ASP.NET

9:00am – 5:00pm
A1 - A Day of ASP.NET 2.0
Fritz Onion

This day-long tutorial will provide an introduction to the new features of ASP.NET 2.0. Ideally, the attendees of this tutorial will have some experience building Web applications with ASP.NET 1.1. With more than 40 new server-side controls and many new pieces of web infrastructure, ASP.NET 2.0 brings more new features than any web development technology in recent memory. Students attending this class will come away with a solid understanding of the new features in 2.0 and will be prepared to make the right design and implementation choices when the switch to 2.0 is made.

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Tuesday, Oct 26

9:00am – 10:30am
Keynote

10:45am – 12:15pm
A2 - Custom handlers and modules - practical applications
Jon Flanders

The ASP.NET HTTP Pipeline is built with extensibility in mind. This allows developers to replace existing pieces of the pipeline, or extend the pipeline with their own code. This feature of ASP.NET is interesting but often times the utility of it is not crystal clear. In this session we'll look at the extensibility points of the ASP.NET Pipeline and some specific practical usages of those points.

1:45pm – 3:15pm
A3 - Test-driven development and ASP.NET
John Lam

Test driven development is one of the key pieces of the Extreme Programming development process. This session describes how to integrate TDD into your ASP.NET applications, and discusses TDD best practices for reducing the bug count of your ASP.NET application.

3:30pm – 5:00pm
A4 - New web controls in ASP.NET 2.0
Jon Flanders

There are over 45 new controls in ASP.NET 2.0. The major theme of ASP.NET 2.0 is code reduction so these controls give you more power with less coding. In this session we will look at a few of these new controls including the new GridView control, the DetailsView control, and the DynamicImage control. We'll also look at the control designer enhancements built into Visual Studio .NET 2005 like smart tasks.

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Wednesday, Oct 27

9:00am – 10:30am
A5 - Custom Configuration in ASP.NET 1.1
George Shepherd

If you've spent any time at all with ASP.NET, you've undoubtedly run across a file named "Web.Config". Web.Config is the means by which you change the default ASP.NET settings set forth within Machine.Config. While there are a number of pre-defined sections within Web.Config, you can use Web.Config to create custom settings specific to your own application. We'll look at the various means of accomplishing this, beginning with using the most rudimentary node, and ending with writing a custom configuration component in which you may even define your own vocabulary for managing configuration settings.

There are many reasons to host your ASP.NET application on IIS 6.0. This session describes many of these features, including: the new worker process isolation mode, health monitoring and process recycling, the kernel-mode request processing model, the kernel-mode cache, and the new HTTP compression engine.

1:45pm – 3:15pm
A7 - ViewState 2.0
(How ViewState changes in the next release of ASP.NET and the impact it will have on your applications)
Fritz Onion

This session explores the details of ViewState in ASP.NET 2.0 and how the new implementation addresses many of the issues developers have with ViewState today. Among the most notable changes is the separation of state into 'Control State' and 'View State' distinguishing between the state retention that is necessary for a control to function properly and the state retention that is a convenience to avoid re-population.

3:30pm – 5:00pm
A14 - Compilation in ASP.NET 2.0
Fritz Onion

The number of ways you can compile your code increases many times over with the release of ASP.NET 2.0. In addition to the pre-compiled bin-directory and the delay-compiled src attribute deployment options in ASP.NET 1.x, you can now deploy raw source files in a /code directory as well as resources in a /resources directory to have them auto-compiled at request time. The /code directory also supports auto proxy generation for things like .wsdl or .xsd. There is a new utility, aspnet_compiler.exe which will pre-compile an entire virtual directory to create a zero-source deployment (including .aspx file content). Finally, the precompile.axd endpoint will automatically compile your entire site with one request. This talk will look in detail at these and other new compilation features in ASP.NET 2.0 with an eye toward how best to incorporate them into your deployment decisions going forward.

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Thursday, Oct 28

9:00am – 10:30am
A9 - Abstracting the data abstraction layer
(A detailed look at the new provider model in ASP.NET 2.0)
Fritz Onion

One of the most dramatic claims about the upcoming release of ASP.NET 2.0 is that it reduces the amount of code in an average ASP.NET application by 70%! This reduction is due primarily to the new provider model in ASP.NET 2.0 that supplies common implementations of many data-related activities in Web applications. This article looks in detail at the new provider model and its tight integration with the many new data-bound controls. We will also look at how to build your own providers to plug into the framework.

Almost all Web sites today contain pages with a similar graphical layout. Sometimes this is as simple as a header and footer; sometimes it is more complex and contain menus, navigation bar and widgets of various types to wrap content. In ASP.NET 1.x the recommended approach for ASP.NET developers is to wrap these common UI elements in user controls and reference them in each page. The model works well when your site contains only a few pages, but it becomes unmanageable when your site grows up and contains lots of content. In ASP.NET 2.0 master pages help to build pages with the same layout but different content. In this session, we’ll explore effective ways to build master pages in ASP.NET 1.x applications.

1:45pm – 3:15pm
A11 - Caching improvements in ASP.NET 2.0
Rob Howard

The ASP.NET Cache in version 2.0 has received many new features and additions. In this session we'll start by discussing some of these new Cache features and in turn apply them in practical scenarios. We'll discuss strategies for database Cache invalidation examining both SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server "Yukon". We'll also specifically discuss how you can extend the SQL Server 2000 database cache invalidation system to support row level or other database invalidation techniques. The changes to the CacheDependency object will also be examined in depth, and we'll look at how it's possible to create any sort of Cache invalidation scenario. At the end of this session you'll have the knowledge necessary to effectively apply caching to your applications to get better performance and scalability.

3:30pm – 5:00pm
A12 - The Data Source Object Model in ASP.NET 2.0
Dino Esposito

In ASP.NET 2.0, the data source model has been designed to simplify the data binding mechanism. The architecture of data-bound controls has been improved to support a new family of data components-the data source components-which also support a declarative and codeless model of binding. The data source control represents a source of data that returns and accepts data over a well-known stream-SQL, XML, DataSet, and possibly custom formats such as the Microsoft Exchange inbox or Microsoft Excel worksheets. In this session, you’ll see how to declare data sources in Web pages and how to connect to new (GridView) and existing controls (DataGrid).

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Friday, Oct 29

9:00am – 10:30am
A13 - Building ASP.NET 2.0 - a view from the inside
Rob Howard

1:45pm – 3:15pm
A15 - Script It with ASP.NET 2.0
Dino Esposito

ASP.NET 2.0 comes with a good deal of new features in the area of client-side scripting. For developers this means that building advanced functions and creating more responsive pages is easier than ever. In this talk, Dino demonstrates loudly requested features such as cross-page postbacks, script callbacks, control focus, and popup controls. You'll learn how to employ these features in your next applications, how they work and how to improve them if needed.

3:30pm – 5:00pm
A8 - Skinning your sites (ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0)
Dino Esposito

If you don’t know it already, I’ll make it clear here. ASP.NET 2.0 will add theme support to all server controls by adding specific capabilities down to the base Control class. In light of this, changing the look-and-feel of a page is as easy as changing a property value on the Page class. Cool, but you have to wait for Whidbey to ship. What if you want to take advantage of this extremely handy feature today? Come to see. In this session, Dino will demonstrate how to parse an XML theme file and generate a VB or C# file. The file will then be compiled on the fly and loaded in the current AppDomain. Same functionality (and, to some extent, same implementation) of Whidbey, but immediate availability.

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