DevConnections Day 1 – The Late Night Summary

Well today has been a blitz of information, free junk and standing in line with nearly 3000 people (the most successful DevConnections ever, I hear!) I’ll do my best to quckly summarize the day, but I’m feeling pretty beat, so don’t blame me if this turns out to be worthless. The day began with myself and my compadre (Also named Brandon if you are keeping score) paying way too much for coffee, two eggs, bacon and toast at a restaurant in the hotel. After we kindly tipped our brusque waitress, we headed to the registration area and picked up conference materials and the backpack provided to everyone (Nothing worth mentioning). It was nice to get a binder with most of the slides ahead of time. I’ll be reviewing these to see if the sessions look to be about what the speakers are claiming they are about. After registration, Brandon and I parted ways; He to the “Build a VS 2005 Application in a single day” session and I to Paul’s “Hands On…” session. Hands on Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2005 w/ Paul Litwin Summary: This session was geared at presenting a number of important new features in ASP.NET 2.0 and giving the attendees an opportunity to use thse features in three hands-on labs. My Take on the Speaker: Paul did a great job in this session and I really enjoyed finally having a chance to take one of his sessions. He’s a great trainer and knows the material well. My Take on the Session: The setup and concept was great! There wasn’t anything presented here that I hadn’t seen or read about before, but this was my first chance to use these features, which really solidified them for me. It was a day of hands-on ASP.NET 2.0 training and exactly what I had hoped it would be. Highlights:

• New Data Controls really do offer two-way data binding – I’m amazed at how simple it is to create a usable DataGrid (now called the “GridView.”)
• Data controls can now be implemented with no code – Everything needed to make it work can be stored in properties on the controls. UX Note: The sorting feature in code-less mode has no visual cue whatsoever for which column you’re sorting on and which direction you are sorting. In order to do this (which one always should), some code is required. Good of Paul to point this out.
• UX Note:When you change the underlying schema of a control (i.e. Table bound to a GridView), the IDE detects the change and asks you if you which to update the view.

I’ll leave it at that. I’ve got a ton of good notes, I may post an organized form of them at some point… After the day-longs, Brandon and I lugged our materials back to the room and headed out to another overpriced meal. Then we waited patiently to be let into the main session area for the Keynote address. Microsoft Keynote(s) – Charles Petzold and Scott Guthrie The keynote for DevConnections was actually two keynotes. One by Charles Petzold and another by Scott Guthrie. I’ll briefly cover each here: Charles Petzold – Windows 1.0 and the Applications of Tomorrow This was a great tongue-in-check talk (circa 1985) about the new GUI OS Windows 1.0 and how programmers interested in long-term development should jump on the Windows bandwagon. This talk was pretty light-hearted, but I was reminded how far we have come in what we can do with UI (and how it’s becoming more important to consider our users as we can do more to confuse them). Here’s a trip on the wayback machine: Scott Guthrie – ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed Scott’s talk was pretty good. It was very demo-driven and consisted of a lot that I’d heard from him before and earlier today from Paul Litwin. There were a couple of highlights though:

• We watched a brief “Behind the Scenes” video that highlighted the structure of development teams, how they worked on a product and how intesely it is tested before shipping.
• UX Note: The XHTML compliance built into VS 2005 is just great. It targets multiple browsers and validates XHTML and accessibility. I can’t say enough about how happy I am about this. The IDE is even compliant when it generates code.
• UX Note: The IDE doesn’t reformat your markup when you switch to design view.
• UX Note: You can use the toolbox to drag objects right into the source HTML.
• UX Note: You can specify default formatting for HTML elements AND export those settings via XML to other instances (i.e. everyone on your team)

And there is so much more. All in all, VS 2005 is going to be the major rev that microsoft has been promising. I’m ready to use it now! well, not right now… Now to sleep. Tomorrow will bring much excitement of its own. In that vein, I have finalized my schedule for tomorrow. Check it out here. See you tomorrow! DevConnections, ASP.NET, .NET