Well Day 2 has finished and yet more areas for me to investigate further are emerging. I seem to have an increasing number of things on my "to investigate" list as a result of the days sessions. I discovered some great technologies that I personally wasn't aware of.. The level of information around new .Net technologies seems to be growing and deepening all the time.
Another interesting and welcome trend reinforced today by Shawn Burkes talk was the sheer volume of CTP (Community Technology Preview) and open-source community activity, that Microsoft is promoting around its technologies and the way it is encouraging interaction in the wider technical community through its Agility Group.
MSDN Wiki
On the subject of community, another thing I learned more about this week is the MSDN Wiki. This is currently in Beta but is aimed at encouraging user interaction around the MSDN knowledge source. All the full content of MSDN is there but the idea is that developers can submit their own information for inclusion and provide samples to extend and widen the information. The idea is to use the same guiding principles as seen in Wikipedia. You can see it for yourself at http://msdnwiki.microsoft.com/en-us/mtpswiki/default.aspx
Session Overviews
There have been some great talks today and the technical and quality of presentation has again been high. The session topic areas I attended today included:
"10 things To Know about Internationalizing an application" talk - this was given by Guy Smith Ferrier . Although I have done some internationalization before on a number of enterprise-scale projects, this session taught me a few new approaches and things I hadn't thought about before. By the way, is it only me that sees the irony in the way that Internationalization is always spelt the US way?
Shawn Burke's talk entitled "ASP.Net AJAX Control Toolkit Unleashed" was a great, highly technical presentation on the ways in which AJAX can be used to produce some great controls, visual effects and web interactions. Shawn gave some real insight into the approaches to developing different types of AJAX controls and the community work by the Agility team that is already out there. Of particular note is the AJAX Control Toolkit. This is available at the http://www.codeplex.com/AtlasControlToolkit site. It has over 30 controls covering a variety of application areas and demonstrates the use of AJAX extenders, controls and behaviours. It looks really useful and interesting however. Therefore its another item for my "Must Investigate soon" list.
- Hidden ASP.Net 2.0 Features and CSS Adaptors
Another really useful talk by was by Fritz Onion on some of the overlooked features in ASP.Net 2.0. There was a lot of good stuff in here. Of particular interest was the discussion around the CSS Adaptor toolkit. This is based on the adaptor frameworks originally developed for Mobile Controls usage. The idea was to provide a mechanism so that controls could adaptively render the correct markup for a given mobile device (e.g. WML for WAP devices). This mechanism has been taken and adapted to allow ASP.Net controls to render standards compliant HTML and CSS to each of the relevant browsers.
In my view this is a major step forward and answers a lot of issues regarding the CSS and HTML compliance of the standard ASP.Net 2.0 controls. The adaptor toolkit essentially allows replacement of some of the HTML/CSS generated by current ASP.Net controls "adapting" their output. This is achieved through the overriding of the render event and effectively handing render control developer within a specialised framework. Each browser is then configured via its respective browser information file in the App_Browsers folder. You can find more details about this and get the code and source at the CSS Adaptors Web Site site. More detail is also on Scott Guthries blog. If you want to rid your ASP.Net site of controls which emit tables, this is the place to come. Definitely another one for my "Must investigate soon" list....
- ASP.Net 2.0 Custom Providers
Another great session given by Jeff Prosie. Providers are one of those areas where I have dabbled with (mainly in relation to roles and membership) but never fully appreciated or exploited all its capabilities. Jeff has some great samples and white papers on MSDN that you should really take a look at.
The day wouldn't be complete without another impressive session from Anders Hejlsberg. There is evidently serious momentum being built around C# 3.0 and LINQ here at TechEd and Anders talk this afternoon was a repeat of the one this morning and yet was still full. His session reinforced some of the sophisticated new features and programmatic constructions that will be coming in C# 3.0. Some these underly LINQ and include method extensions, expressions, anonymous types, local variables and type inference. All this means that the C# language is getting both more powerful and concise (terse) at the same time. Once again all this is available to play with via CTPs
That's it for now - a lot to digest.
I promise to find out about whats in VS 2005 SP1 and blog on this tomorrow......