TechEd US in Boston: On Keynotes & Pre-conf
Yesterday TechEd US 2006 kicked off with the opening keynote and earlier on the day the pre-conferences.
I attended the pre-conference "ASP.NET 2.0: Up Close and Personal" hosted by Jeff Prosise. The pre-conf was split in 3 parts: an overview of the ASP.NET 2.0 features, the advanced stuff and finally some ASP.NET 2.0 "Atlas" coverage.
In the first part he discussed the new features and some of the changes since ASP.NET 1.X: the code-behind model, data-access, master pages, membership, controls related to security, configuration files, profiles and site navigation.
During the advanced section of the pre-conf he covered asynchronous pages, custom expressions, XML HTTP and post cache substitution.
The last part of the talk and for most attendees probably the most exciting part was on ASP.NET 2.0 "Atlas". "Atlas" is a free framework for building a new generation of richer, more interactive, highly personalized standards based Web applications. Jeff touched on the Atlas controls, the clientside javascript (XML Atlas Script), behaviors, calling web services from javascript etc. It's clear that when the Atlas team comes up with an integrated designer surface in Visual Studio 2005 for Atlas, a lot of the common problems that web developers are facing today can be solved with this AJAX framework for ASP.NET.
Overall I highly appreciated the pre-conf but I can't ingnore the fact that there was still a lot of basic ASP.NET 2.0 coverage. This technology has been around for 2 years ... Something I'll keep in mind when picking the web development pre-conference for Tech·Ed 2006: Developers. By then we'll (hopefully) have a lot more to cover on Atlas. ASP.NET 2.0 should then really be mainstream!
At 7:00 pm the opening keynote of TechEd US was scheduled. I was a little bit disappointed on the developer-oriented coverage. Beside Keith Smith's (short!) demo of Datadude, WPF and Expression Interactive Designer there was not a lot of development coverage. Given the mainly IT-Pro audience this could be considered logic, but still there a lot of developers here too ...
You can check out the keynotes here if you couldn't make it. And online simulcasts of more than 40 breakout sessions are available at https://www1.msteched.com/content/webcasts.aspx.