TechEd 2006: The first day of sessions

Our first day is over so I guess it’s about time to write something about it.

The keynote was very interesting with several great speakers showing emerging technologies like AJAX, LINQ, Office 2007 with some custom made side panels for Excel. The WPF part of the keynote was like WOW. The AJAX part showed drag & drop behavior and the simplicity of the UpdatePanel for a clothing shop where a customer could drag clothes over a model and via the UpdatePanel it got refreshed without flickering or any noticeable delay. Smooth!

The first session was “Developing rich web applications with AJAX” which was more of a small introduction about the capabilities of the product.

The second session, “Developer and Designer AJAX bliss with Visual Studio and Expression”, was kind of a dissapointment for most attendees because the largest part of the session was actually about the new product Expression and only a small part was about AJAX. The session itself can be found here.

The third session, “ASP.NET AJAX, tips & tricks”, was a very interesting session, showing that since recently localization is part of the game. The profileservice was shown and how to create your own Extender control.

The fourth session by Kimberly Tripp called “SQL Server 2005 optimizing procedural code”, was also interesting. Although I’m not really into SQL Server stuff that deep I did learn some nice commands and optimization stuff that I would like to check out on books online afterwards. If you ever have the chance to see Kimberly give a presentationm just go. She’s a very good speaker and really knows her stuff. She’s got a dedicated site available: http://www.sqlskills.com/.

Another opportunity for me was to speak with Fredrik Normen, who’s also a moderator on the ASP.NET forums like me. Nice to see some people that I’ve only know from the community in real life.

Grz, Kris.