Evangelism Rhythms, "know the score"

Yesterday Dave Glover - from the Microsoft Developer Platform Group - gave a special lunchtime presentation in Adelaide titled: "What is new in VS 2005 and ASP.NET". This presentation will serve as a forerunner to the Whidbey "ASCEND" day in January.

Dave is a slick presenter who really knows - and loves - his stuff.  It seems that we might have Dave available to do more of these lunchtime sessions which is great.

This session was a grab-bag of details which did a nice job of filling in some of the details from Dave's last, high-level, talk here in early October. 

This talk covered off on 3 topics: ClickOnce, Team Services and Whidbey ASP.NET.

The ClickOnce demo was a quick 5 minute demo showing how simple it is to configure and publish a project using ClickOnce.

In VSTS we saw some of the awesome new modelling tools which we'll soon have at our disposal.  Dave spent a good 30 minutes on this and was able to show us how to model the Application and Application Hosting layers using the designers.  This included 3 demo's:

• Creating a Distributed System project
• Creating a Data Centre project
• Define the Trial Deployment of a system and validate constraints.

Lastly, we took a look at the new features in ASP.NET from the perspective of: new controls, changes at the Page Framework layer and Services and API changes.  Dave wound this part of the session up with a partially successful demo.  I say "partially" because that was about the time that his Virtual Server decided that it had no longer wanted to host beta software :).

The whole thing took a shade under 90 minutes and held the attention of the 30 strong crowd the whole way through.  In fact, it was great to be able to witness - audibly - several "aha" moments from within the crowd as Dave showed this stuff off.  A feature point was that many of the crowd were different to the 40+ people that we get regularly attending our monthly .NET User Group meeting at nights.

By the way Dave, I loved the new look and feel you have for your slide deck; a lively mixture of Yellow and Orange colours with the words "Evangelism Rhythms 'know the score'" written into a footer bar.