The next DevConnections conference will be held April 2-5, 2006 in Orlando, Florida at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress Resort (where it has been a couple of times in recent years — very nice hotel). I will be hosting three sessions, and for the first time I’ll have two sessions in the Visual Studio Fundamentals Track (normally I’m strictly an ASP.NET guy). Sadly, my favorite talk on Caching Best Practices was not picked up for this show (but you’ll probably hear about caching in my performance talk). Here are the three topics I’ll be presenting (see a complete list for ASP.NET sessions and Visual Studio sessions):

APE301: Improving .NET Application Performance and ScalabilityThis session will focus on techniques for locating bottlenecks in .NET applications, and best practices for designing applications with scalability in mind. Load testing, HTML optimizations, caching, and other high-impact tools and techniques will be discussed and demonstrated. Learn how to efficiently identify the ‘low hanging fruit’ in your application that can offer big performance and scalability gains with minimal coding. These techniques will work equally well for ASP.NET 1.x or ASP.NET 2.0.

VBE201: Visual Studio Team System Overview
Visual Studio Team System provides developers with tools to manage the development process, track defects and tasks, unit test their code, stress test their applications, manage and automate builds, and deploy applications to testers and production. In this session we will quickly dive into VSTS and show how it can be used to accomplish each of these tasks. Expect minimal slides and maximum demos as this session attempts to squeeze several hours of content into just over an hour.

VBE205: The Best Free .NET Developer Power Tools
This session will demonstrate about a dozen of the most powerful free .NET utilities available, and how you can use them to improve your productivity. Most people have heard of some of these, but some will be new to most people. Save yourself a few hours of trying these out yourself. Come find out which tools are worth using and why. This session has been updated for .NET 2.0 but is very applicable to .NET 1.x developers.

If you’ll be attending the show, stop by and say hello. Also, if you have any favorite free .NET developer tools, please leave a comment or send me an email and if I don’t already have it on my list I’ll try to fit it into my last talk.