I recently attended the WebDD '07 Conference at Microsoft UK HQ in Reading. At the time I promised I would give some feedback via the blog, so here it is. I'm normally reluctant to attend technical conferences on a Saturday but I'm glad I went to this one as it was well worth attending.

Speakers

Whilst there were many other speakers, the star of the show in my view,  had to be Scott Guthrie. Essentially he spoke non-stop for most of the day (about 6 hours plus)! His sessions were so heavily oversubscribed that he actually repeated some sessions during the lunch break. His presentations were always energetic, humorous and well targeted for his audience.   Topics covered included details of the forthcoming 'Orcas' Visual Studio update, cool features of .Net Framework 3.0 (such as LINQ, anonymous methods, lambda expressions etc) and features of AJAX, Control Adaptor toolkit, ASP.Net 2.0 and IIS 7.0. There was truly a lot of interesting stuff packed in.   You can find out more about all these technologies and lots more of what his Microsoft Product Group teams are up to via Scotts Blog.

Scott's talk on WPF/e was so heavily oversubscribed, so instead I attended a talk by Charteris's own Barry Dorrans on Windows CardSpace. This lively talk clarified many of the confusions I had around this technology and how it related to other existing identity and security technologies.

Microsoft Expression Web

Finally, as an added bonuses all conferences attendees who completed a short on-line survey got a free full copy of the latest Microsoft Expression Web software to take away. This installed without issue on my Windows XP machine and so far appears pretty stable. I've been playing with some of the CSS design and editing features and these are certainly impressive. I'll post some more as I use it more extensively.