Lab Fest is all about hands on experience using Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 to build an application with both Windows and ASP.NET 2.0 clients. You will be using SQL Server 2005 for the data store. You will also get the experience of creating a web service to deliver up data from SQL 2005.

This event is sponsored by CPCC, Wachovia, Microsoft, Logical Advantage, O'Reilly, addison-Wesley and Dunkin' Donuts.

Lab Fest - Saturday, April 29
Saturday, April 29 is the big day. Brian Gough, Eric Notheisen, David Catherman and company are working hard with CPCC, the college chapter of the ACM. Farhad Jividi is the Program Chair for Programming and the sponsor for the CPCC Chapter of ACM. Rod Townley is the Dean of IE and the Engineering and Futures Institute. Hal Lohn is working with us as part of the Microsoft IT Academy program at CPCC. And let's not forget the efforts of Doug Turnure at Microsoft. All these folks are working together to provide us an excellent event.

In addition to the labs, we will be collecting canned food donations for the Salvation Army. Please bring whatever canned food and non-perishable food items you can. We will collect them and deliver them to the Salvation Army. Thank you in advance for helping to support this noble cause and showing your Community spirit!

Our goal is to get attendees acquainted with Visual Studio 2005 and introduced to SQL Server 2005 to help our members get a sense of the power Visual Studio 2005 brings to the table. This lab will be presented as a 100-200 level lab. Each student will create a Windows UI, Web UI, and a web service the UI's will consume as a data layer. This is not a 'best practices' event and the instructors, fellow Guild members, are not .Net experts. So we may not be able to answer all your questions, but Doug Turnure of Microsoft "knows a guy" that should help us get them answered for us. We hope everyone will find the labs informative and of value.

We are already in a dialogue with Will Sweeny, Microsoft SQL Server technology specialist, to host another Lab Fest late 2nd quarter. We hope to offer Lab Fests on a regular basis and at many levels, 100-300, and address different areas of development and projects such as SQL Server, reporting, N-tier development, web parts, etc.