ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Web Developer Roadshow Tour in Europe
It has been a busy last few months – sorry I haven’t been blogging in awhile.
I was in Europe for a little over 2 weeks earlier this month doing an ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Web Developer 2005 “roadshow” tour that visited
The three talks I gave were:
-- A 3 hour introductory talk that spent about 25 minutes on slides, then the rest of the time doing pure demos building an end-to-end ASP.NET application with Visual Web Developer. I kick-started the demo showing off new Visual Web Developer specific features (project system, html source preservation, intellisense everywhere, tag navigator, collapsible regions, schema validation, xhtml, design-view tables, formatting, build, dynamic compile, cassini webs, copy-web, and many, many more). I then built an end-to-end application from scratch, slowly adding one feature after another: data binding to objects (master/details + filtering), SQL cache invalidation, themes/skins, master-pages, site navigation and navigation controls, membership and login controls, role management, profile personalization, web parts, and finally localization (I would bring someone up from the audience to help me translate the app in the local language, and then dynamically flip the language based on the browser’s user agent string -- always a crowd pleaser).
-- A 1 hour Visual Team System for Web Development talk that introduced the new team-system product line, and then did a 40 minute demo using team-system on top of the web app I built earlier in the intro talk. Specific things I showed included: using the class designer to model and build a class library, using the new testing tools on the newly built class library to build an automated unit test, integrating the class library into the above web-project, using the new Web UI Automation tools to build an automated functional test, analyzing code-coverage of the tests in the web application, and then using the new web load testing tools in VSTS to run a stress load and get performance numbers for our web application.
-- A 1 hour Migration talk that covers migrating from ASP.NET V1.1/VS 2003 to ASP.NET V2.0/VS 2005. This talk went through our upgrade story, and helped provides guidance on breaking changes as well as some of the new implications of the web project model in Visual Web Developer.
By the end of the day I was pretty exhausted – but seeing people’s reactions to the products more than made up for it (people were really, really, really excited). Someone recently asked me what some of the highlights of my job were. Getting the opportunity to create really cool software, and then watching thousands of people’s faces light-up and see them get super-excited about it is definitely one of the big ones… J
I’m back in Redmond now working on getting Beta2 of ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Web Developer out of the door, as well as finishing up our push to hit IIS7 feature complete (I’ll blog more about that soon – or you can see a quick interview I’ve done on Channel9 that talks a little about it: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=14). It will be a very hectic next few weeks, but we'll have some cool stuff coming out soon....