Miguel Castro

Speaker Image

Microsoft MVP

Miguel Castro is an architect with IDesign with over 22 years of experience in the software industry. He’s a Microsoft MVP, member of the INETA Speakers Bureau, and ASP Insider. With a Microsoft background that goes all the way back to VB 1.0 (and QuickBasic in fact), Miguel has spoken at numerous user groups, code camps, and conferences throughout the US and overseas. He has also been featured on the technology talk shows, .NET Rocks, .NET Rocks-TV, Microsoft’s ARCast (Architecture Podcast), and The Polymorphic Podcast on numerous occasions. He specializes in architecture and development consulting and training using Microsoft technologies. Miguel is also a regular author with CoDe Magazine.

Sessions

Programming the Bing API

Level: 200
Track: None
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM
Day: 2
Room: Credera 1

It seemed that Bing came out of nowhere. Even Microsoft MVPs, who are privileged to product information earlier than most were surprised by the release of the new search engine. Well, Bing really does seem to be holding its own and even standing out above other engines in many ways. But part of the great thing about a search engine is the ability for us to leverage them from beyond just the web browser. I of course refer to the ability to access their services from our own applications. Bing exposes a great API to do just that, and I don't mean just the simple ability to perform text searches. I also refer to image, video, and many specialty searches. In this session, I'll show you how to access the Bing API and perform all its great functionality from within your own applications, and I'll do this using another great Microsoft technology, WCF. WCF has the ability to act upon both SOAP and REST so it's great for not only writing APIs but for consuming outside APIs as well. Come see how. And as a bonus, maybe I'll wrap some of this stuff into some custom controls too.

WPF Programming for Windows 7

Level: 100
Track: None
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM
Day: 1
Room: Credera 1

Windows 7 brought with it some new visual goodies that with Windows Forms, we are not able to tap into. WPF 4.0 however lets us add features to our desktop applications that hook directly into these cool new Windows 7 capabilities. In this session, I'll show how to use WPF to provide jump lists for your application, how to customize the task-bar popup as well as the task-bar icon, how to add features to the task-bar thumbnail, and how to add aero-glass visuals to any part of your application.

WPF Validation: Techniques and Styles

Level: 100
Track: None
Time: 12:45 PM - 02:00 PM
Day: 1
Room: Credera 1

Of all the things that WPF gives us, a validation framework is not one of them. There are a few different ways of capturing validation information and providing rules for validation and there are many ways of displaying broken validation rules. In this session, I'll show you what WPF offers in the area of validation, how to include validation in your View-Models when using MVVM, and a few different styles for elegantly reporting validation errors to the user.