Yesterday I finished the day by doing a hands-on lab on the new ASP.NET technology. It seems that major enhancements have been done here too.

Databinding

I actually created a webpage to view data in a grid, complete with editing, sorting and paging support, filtering by data selected from a combobox and much more. I didn't have to write one single line of code!

SQL Server Caching

Everyone knows page caching in ASP.NET. There was one case you couldn't use it: when the application needs to reflect changes in a SQL database. Well, the new ASP.NET will support invalidation of the cache when data is changed in SQL Server. And it's not marketing talk, it does it already.

I found one disadvantage for this, you need to execute a command line tool to set up the database for SQL Server caching. This might be quite difficult in scenarios where don't have full access to the webserver, like for example in Shared Hosting at a hosting company (like HostBasket or WebHost4Life) scenario's. Perhaps Microsoft will change this later.

Personalization, authentication, membership

Actually, I didn't take a lab on this creating these features, but they are all supported with a minimum of coding. Quite amazing!

Internet / Intranet website

A full blown internet site with quite a cool layout is provided as template. The Intranet website template even supports personalization and authentication right when it's created. Can you imagine that different parts of a website can be moved on the page, removed or added from/to the page? All of this is already in the template, you don't have to code anything for this. I guess I can't write out exactly how excited I'm about this!

Master pages

Didn't do this in the lab either, but I feel the urge to mention it here too. You have some sort of visual inheritance in ASP.NET with Whidbey! Create a master template (which is fully compiled) and reuse it in different other pages Great!

A conclusion, the PDC is just over it's half and I can already conclude that it succeeded big time for me. Yes, it's a great succes. One major disadvantage of this conference, one will have to go back home and continue developing real world applications with Visual Studio .NET 2003 for quite some time. Perhaps I just should go back to the hotel and forget about everything that has been said here. On the bus over here, I heared two people talking: "I slept very bad tonight, I was too excited about the stuff they show us". While I had a very good night of sleep, I do understand what that guy was saying...