are a lot of scenarios where this is overkill and POX/REST is good enough. Also, some services or clients don't support SOAP, for instance because they were built before SOAP became widespread. This session looks at supporting POX/REST messaging and how to support it side-by-side with other protocols. Topics discussed include message processing, message signing, session management and WCF REST Starter Kit.

Mashing-up WCF and WF by Miguel Castro

.NET 3.0 introduced us to W*F technologies. (Hey, did we just coin a new term there?) While many jumped on the WCF bandwagon and others on the WF one, some people tried to jam the two of them together, only to find that it was a bit cumbersome and lacking in elegance (and don't get us started on the difficulty of the web service activities).. Enter .NET 3.5. Two new Workflow activities have been added to the mix that are specifically designed to marry the worlds of Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation. Before you stay up all night trying to figure out exactly how these things work, come join this session. You'll get an end-to-end explanation of what these two new activities are and how they work.