ASP.NET Road Show
I attended the ASP.NET Road Show this past Thursday so I thought I would give my 2 cents.
First of all, Rob Howard is awesome. He is a very good presenter and very knowledgeable. However, I was a little bored at the presentation. The first part which lasted a little over an hour was specifically on the basics of ASP.NET. After the first part the content got a little better but still wasn't what I had expected. Rob covered a great deal about security holes and how to use .NET to help plug these holes. Some of the content didn't even have anything to do with .NET specifically. For example, Rob showed a sample app on how to build a progress screen using JavaScript. Not sure where that came from but it was cool.
After the second bit, the good stuff came...Whidbey! This was the most exciting portion of the whole event and probably the only reason why I went in the first place. There were lots of cool features built into the new version but one of the cool things that I enjoyed seeing was the page inheritance that is built into ASP.NET 2.0. I have read a lot about it but actually seeing it work was much better. That is definitely going to save me time in the future.
All in all, the event was good. Everyone got a free book that Rob co-authored and a chance to win a Pocket PC.
The advertisement for the event stated it as “This is not going to be high-level marketing fluff!” I should have read a little further though because below that it says “We've designed a 3.5 hour workshop that delivers the technical knowledge you need to start developing secure, next generation Web applications with ASP.NET and Visual Studio .NET”. So I guess it was targeted at people who maybe aren't as familiar with .NET.
And that's my 2 cents!