TechEd 2006: Day Three

Day Three: A short summary.ASP.NET 2.0 Tips and TricksScott Guthrie's session gave a good variety of tips and tricks - as the session title may have suggested! Taking apps offline using the app_offline.htm, tips for managing debug/release mode for production servers, handy HTML formatting settings, cross page postbacks, server side comments for aspx files, registering controls across an entire solution via web.config, validation groups, DefaultButtons, DefaultFocus, new clientside JavaScript features, the RSS Toolkit, and much much more. WEB313 Building and Deploying Web ApplicationsA pretty basic session covering deployment projects, which seem like they're too basic to be much use to anyone other than hobbyists (the speakers words here, not mine!). A few interesting tips, but overall the session was very basic and not a lot of use in an enterprise environment.Building rich Web Applications with AtlasThe Atlas stuff looks good, but this session was pretty basic. Some of the demos dragged on a bit, although they showed the basic capabilities of the product pretty well.WPF OverviewWPF looks very cool. That's the guts of it. The whole "designer" and "developer interaction thing sounds nice in theory, although who knows how it will pan out in reality.The coolest thing of the demo was the alternate tree view, showing an incredibly cool navigation system involving revolving wheels and menu selections. It's all downloadable as a demo from the website, and is well worth a look.DEV313 C# Tips and TricksThis was less of a tips and tricks session, and more of a collection of advanced techniques. There was some good stuff in there, but I really wasn't in the mood and didn't manage to take a lot in.In SummaryFor me, I managed to get enough useful titbits of info out of TechEd to consider it well worthwhile attending. Some of the sessions were better than others, but that's always the case. I'm starting to think that the best approach to TechEd might be to check out sessions relating to topics you have no knowledge of or interest in whatsoever. Attending the ones which seem like they have some relevance to your job can often lead to disappointment when they're a bit too basic to provide much value. Anyhow, some good info, and a lot of things to follow up on.

 Print | Posted on Wednesday, August 23, 2006 9:19 PM |