ASP.NET 2.0 on tour

Today the ASP.NET 2.0 tour arrived in Brussels, but because of heavy snowfall the speakers (David Platt and Dave Webster) were stuck in Copenhagen where they also did the ASP.NET tour. Their flight was delayed and they finally got here at noon. The morning-sessions were replaced by Prashant Sridharan (Senior Product Manager for Visual Studio) who specially came over at night from the Netherlands were he will give the keynote session for DevDays 2005. He gave here two interesting sessions about Visual Studio 2005. A lot of attention was paid to the key differences between the various products (product line overview).

• Express Products
  Hobbyists, Students, Enthusiasts, Novices
• Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition
  Web Professionals, VB6 Developers, Part-Timers
• Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition
  Solo Professionals, Consultants
• Visual Studio 2005 Team System
  Project Managers, Testers, Architects, Enterprise Developers

Visual Studio 2005 Team System will be the Rolls-Royce enterprise development tool because it will provide tools to support the entire software development team.

• Team Architect
• Team Developer
• Team Test
• Team Foundation

Like Team System, Visual Studio 2005 Professional will also contain Team Architect, Team Developer and Team Test but Team System will also include Team Foundation which will deliver a series of management tools : Team Build, Version Control, Work Item Tracking, Team Reporting, Project Portal, Integration Services and Project Management.

Other sessions I attended in the afternoon :

• Moving from ASP.NET 1.1 to ASP.NET 2.0 [Dave Webster]
  Info about new compilation model and demos about side-by-side execution of 1.1 and 2.0 applications.
• Introduction to ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 [David Platt & Dave Webster]
  ASP.NET 2.0 will be a major release that includes significant new features that will define a new level of functionality. A lot of work has done to increase the productivity of developers. New cool features were shown like the GridView-control, databinding, login-controls, master pages, themes, configuration management, site navigation, database cache invalidation, ... All standard ASP.NET 2.0 controls are now built with a rich UI adapter extensibility architecture that enables rich customization of output for different browsers and devices. I also enjoyed the "fast" talk of David Platt : he certainly knows how to entertain an audience with some funny remarks/stories.
• Personalization & Membership in ASP.NET 2.0 [Gunther Beersaerts & Bart De Smet]
  The last presentation of the day was about customizing Membership, Profiles, User Role Management, Web Parts, ... in short : building highly personalized dynamic web applications.

The day started with a re-arranged program/schedule, but I must say that the content and speakers were excellent! Nice job! For me, ASP.NET 2.0 was better delivered than on the Dev & IT Pro Days. The MSDN Events are not to be missed and that's also the reason why so many people (more than 1000) showed up today and they will come back if this quality is sustained.