Attended the first WebDD event at Reading on Saturday and it was tops :)Spent the whole day in Chicago 1 where Scott Gu was presenting but it was a bit of a mission to get a seat!! They really should of guessed that everyone would have wanted to attend his sessions and used both Chicago 1 & 2 to get everyone in. I think a lot of people were turned away to all 4 of his sessions. All of his sessions were recorded though so I'm sure they will be posted on the WebDD site at some point soon.
His first two sessions were a part 1 & 2 of building a complete website from end to end using ASP.NET 2.0, AJAX, VS2005 & IIS7. Most of the stuff in these sessions was quite simple but I found the info on IIS7 really good as I haven't used or read up on this new version yet. He also showed some good tips and tricks which are all on his site.
His next session was a sneak peak at the next version on Visual Studio code named "Orcas". This was a really interesting session, he was using a very recent build which he said will be public download in a couple of weeks (I think i will be installing this :)). The main cool points were:
- Backward compatibility with v2.0, v3.0 and the new v3.5 of the framework.
- Inclusion of all the Expression Web features (I think he even said this will be in the Express edition!!) I really like the CSS features, I think these will really help me :) We now have a split screen mode with design and code, and its a lot quicker to switch between the two!!
- Full support for AJAX including Javascript intellisense and debug :)
- Full support for LINQ and BLINQ :)
- plus loads more stuff I can't remember now!!!
The next session was by a guy from Telerik on creating AJAX extender controls. Unfortunately the guy was quiet and had quite a strong foreign accent which made him hard to understand!! However he really did know his stuff!! The session was in-depth, with lots of code and quite interesting - I need to go through the AJAX clientside framework because I didn't really understand this part of the talk!!
The final session was back over to Scott (he probably needed the break as he re-ran his last session through lunch for those who couldn't get in the room!! He did mention he done a webcast - so look out for that :)) This session was on WPF/E and he showed some excellent demos and ran through the code step by step. He showed us this really cool vista emulator done in WPF/E over here, its in some foriegn language, he didn't seem to know who the author was but it was quite funny and shows the power of this technology!! I want to try and use this for a video player in my project but he did say it will only play WMV format, which is an awesome codec (HD 720p quality with low bandwith) but might cause me some problems :(
Scott said he will be posting all his slides and code on his site at some point.
We also all got a free copy of Expression Web which was cool, got a few other bits of swag which is always a bonus :)
A really good event, I think Scott being there really made it for me :) But I will defiantly be signing up again for WebDD2!!
