First Glances and Second Chances (Tech·Ed 2004)

Direct from Tech·Ed 2004 in San Diego, California, here's Eray Chou:

The first few days at Tech•Ed 2004 were a great experience—sunny San Diego weather, a hotel room that overlooks the marina. The best part, however, has been meeting customers! I spent my first two days manning the Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 demo booth and chatting with a lot of customers. I found rather quickly that FrontPage users represent a very wide range of interests and FrontPage experience.

Some folks came to share stories about their FrontPage 2003 projects. One person to whom I talked had been working with the DataViewWebPart class a lot but couldn’t figure out how to get the Drop Down Menu style to work. It was great to be able to show him code examples we recently posted on our blog, https://weblogs.asp.net/frontpoint. Another attendee did a lot of work with dynamic Web templates. He said that he created different templates with different editable regions in each, to better match the content from his contributors. A few others had been doing a lot of SharePoint customization, and we traded stories about working through the ows.css files and theme.css files to drastically change the look and feel of their sites.

A good amount of people I talked found their way to the booth after hearing about some “no-coding-needed customizable data-view thing.” Erik Rucker ran a well-attended breakout session (more than 200 attendees) on the first day, and I was happy to hear that these people had been spreading the word to their friends. In some cases, I talked to people who were at the session and had been playing around with DataViewWebPart all night. I was able to help one person format fields as hyperlinks based on a URL stored in another field. Another was interested in creating conditional clauses from different hierarchical levels, so I showed him the XSL we generate and the relationship between the xsl:variable rows, each DVT template, and the context node. 

The last major group of people to which I talked had used FrontPage a few releases ago and were curious about whether we had stopped mangling HTML code. I was very happy to report that we had done that and more. Everyone really liked split view in which they could easily see how clean FrontPage-generated HTML was for each of their actions in Design mode. People also like the Tag tree to make quick selections and edits, as well as the IntelliSense work we did. Again and again, I heard “Wow, FrontPage does all this now? I should really take another look.”

All in all, it’s been a great few days. I’m looking forward to my own breakout session Wednesday, where I’ll be diving into the XSL code that DataViewWebPart generates. I’m also looking to talk to some folks from the Information Bridge Framework team, which lets people pull enterprise data into their Office applications. More to come then…