::sniff:: The last day of my first ever TechEd. It’s been a hell of a week and well worth it. I plan to post a nice little wrap up of general TechEd stuff hopefully this weekend. If PDC is more hard core than TechEd, I’m dying to go. For now, I’ll likely just have to wait until next year.
The day started off by hitting CLI335 - InfoPath: Developing Forms Using Managed Code in an effort to use TechEd and some web casts as my InfoPath crash course. In this session, the presenter (forget his name, but he was from 3Sharp, showed how you can use managed code to develop some powerful InfoPath forms. I walked away with a good understanding of what’s involved.
The next session was a bit of a mistake in my selection. I sat in on WEB327 - ASP.NET 2.0: Best Practices for Building Web Application UI with Master Pages, Themes, and Site Navigation which wasn’t a bad presentation, I had just seen most of it in Scott Guthrie’s ASP.NET 2.0 Overview sessions.
After grabbing a bite with Todd Bleeker, we realized we were heading to the same session next: WEB428 - ASP.NET 2.0: Advanced Server Controls and Web Parts with ASP.NET 2.0. One word: WOW. I was flat out blown away by his presentation… thank goodness I chose to his this one. Todd seemed just about as impressed as I was. It wasn’t the web part stuff that got me, it was more of the advanced server controls bits. Microsoft has really stepped up to the plate on this one… get this:
You can now embed your resources (like images) in your control assembly (yeah, nothing new here), flag your class with a new attribute which exposes your resource, and then your control can get a unique URL pointing to your reference. The Framework will then extract the resource out of the control! Now you can ship ~ALL~ your resources in a single DLL! That rocks… but wait… there’s more!!!
The presenter (I’m sorry man, we walked in 2 minutes late and I missed your name… but you were excellent!) also showed off the new async and smart postback technology in .NET 2.0. I’d call this Microsoft’s integreation of AJAX into the .NET Framework 2.0. Very slick.
Finally he showed off web parts. Todd and I agreed that it looked like everything was essentially taken straight from the SharePoint team… sometimes the same amount of work is required, sometimes it isn’t and things require less lines. But it’s very slick!!
The last session I hit was a repeat from earlier in the week that I missed: CLI220 - Windows Forms in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005: Overview. Good presentation, but I didn’t learn much that I already knew. Nothing against the guy who presented… he did a fine job. Just not new info for me.
Last bit was to hit the bookstore, grab a long sleeve TechEd tee, and a great book on regular expressions (more like a 10 minute quick start pocket book… worth it for me… I recently drank the RegEx koolaide so I’m not the seasoned expert.
David Strommer and I then met up and hit the road to make our way back home. On the road by 5p, took about an hour to get through Orlando, and we made it home by 7:30p. Just in time to unload, eat, share week stories with my wife, and crash by 10p (yeah, if you were at TechEd this week, and like me, your brain was full). Now I just can’t wait to start researching everything!