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Today I went to attend my first ever Microsoft Event. It was a free session on ASP.NET 2.0. Got to the venue (a large movie theatre) about 8.45 and had a lineup quite long. Fortunately the lineup moved quickly since we only needed to get our invitations scanned. Grabbed a croissant (wow.. really good food…) and went straight into the main theatre. The room was almost full already, so I got up to the very last row up top and sat near the aisle.

The topic was very interesting, as it relates quite well to my work. ASP.NET 2.0 introduces some interesting concepts such as Master Pages, a web based administration system, advanced profiling/membership/roles that could use LDAP’s, Active Directory or databases as a backend, web parts and tons more controls being introduced. You could see some of the slides here. The speaker was Adam Gallant, a Developer/Platform Evangelist for .NET. I found him to be very knowledgeable about what he was talking about and really enjoyed this session. A lot of these features really take out some of the grunt work from developing web applications, and will reduce the amount of coding by quite a bit. I even joked with some of my colleagues at work that maybe soon there will be no need for programmers / developers :)

At the end of the session, everybody was given out free backpacks and an Introduction to ASP.NET 2.0 book by Dino Esposito. Overall, I found the session refreshing, as it showed me what could be done with ASP.NET 2.0, and my mind was racing with the thoughts of trying this out at work. I was told that Visual Studio 2005 (they’re dropping the ‘.NET’ from VS) will definitely ship this year, and that Beta 2 will be released in ‘Microsoft’ March (not sure how long that is :) ). I’ve seen really neat features and can’t wait to get my hands on it.

Two thumbs up to Microsoft for continuing to provide great developer tools and listening to public input.

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