DevConnections Day 2

[This blog post is a stub. I’ll be expanding it soon with details from sessions]

Tuesday was the first and quite a busy day here at devConnections 2005 . After Mat Nunn’s introduction to SQL server 2005, I attended Jonathan Hawkin, lead program manager Microsoft Corp’s presentation on “Developing ASP.NET server control with design time support” which was highly informative.

Matt Nunn's SQL Server Keynote session.

Michael Bundschuh’s “Best practices and techniques for mitigating ASP.NET 1.x applications to ASP.NET 2.0” was full of practical help regarding migration. He walked us through a real conversion, identified the potential issues and resolved it. He kindly gave me permission to publish the slides on my blog till it becomes available on devConnections website but stupid exchange blocked the PPT files; I’m waiting for him to resend me on a different address.

 

The Microsoft Panel answering questions.

Lunch was pretty tasty and well organized; it’s difficult to manage 3000 people but. Kudos to organizers, they are trying to keep the crowds well distributed.

“Tips and tricks for ASP.NET 2.0 and visual studio 2005” by Bradley Millington were also among sessions I believe have learned from.  “Creating dynamic websites with ASP.NET 2.0 web parts” by Stefan Schackow was interesting but I found its level to be a bit basic.

 

Since I’ve already attended Atlas project presentation recently at San Diego .NET developers group meeting, I opted to go for “Extending ASP.NET membership and role manager with custom providers” in which Stefan Schackow demonstrated custom data store integration with membership roles along with code examples.

 

Microsoft unplugged night was the best part of the day. It was an open mike questions night in which Microsoft’s panel was answering audience’s questions. The questions asked by fellow developers were highly wide and diverse. To give you an idea, following are some of the topics.

 

VS.NET 2005 features

XSLT debugging

Team Studio

SQL Server 2005 Migration from SQL server 7.0

Reporting Services Excel export

Running .NET framework on Linux (Mono Project)

What kind of stuff is penciled out for SQL Server 2010

Atlas

Source safe

Increasing spider ability

 

Did I mention Jeremy was doing Karaoke at 3:00 in the morning!

Following are some Misc pictures I haven't organized yet.

More Microsoft Panel

 

The massive lunch and expo hall which accomodates over 3000 people.