TechEd 2007 Day 2: LINQ to SQL, AJAX ASP.NET and more Silverlight 

Today was the first full on day with sessions starting at 9  o'clock in the morning and continuing to six o'clock. First session for me was part two of the Visual Studio 2008 web application development, covering the new dynamic data controls for ASP.NET (ListView, LinqDataSource and DataPager controls), enhanced debugging for Javascript, and default AJAX ASP.NET support. I noticed today that almost every speaker doing a presentation about ASP.NET really emphasized on the fact that now the generated HTML for the webcontrols is a lot cleaner. Thank god for that!

Silverlight is a hot topic here at the TechEd, as is LINQ to SQL. Today's second session was all about the latter. Presented by Luca Bolognese with a full blooded Italian accent ('flaaauwers for a beautiful laidy'),  this was the best session of the day, although the demos were not very in-depth. But it still made a good impression, and LINQ to SQL definitely is a very powerful piece of tooling. There also was another Silverlight session today (one of my main subbjects this week, since I'm doing a presentation on it within a month for my co-workers). This was an in-depth session on Silverlight 1.1 Alpha again presented by Jesse Liberty. A lot more compelling than yesterday, although there were a couple of things shown that I didn't really like. For example, in 1.1 you finally have CLR support. Great! And you also have bi-directional access with the HTML Document Object Model. This is equally as good, because you can make the HTML and Silverlight control communicate with each other. There's a drawback though: the Silverlight control is able to connect to the HTML DOM and address an HTML control by using the GetElementByID method,  but not to the control collection within the ASP.NET page. This means that if you want to address a webcontrol you need to know its generated client ID. Not very difficult to do, but it would have been really nice to be able just to use the declared ID.

Final session of the day was about optimizing AJAX ASP.NET applications. Pretty interesting stuff, ranging from using the ConditionalUpdate on an UpdatePanelControl to leaving out UpdatePanelControls all together. This requires some extra plumbing, but has the benefit of avoiding reloading the page's control collection on every roundtrip (which is probably the most important argument of AJAX ASP.NET opposed developers).

Finally, since Dennis has already blogged about the beach birthday party (and admitted we didn't get back till four o'clock in the morning), a few pictures of that crazy night at the beach. Mind you, we DID go to the first session the next day, that was tough....