August 4th of this year will be the forth annual Baton Rouge SQL Saturday and Tech Day. LSU has offered the new business building for out event.

This blog continues the series of blogs over the next few weeks to spotlight the tracks for this FREE event. Of course, nothing like this is possible without sponsors. This year we have Bronze sponsors CozyRoc and Turner Industries (my current employer).

The next track is the .Net 1 in the room 1100C. Returning speakers Latish Sehgal and Chris Eargle (MVP) are welcomed back. New local speakers, Steve Schaneville (Amedisys) and Forest Marie (Turner Industries) are my “enemies” because the use Entity Framework to generate SQL in .Net. They are still very respected individuals.Trey Cook is a former The Shaw Group employee that now works for Microsoft.

Oh, by the way, I heard today from the famous Patrick LeBlanc that he will be at SQLSaturday this year. It is recorded on SQLLunch.com today during a presentation I did for CDC control task in SSIS 2012.

8:20AM - The .Net Ninja's Toolbelt

As developers, we all have our favorite utilities, some used occasionally and then there are others that we refuse to work without. We might not use all of them everyday, but a good developer should know his options when the need arises. In this session, we'll go through the tools, utilities and hacks that can make you much more productive as a .Net developer.

Session Level: Beginner

Latish Sehgal

Latish is a .NET consultant with Improving Enterprises and very passionate about software development and solving customer problems. He also leads the Dallas C# SIG. He can be reached via his blog at http://www.dotnetsurfers.com/ or twitter (http://twitter.com/latish).

Contact URL: http://www.dotnetsurfers.com

9:35 Windows Azure and Smooth Streaming

Learn how to leverage Windows Azure and the Content Delivery Network to host HD quality video, and Visual Studio to build and deploy a Smooth Streaming Media player to play the video.

Session Level: Intermediate

Trey Cook

I am currently a Technology Strategist for Microsoft for the Enterprise Partner Group customers in South Louisiana. Prior to joining Microsoft, I spent eight years with The Shaw Group as an IT Manager / Senior Systems Engineer for messaging and collaboration as well as an IT Security Manager. Prior to joining The Shaw Group Inc., I spent nearly five years as a PC/Network Technician, Help Desk Manager, Systems Administrator and DBA for Turner Industries, Ltd.

10:50AM - The Legend of Lambda

Lambda expressions are a powerful feature of C#, one that can be wielded for good or evil. Attend this session for an adventure through the evolution of the C# language, from the depths of the delegate keyword to the expressiveness of the lambda expression. I will show you how anyone can easily learn to wield and empower code with lambda expressions. It's dangerous to go alone! Take this: =>

Session Level: Intermediate

Chris Eargle

Chris Eargle is a Telerik Developer Evangelist, INETA Director, and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional – C# from Columbia, SC, USA. He has over a decade of experience designing and developing enterprise applications, and he runs the local .NET User Group: the Columbia Enterprise Developers Guild. He is a frequent guest of conferences and community events promoting best practices and new technologies. His blog, kodefuguru.com, features content to guide you in becoming a .NET Ninja!

Contact URL: http://www.kodefuguru.com

1:10PM - Tools, Tips and Nuget for ASP.NET Developers

A high level discussion of the tools used in a large enterprise by a professional .NET team. On a budget? No worries, most of these tools are free courtesy of the open source .NET developer community that you need to know about. Discussion to include awesome debugging skills, catching performance issues before they go live (we learned the hard way), how to have a professional error logging system set up in minutes, working with other developers and productivity tools. We'll also spend some on some critical design tips to keep your applications running faster and avoiding the "clean slate syndrome."

Session Level: Beginner

Forest Marie

Forest Marie is a lead software developer working for Turner Industries in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Microsoft Certified Professional. He's been developing a variety of software since graduating from Southeastern in 2003. As an advocate of the S.O.L.I.D. principles, Forest is passionate about writing applications that was easy to work on, easy to maintain and easy to extend.

2:25PM - Unit Testing - Solving some Tough Issues

Unit Tests are common place in our tools for creating quality code. However, we still run into several road blocks that often prevent us from writing a thorough suite of tests. This session will suggest ways of solving 2 specific problems that I have personally experienced when trying to write suites of unit tests. Specifically, I'll attempt to address: * how to write test for older code libraries that do not currently have unit tests so that the code can be changed with confidence (a look at the new Fakes framework in VS 2012). * how to write tests for logic/data access code that uses Entity Framework without hiding the flexiblilty of Entity Framework (note, I actually don't prefer the repository pattern).

Session Level: Advanced

Steve Schaneville

Maintenance Engineer at the Paper Mill a didn't make my (or any other) list of most satisifying jobs, so I left that life and moved to Germany, where I discovered programming. After 2 1/2 years writing code to control robots (well kinda), I moved back to Baton Rouge and, surrounded by some incredibly smart people, learned something or other about writing enterprise software. I now serve as the Senior Applications Architect at Amedisys, Inc., and learn new things daily from my genius coworkers