Dear diary, today James Avery did something cool...

Just in case I hadn't mentioned it previously ;-)... I'm in Redmond this week getting a look at some new ASP.NET bits.  In a nutshell, the stuff that I've seen has not only blown me away but will likely answer most of the issues being faced when building current, real world apps today.  Over the 2 days that we've been here the MS guys'n'gals have been demonstrating and explaining the bits to us and, I can safely say that they are just as excited by this stuff as we are.

Some key moments for me from yesterday were:

• We were given a wonderful overview of the new C# language features by Anders Hejlberg - including a peek at what Generics might look like (refer: http://research.microsoft.com/projects/clrgen )
• While sharing a room with James Avey, James was banging away on his keyboard like crazy when Scott Guthrie entered the room.  Just at that moment James displayed to us a grid of data and explained that this was no ordinary grid of data.  This was in fact a new Data control being bound to a collection that he had created using generics.  Scott's immediate quote was... "Now that is very cool!".  Way to go James :-)
• I managed to sit next to Doug Seven and Donny Mack (of DotNetJunkies fame) at dinner tonight.  Those guys are a lot of fun - and just a little bit whacky too :-).  Without going into too many details, I can safely say that there's never a shortage on entertainment while they're around!

The ASP.NET team are currently in-between feature milestones and are doing bug triage of this stuff so, occassionally we get some interesting results :-)  Overall the week has been very slick and Scott, Rob and the rest of the team have done a great job in giving us something to play with.  I should note that, things must be going pretty well because I didn't see anyone wearing an "I broke the build" shirt!