Neil Bostrom: Microsoft TechEd (Tuesday)

Building a Complete Web Application Using ASP.NET "Orcas" and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (Part 2 of 2)
Omar continued the session on ASP.NET today covering new data controls, javascript support and intellisense. The new data controls shipped with Framework 3.5 are the ListView and Pager. These both have better support for data binding and are fully supported by LINQ. One of the biggest things to "wow" me in this session was the javascript intellisense support in Visual Studio 2008. It now has complete javascript intellisense, covering the HTML DOM and your own script libraries. The intellisense also support commenting so if you use the ///

on a function, intellisense will show the information on use. Similar with ///. Also saw a nifty way to call a webservice within javascript without getting too complex about it. The ScriptManager control has a webservice sub tag that you can point at a ASMX page and it will add a proxy on the fly for that webservice.

LINQ to SQL: Accessing Relational Data with Language Integrated Query
This was mostly a refresher course to get a handle on the basics of LINQ again. Luca Bolognese started out with some basics on how LINQ works under the covers. His samples were clear and easy to understand. On a side note, I always forget about the ObjectDumper, what a top class for knocking out quick apps! He then went into more detail about the execution tree and IQueryable<>. He did mention something that stood out during his session. The LINQ team had done a bunch of work on making sure the SQL it produces is not only accurate and quick, it's also easy to read. So they have a simplify method at the end of the stack to see if any of the page long worth of SQL can be simplied. Very clever and so worthwhile!

Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (Part 1 of 2): Applying Work Item Tracking and Version Control to Application Lifecycle Management
Kevin Kelly from the Team Foundation group covered a really good talk on the new features coming out in Team Foundation Server 2008. Spoke more in-depth about the uses of the TFS internally within Microsoft and the trouble they faced dealing with 7000 users, 1000+ project over 25 TFS's. Showed lots of nice fixes in TFS 2008. The one new feature that utterly sold me was the "annotate" feature. This allows you to right click any line of code in your solution and choose "annotate". This bring up a screen showing who has modified every line of code last in the file. This is fantastic for finding out who wrote that crazy line of code!

Developing Data Driven Application Using the New Dynamic Data Controls in ASP.NET
Dynamic Data Controls is a completely new topic for me. I was happily surpised to find it was Microsoft doing what we have been building interally for the last 6 months. Its still very much in the early stages but I believe its got good potential for being a good framework for knocking out our lookup management pages in under a second. It's a fully templated auto generated pages and controls for doing basic list, view, add, edit and delete. Currently it has a horrible web.config handler system for overwriting the default mappings. This however should all change when it gets more interaction with the new MVC framework coming out around the same time (mid next year). Hoping to get some more sessions on MVC later in the week. Very exciting topic!

Entity Framework Introduction
Carl Perry covered a good introduction on the ADO.NET Entity Framework. Discussing the basic direction behind the product and showing a good demo on how to get started with the current release of the entity framework. The entity framework has some awesome features including many to many mappings, mutliple tables to a single class (and visa versa). These are all key features I felt LINQ to SQL was missing.