What’s New In Silverlight 3? – Mike Taulty
Mike is a good speaker and knows his Silverlight onions so I thought this one would be worth attending even if I have read about the majority of the changes. Overall it was a good session and it’s good to see live demos of the changes. One of the demo’s failed but Mike was determined to provide an answer why and was forthcoming a couple of couple of hours later (and on his blog).
What’s good in .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 – Alex Mackey
The idea behind this session was to preview the, "new stuff". However, I came away from this session a little disappointed. I was hoping for some insights but what I got was really a summary from publicly available blogs and CTPs. Still it was ok and it’s quite a nice idea for someone to collate these remours into one place but to paraphrase Alex, ‘I’ve not looked deeply at X because it’s likely to change’ so perhaps this session is too early to watch too?
I want it on that one, that one and that one! And it all needs to be synched! – Andrew Westgarth
Andrew presented the deployments options in II7. I was interested to see the Deploy utility, that seems to be an implementation of a Powershell host, and I especially like the idea of easily keeping production and test sites in sync. However, that was really the interesting part of the session and the rest felt like it was just repeating itself. I think this was probably due to the fact that almost all the demos failed and probably took all the momentum out of the session.
An Introduction to jQuery – Andy Gibson
I took a chance on this one since I have been dabbling with jQuery so I should be beyond an introduction now but I thought I might learn something I’d missed. Overall the session was a decent introduction to jQuery, although since I understand it you’d really have to ask someone who was new to jQuery, and it was reassuring to hear some things I’d guessed at rather than knew for certain. For a WebDD I would have liked to have seen an intermediate/advance session rather than a introduction.
ASP.NET MVC best practices – Sebastien Lambla
Sebastien provided a witty and interesting session on what was wrong with the out-of-the-box MVC framework and how his teams worked around them. I really liked this session even if the demo gods caused a blue-screen and other demo failures. I just felt he could have quickly introduced the Windsor framework as I could see a number of people were confused by its sudden use but that’s only a tiny point. Suffice to say that I’ve added his blog to my reader
ASP.NET 4.0 – Mike Ormond
Mike is a another MS session stalwart and presented a good session on ASP.NET 4. Although all the nice things about ASP.NET Ajax WPF style binding was good to see I felt like shouting hallelujah at the control provided over Client IDs, something I’ve been campaigning for on forums. For me ASP.NET is a terrible framework but I concede that v4 looks to finally have started to consider professional developers so maybe I’ll be enticed back…maybe.
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