Neil Bostrom: Microsoft TechEd (Tuesday)

ASP.NET AJAX
Previously known as "Atlas", this is Microsoft's open source implementation of AJAX. When I say open source, the client scripting is open source and is compatible with all major current browsers (IE, Firefox, Netscape and Safari - even on the Mac). This client scripting is being developed by the community in an open source fashion.

Server side scripting for this technology is Microsoft's usual closed source but is only compatible with ASP.NET so no real reason to make it open source. A lot of the server side work is drag-and-drop; you can change most of your existing code to start using the power of AJAX (when appropriate).

Neat features with this AJAX framework are that it will plug straight into existing web services. and has bridging code to allowing AJAX script to seamlessly call current web services.

SQL Server 2005: Advanced Indexing Strategies
All of this session made me see that I need to learn a lot more about sql server! and soon!

Summary of this session was try to always have a clustered index of your standard tables. Try to make the clustered index narrow (limited fields), unique (identity field, datetime / identity or GUID) and small (Identity). Sometimes the best non clustered indexes are the ones that cover a lot of fields. This gives the sql optimizer a bunch more options.

Kimberly Tripp knows her stuff and is incredibly passionate about SQL server and all it entails. She has made a bunch of online webcasts discussing almost every aspect of sql server and getting the most out of it. As soon as I get back to the office I will be downloading them all!

Language Integrated Query (LINQ) Framework
I personally believe this is the best thing to come out of TechEd: It's Gentle.NET on steroids backed by Microsoft. It's a well thought through framework for querying almost anything inside .NET. Objects in memory, you want to filter them? Job done. Sort, group, aggregate? Job done. You want to do all that with data from sql server? Job done. You want to all that with xml document / web services? Job done.

I believe this will fundamentally change how I write my code and I'm picking up a copy as soon as I can!

Visual C# IDE Tips and Tricks
Class Diagrams - You can drag framework classes into the class diagrams to explore them in more detail
Refactoring - All the refactoring in C# is code snippet based, meaning you can change the refactoring to suit your needs
Debugging - You can control more closely what is debugged and how it's displayed using the Debugger attributes available in the framework