Another varied and interesting conference day here in Barcelona has now finished and it was a day for doing different and new things. On the schedule today were the following:

• Asynchronous ASP.Net - this was a thought provoking presentation by Jeff Prosise on how Asynchronous ASP.Net techniques can have a massive effect on web site scalability and performance in specific circumstances. Some of these techniques have been around since ASP.Net 1.1 but others such as asynchronous pages are new for ASP.Net 2.0. Other approaches include asynchronous HTTP modules and custom HTTP handlers. Asynchronous programming is certainly more difficult, but the benefits were made very clear. Just be careful  with regard to thread management. As an intellectual exercise,  I certainly intend to look at some of my previous code to see if making it async would give any benefit. I urge you to do the same.

• Hands-On Mobile Lab - - Having spent two days just sat and listening,  I was getting coding withdrawal symptoms,  so took time do a Hands On lab and  build a Windows Mobile App With SQL Mobile ("Compact", Everywhere or whatever it is now known as) 2005. It was the first time I'd truly played with the new data synchronization features so was very useful and well structured.

• Internet Information Services 7.0 - This was a really interesting talk by Thomas Deml - Lead Program Manager at Microsoft. He explained many of the new and interesting things coming for IIS 7.0. This has just been released inside Windows Vista will be in Longhorn Server sometime next year and will be made available for Windows XP. IIS 7.0 has effectively been rewritten and made more granular . It is now much more modular and so only the pieces actually needed for a given server role are installed. This makes it both easier to manage and exposes a smaller attack surface. IIS 7.0 now uses many elements of the ASP.Net pipeline and functionality can now be extended using managed code via HTTP modules. It also includes a brand new dynamic management UI - so bye bye to the MMC interface. IIS 7.0 also allows the viewing of web requests in real-time and provides some fantastic debugging and error handling tools that give much more detail than ever before. No longer will you just get the dreaded ASP.Net Server Error 500 message and that's it. Now you can actually see the specific error and even track the requests that are causing it. It'll make debugging and deploying web apps so much less painful. Well worth adding to my "investigate" list.

• Microsoft Robotics Studio - "and now for something completely different" as someone once said. As a bit of light relief,  I decided to attend this session on the recently announced Microsoft Robotics Studio. This session was so well attended that they had to create a spill-over session and stream a video feed to it! The Robotics Studio introduces a whole new approach to programming which I'd not really come across before and introduced me to the Microsoft Visual Programming Language. This allows the diagrammatic construction and  linkage of programmatic elements of the robot behaviour. It is strikingly similar to the visual tools in Windows Workflow Foundation but apparently really is different. Robotics Studio provides a way of using managed code to provide a unified way of talking to and control a variety of Robotics hardware in an easy manner. Code modules are exposed in a web service like manner and can expose their state through requests made from Internet Explorer. Modules are written in .Net languages such as C# etc. A runtime known as the CCR is provided to co-ordinate and execute the requests. A full simulator tool is also provided so the robot can be tried out virtually - so you don't even need a robot to get started! There is even talk of a Windows CE version - now that would be cool. Truly a different and interesting session. Now if only I could find a way to justify that Lego NXT set for my kids....

• Converting Web  Sites to Web Application Projects - A great whiteboard session from Fritz Onion on the recently announced (a CTP was available in May this year) Web Application Projects add-on feature in ASP.Net 2.0 .  This was released as a result of feedback on the web site and compilation approach adopted by Microsoft for ASP.Net 2.0. This caused many developers big migration issues from Visual Studio 2003. Essentially the Web Application Project provides a project file based approach as per Visual Studio 2003, but with all the benefits of Visual Studio 2005 (partial classes, hidden control wire up) etc. This project file approach now also compiles to a static named assembly in the bin folder as before.  Fritz went through all of the compilation models and approaches and how an existing 2003 project can be converted to a web application (WAP) project. The ASP.Net team have also written lots of conversion support in Visual Studio 2005 for many aspects of the conversion process to WAP. It converts all the code classes to partial classes etc but the key issue is that it is always under the control of the developer. You can even convert .aspx files on a file by file basis. This means it allows an incremental approach to migrating code from 2003 projects to Visual Studio 2005. You can even move code and elements from ASP.Net 2.0 "web sites" to the new web application projects. Having seen it all laid out,  I can't see a reason why many enterprise solutions should consider anything other than web application projects for their ASP.Net sites.  The Web Application Project is already an officially supported approach by Microsoft and will be in Visual Studio 2005 SP 1 and the forthcoming "Orcas" version.  If you want to find out more look at the ASP.Net team blogs or Scott Guthrie's blog. I'll certainly be blogging more on this later.

So that's it for Day Three. Another set of interesting things to look at and absorb. One more day left but due to flight timings sadly I have to leave before the end. More on Day 4  later.