To cloud or not to cloud?

Matt Hester

Cloud computing is emerging as a promising IT service delivery vehicle. But is the question “To cloud or not to cloud”? For IT professionals and your IT organizations, it is crucial to recognize the opportunities and play a key role in the transformation from existing infrastructure-focused IT into a service-oriented, user-centric, and IT-as-a-Service (IaaS) environment. Are you ready for the challenge to lead and transform your IT organization?

This session will clarify the myths and provide pertinent information on cloud computing from a business and datacenter viewpoint. We will review the architectures and examine the service delivery models of cloud computing while stepping through business scenarios and operations of employing public cloud and private cloud

Web development was a different game back in the early 2000s. Early versions of ASP.NET were aimed at Microsoft's existing customer base, and even tried to hide the nature of the web from developers who weren't ready for it. Gradually, the ASP.NET team began to open up, shipping open-source components and eventually open-sourcing much of the ASP.NET platform. The next version of ASP.NET goes even further, providing explicit support for development and hosting on non-Windows platforms. Come see how you can take advantage of the robust and full-featured ASP.NET platform while still using the tools you love: OS X, Sublime, Vim, and others.

Brian Sullivan

There are a number of options when going mobile, and it's not slowing down. Why choose one over the other? What are the strengths and pitfalls? What's right for your customers and users? We'll go over each option, with examples of how you can come to the right strategy around your mobile offerings.

Jeremy Johnson

A UX Story from the worlds most used white labeled travel site. How we use Sketches, Prototyping and Innovation Games to collaborate with our customers and experience innovation breakthroughs.Previous conferences delivered at:Big Design 2013, Tulsa TechFest 2014Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/calebjenkins/prototype-collaborate-innovate

Caleb Jenkins

Keeping Up With JavaScript

Pete Hodgson and Brandon Byars

How can we "level up" our software development abilities without leaving our familiar, comfortable languages? We can try using an unusual programming paradigm, or introducing artificial constraints which force us to see things through a different lens. Brandon Byars and Pete Hodgson will discuss "leveling up" by using JavaScript in a different way, with some practical examples: not using the `this` keyword, and applying the Functional Reactive paradigm to JavaScript development.

Change Your Questions – Change Your World! Allison Pollard and Cherie Silas At a critical moment in history the world pivoted because people began to look at things from a different perspective. They stopped asking themselves, “How do we get to the water?” and started asking themselves, “How do we get the water to us?” When we change our questions we get entirely different outcomes. Questions are powerful tools in the hands of agile teams that can help people discover innovative solutions that have been locked inside waiting to be released into our products! Join us for a high-energy workshop that teaches how questions can be used to help a team learn, grow, and break through thought barriers. Learn what makes certain questions provoke more thought than others and how to make your questions more impactful. Participants in this session will discover how to change the way they currently communicate to incorporate powerful questions that will unlock new thinking patterns in their teams. They will also interactively learn how to identify if the way questions are being asked are actually impacting others in the manner intended.

Cherie Silas and Allison Pollard

RESTful web services are quickly becoming the preferred type of web service to roll out when providing ways to integrate and consume your data. Yet, developers are often confused by the myriad of choices when it comes to securing their RESTful web services, and often leave them open to significant vulnerabilities. In this session, you'll learn best practices on what not to do for RESTful authentication, what are the most widely adopted authentication mechanisms for RESTful services, and what it takes to implement the most robust of them all, OAuth 2.0, in ASP.Net Web API.

Chris Weldon

XAML gives us two-way data binding: view to view model. But how do you synchronize data between phones and tablets? Learn how to data bind to the cloud. When a change is made on one device, the change appears on another. Data flows seamlessly across devices.But those devices aren't always connected. And even when they are, users don't want to wait for a network connection before they can see or work with their data. So data needs to be stored locally, and synchronized in the background.Build a universal app where the phone and tablet share a common data model. That model is synchronized through a cloud service and into local storage. Project that storage through the view model, and data bind it to the view.

Michael Perry

TBD

You've heard of the cloud. You've heard of Windows Azure. You have a general understanding of what it is but you still don't fully understand how or why you would want to use it. If this sounds like you, you owe it to yourself to attend this session and get a foundational understanding of what exactly Windows Azure is and how you can leverage it in powerful ways in your new and existing .NET applications. In this session, Casey starts by covering some basic, high-level cloud-related topics to give you a solid foundation in cloud development, then moves on to how Windows Azure implements these ideas and makes them easily consumable to .NET developers. Finally, you will have the opportunity to dive in with Casey and build applications from scratch that leverage several important Azure features such as Azure storage and service bus. Bring your questions about Windows Azure to this highly interactive session. Note: Please be sure to sign up for a Windows Azure account at http://www.windowsazure.com before the session. If you want to follow along with the interactive sessions also be sure to bring a laptop with Visual Studio 2012 or 2013 and the Windows Azure SDK 2.2 installed. You can find the Windows Azure SDK 2.2 at http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/downloads/?sdk=net.

Casey Watson

Xamarin already lets you achieve up to 75% code reuse for over 2 billion devices including iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Now the Xamarin.Forms project extends this code reuse to support user interface implementation. This allows sharing of all native user interfaces and business logic across the multitude of devices that Xamarin supports. This will walk you the creation of your first app with Xamarin.Forms, so you can discover for yourself the speed and ease for yourself.

Sean Sparkman

The traditional role of UX is to fight for the user by designing usable & functional software. But in the age of the 'Internet of Things' every experience of soft and hardware bleeds into the next. The wares we design (and unfortunately those we don't) are no longer isolated elements, but a network of experiences and combinations - often referred to as Service Design.As designers we're strategically placed to affect meaningful change in our organizations for good. I'll share 5 strategies I've found useful in elevating design thinking, educating and garnering support among my colleagues and superiors towards creating a unified vision where everyone in the organization takes conscious part in the design and execution of a common service design. This leads to increasing customer engagement, loyalty and evangelism.

Brandon Ward

TBD

Come and learn why there's such interest in functional programming these days! We'll discuss the basic ideas behind functional programming, build some cool examples, and see how functional composition can simplify testing and improve your code base.

Ken Byrd

Let’s talk about testing javascript. For every person I have run into that says testing is not worth the trouble, I find more that have benefited greatly from taking the effort to make sure a known bug doesn't unexpectedly return. We will go over how to setup your environment. How to automate the tests, so the tests can be incorporated into a build cycle. Not only are these tools easy to use, they will work on Windows, Linux, and yes even a Mac.

Harold Pulcher

Using agile techniques to build an outlaw pinewood derby car from scratch, no wimpy kits involved. The result is Frankencar! A 400 watt brushless motor powered, Arduino controlled torque monster that smokes the competition. Learn aspects of Agile that apply outside of software development. Uncover universal truths that will improve any project. Find other uses for a Dremel tool. But mostly, discover how you can apply your geekitude to hardware even if you've never touched a soldering iron and have fun doing it.

Matt Spradley