Back from TechEd

Now, back in Redmond... it was great to see and interact with many folks in the cabana area and in the various chalk talks. Its fun to see excitement around Whidbey and various features we've worked on during the past few years, as well as hear real world experiences using the v1.x product from TechEd attendees. I heard some good suggestions, ideas (in terms of product features, and documentation as well) and had some good discussions as well. If you have input you'd like to provide, don't hesitate using msdn feedback, and/or my comment form below. It would be great to factor that in as v-next planning gets into full swing.

I ended up joining various cabana talks: page lifecycle, data controls, WebParts, and even a UX-releated discussion. There were some really good questions indicating quite of bit of insight on the part of attendees. I attended Fritz Onion's excellent BOF session on async pages. I liked the format of the session consisting of free-form white-boarding, and open Q&A. In fact, I liked it so much, that I adopted it for the page lifecycle discussion the next day. It was really fun to draw up the lifecycle, talk through its various incarnations, and how it impacts what page and control developers can/need to do for almost an hour. I just wish it were recorded. I wonder if I could use this as the core format, add a few demos, and turn it into a good way to get across lifecycle and other advanced server control concepts.

If I were to put a finger on the most popular topic of the week, it had to be Ajax. Not at all surprising! It was interesting enough that I had a press guy come to the cabana and try to probe and stir up a debate. It was great responding to the more technical questions, showing how callbacks in Whidbey provide the basic building blocks and infrastructure to enable server controls to offer rich user experiences. I am hoping to post more on the subject in the future, in terms of how to fully utilize the model, some potential upcoming changes in the callbacks infrastructure for RTM, and possibly some additional work we'll be doing in this area post-Whidbey.

Speaking about future posts (as discussed with an attendee), please do use my contact form to suggest topics you'd like to see covered. I prefer topics which are a bit generally applicable rather than specific problems, or topics that allow me to discuss interesting aspects of ASP.NET architecture, or those that allow me to share opinions about Web development (with the goal of starting a fun discussion/debate).