Jean-Luc David's Weblog

Microsoft Web Development Summit - Session 1: Scott Guthrie

jldavid — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 01:18:00 GMT

The product teams at Microsoft didn’t pull any stops at the event. The first presenter of the morning was Scott Guthrie, the General Manager of the Client and Web Platform & Tools Team. He gave an impressive end to end three tiered demo of an ASP.NET application running on IIS 7.0. He has delivered the ”Building a Complete Web Application” talk before - you can download the slides and demo files here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/08/21/IIS7_2C00_-ASP.NET-2.0_2C00_-Atlas-and-VS-2005-End-to-End-Talk.aspx

Scott is a very entertaining speaker and went “off-script” explaining concepts to the audience. He also did a pretty good job tying .NET concepts to similar analogies in open source terms. For example, a lot of thought was put in the performance hit required to access configuration files, such as .htaccess. As a result, the web.config file in IIS 7.0 incurs no performance hit on an ASP.NET website, and you don’t have to reboot the server to make configuration changes. Also, a lot of thought was placed into mitigating attacks in ASP.NET, including detection of attacks based on document encodings.

Scott also presented the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions (formerly codenamed “Atlas”) (he was the first to blog about the new product naming and roadmap. (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/09/11/_2200_Atlas_2200_-1.0-Naming-and-Roadmap.aspx)

Scott delivered yet another great demo and mentioned two interesting facts: first, there has been a recent drop of the Atlas AJAX Control Toolkit (http://www.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=AtlasControlToolkit) released on Codeplex (http://www.codeplex.com). The second fact is that the Atlas AJAX Extensions will be completely integrated ASP.NET vNext. In fact, the “atlas” prefix will be refactored to “asp” in the near future.

Here is a photo from the event:

Microsoft Web Development Summit - Day 1

jldavid — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 01:05:00 GMT

I’m writing right here from the Microsoft Web Developer Summit in Redmond, Washington. In a few small meeting rooms in Building 122, Microsoft has brought in a very impressive group of open source developers from all over the world. The purpose of the summit is to create a frank and open conversation about technology, interoperability, and integration - in a nutshell, to reach out to the different communities on different platforms. The brainpower in the room is amazing - I’ve met really smart developers who have made major contributions to core development platforms such as PHP. A really interesting fact is that many of these developers use Microsoft products on a daily basis - in fact, half of the attendees use the Windows operating system as part of their development environment to write PHP. I also met quite a few Canadians - I’ve interviewed many on a podcast I'll be posting in the next couple of days. Stay tuned!

New Blog Roadmap

jldavid — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 23:26:00 GMT

Welcome to my new MSDN blog. I'm a Developer Advisor at Microsoft Canada working alongside my great peers (such as John Bristowe, Christian Beauclair and Dan Sellers - among others). I'm currently managing four blogs:

ASP.NET (http://weblogs.asp.net/jld/) - No longer maintained - archived
Team System Rocks (http://www.teamsystemrocks.com/blogs/jldavid/) - Postings will continue, especially for new TFS book
MSDN (http://blogs.msdn.com/jldavid) - My primary blog
Canadian Developers blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/cdndevs/) - Another primary blog focused on important events, announcements and so forth

As you can imagine, that's a fair amount to update. The main point of my ASP.NET blog was to highlight community events and my activities as a Microsoft MVP. I am now officially switching over the blog to MSDN (since I'll be undertaking a whole brand new range of community activities at Microsoft). The ASP.NET blog will remain online as is as an archive.

I've also decided to continue posting to Team System Rocks. As of the end of the year, I have a new book coming out called Professional Team Foundation Server. The release date for the book is slated as November 2006. I'd love to share content from the book to the community at large.

I'm currently in Redmond attending a Web Development Summit presented by luminaries such as Scott Guthrie and Anders Heijlsberg. Photos and details coming up! :-)