What's New in .NET 4.5 Training

• What has changed in the .NET runtime and how does it affect my applications?
• How does C# 5.0 meld the parallel programming concepts introduced .NET 4 with the C# language itself?
• How do I build Windows 8 applications for tablet aspect of Windows 8 and how do I publish my applications to the Windows Marketplace?
• Learn how Entity Framework has shifted towards a code-first programming model to empower developers to build, and test, great data-access layers.
• How does ASP.NET 4.5 dramatically improve the (perceived) performance of your web applications by optimizing JavaScript and CSS content?
• What are the key elements of HTML5 and when can I leverage them in my applications?
• How has WPF improved performance in .NET 4.5?
• Which service-framework should I use? ASP.NET Web API or WCF? We’ll explore both of them in this course.

• What has changed in the .NET runtime and how does it affect my applications?
• How does C# 5.0 meld the parallel programming concepts introduced .NET 4 with the C# language itself?
• How do I build Windows 8 applications for tablet aspect of Windows 8 and how do I publish my applications to the Windows Marketplace?
• Learn how Entity Framework has shifted towards a code-first programming model to empower developers to build, and test, great data-access layers.
• How does ASP.NET 4.5 dramatically improve the (perceived) performance of your web applications by optimizing JavaScript and CSS content?
• What are the key elements of HTML5 and when can I leverage them in my applications?
• How has WPF improved performance in .NET 4.5?
• Which service-framework should I use? ASP.NET Web API or WCF? We’ll explore both of them in this course.

Day 1

The .NET 4.5 Runtime and Visual Studio 2012
The release of .NET 4.5 upgrades the core runtime with significant new changes. At the same time, Visual Studio 2012 is a major release for Microsoft’s IDE. This module explores these important changes. We start with the performance improvements in the runtime including new GC and JIT capabilities as well as new NGEN options to improve startup time of your .NET applications. Next we’ll that the .NET runtime has been updated to integrate with WinRT (Windows Runtime) which allows you to build Windows 8 applications (AKA Metro applications) in .NET. Finally, we’ll cover a whole host of great changes in Visual Studio. This includes features inspired by the Visual Studio Power Tools brought into VS 2012, its new Metro UI, the CSS3 and HTML5 editors, the new JavaScript editor, the improved unit testing capabilities, and more.

The Task API and Modeling Concurrent Workflows with TPL Dataflow
The Task class and related APIs which were introduced in .NET 4 revolutionized the way we build multi-threaded applications in .NET. This next release of .NET raises the bar by incorporating asynchrony into the language itself. But in order to fully appreciate what the compiler is doing for us, we first must look at several features of the Task APIs which we do here. Finally, we introduce the TPL Dataflow library which utilizes tasks, concurrent collections, tuples, and other features introduced in .NET 4 to bring support for parallel dataflow-based programming into the .NET Framework.

C# 5: Asynchrony in the Language
Along with the release of .NET 4.5, Microsoft has made major changes to the most important .NET language: C# 5.0 (don’t let the version inconsistencies throw you - they come as a pair). The previous version of .NET build a solid foundation for building parallel / multi-threaded applications with the PFx Task API. C# 5 (and VB 11) take this to a higher level of abstraction with the introduction of the async and await keywords. At first glance, this appears to be simply syntactic sugar. But as we’ll see in this session, this represents a deep change to the way we build concurrent applications and goes far beyond the PFx framework of .NET 4.0.

Day 2

Windows 8 Applications and WinRT with C# and XAML
In this module you will get inside the thinking of Windows 8. You will see how Metro relates to WinRT, gain an understanding of the driving principles behind Windows 8 and Metro-style applications and learn the core ideas that make a great Windows 8 application. WinRT underpins all Windows 8 application development. With a history that extends back to the days of COM, it is very important that Windows 8 developers understand how to create and consume WinRT types; what their limitations are; how the use of metadata and language projections work; and how applications and types are registered. This module will give you the core skills in WinRT that are needed by all developers, no matter which language they intend to use.

What's New in WPF 4.5
.NET 4.5 is offers some excellent new performance changes for WPF for typical LOB type applications. This module dives into those changes and shows you some of the new features you can take advantage of to increase your application performance, particularly for large data sets.

LINQ and Entity Framework 5
Entity Framework 5.0 is built on top of .NET 4.5 and represents a stable and mature platform for representing relational data in a way that more closely resembles the real world. There is a built-in object-relational mapper, with a Visual Studio designer and support for stored procedures. The latest version incorporates numerous performance improvements with query pre-compilation and caching.  You can stream data with a reader and dynamic SQL, perform batch updates, or use LINQ to generate entities that can be updated with changes persisted to the database.

Day 3

Entity Framework Code-First
“Code-First” describes an approach to developing applications with Entity Framework where the entity model is inferred by the runtime based on class definitions.  No need to create (or maintain) a model using the designer.  By default, EF code-first supports a “convention over configuration” approach that enables you to rely on common mapping conventions instead of having to explicitly configure mappings.  But if you have an existing database and need to specify mappings, you can either place “data annotations” attributes on entity classes or use a fluent API.

ASP.NET MVC 4 and ASP.NET 4.5
This module covers all the new features in MVC 4 and some from ASP.NET 4.5 proper. This includes bundling/minification support for improving performance of script and CSS, the new Assets API for allowing dynamic inclusion of scripts and CSS, display modes for mobile device support, OAuth/OpenID support for user authentication from social networking websites, and the updated Task-based asynchronous controller support for improved server performance.

Building Services with the ASP.NET Web API
This module provides an introduction to Web API which is the new framework for building HTTP-based RESTful services. We will cover the motivation for HTTP oriented services as an alternative to SOAP-based services. We’ll examine the major tenets including the importance of URIs, HTTP methods and status codes, content negotiation and hypermedia. We’ll conclude with the new client-side programming model for HTTP services with the HttpClient API.

Day 4

HTML5 and CSS3
This module introduces HTML5, providing an overview of what will be covered throughout the rest of the course. Browser support and techniques for detecting the different features in HTML5 are explored. HTML5 includes a handful of new, semantic elements that make your markup much easier to structure and reason about. We'll also look at some of the new CSS properties that you can use to enhance the style of your documents.

WCF
The WCF team has been busy. WCF 4.5 comes with a host of new features: further configuration simplifications; WebSockets support; UDP support, contract first development, support from "Modern UI" (Metro) applications and more. This module shows you the new features, why they were introduced and what impact it has on the way you build distributed systems.

Workflow 4.5
.NET 4.0 shipped with a new version of Windows Workflow Foundation. This version was a rewrite taking on board the customer feedback from previous versions. What we have ended up with is a streamlined, flexible runtime for building rich functionality in a visual scripting environment. However, being a rewrite there were inevitably some rough edges and  .NET 4.5 has removed polished this initial release addressing the concerns developers had about missing functionality in the 4.0 release. This module looks at what problems workflow is designed to solve and examines the basic building blocks of a workflow based application - including how you can provide a customized editing environment for workflows that your business users can work with.

Upcoming Dates & Locations