TechEd 2007 Day 3: More on AJAX ASP.NET, Silverlight, patterns & practices and...additional speakers! 

After an early night yesterday, today started with a very interesting session by Stefan Schackow on building highly scalable ASP.NET 2.0 applications using asynchronous programming. What it basically boils down to, is that the ASP.NET thread pool only uses 12 threads per CPU. Say you have large website with approximately 200 pages and some of these pages are doing long running thread stuff, calls to these webpages could block requests waiting until the they have finished. By using asynchronous programming features provided by ASP.NET 2.0 such as the RegisterAsyncTask() method combined with the PageAsyncTask class, you can create asynchronous functionality fairly quickly. You can even decide to run these tasks in sequence or parallel to each other, but you have to be aware of any dependency between the tasks.

After that, another interesting, although technicallywise mindboggling session by Don Smith (patterns & practices) and Olaf Conijn on the new version of the Web Service Software Factory. It looks really cool, and is highly extenable without having to reach into the source code (Dennis is our main p&p guy, so he'll probably have more on this subject later on).

After lunch, there was another session on Silverlight (yes, it never ends this week) combined with AJAX ASP.NET, focusing on the consumption of web services. This is actually a bit misleading because it leads you to believe that you can consume external web services as well, which is not the case. By default you can only consume web services with AJAX ASP.NET that are on the same domain level. If you want to use cross-domain level web services, have a look at a 3-part real life demo on Nikhil Kothari's weblog. He uses a JSONP to workaround this.

And then.... it was time for my colleague Dennis to take the Auditorium stage at the TechEd 2007 talking with Don Smith and Olaf Conijn about how to build software factories. He was asked about two days ago by Don if would like to join the session because of his real-life experience with software factories, and of course he said yes. He was really nervous beforehand (which you would be when you know that the Auditorium can hold 4000! people). But Dennis did a great job, and I think it went down really well. Since I'm relatively new to all this stuff, I had a bit of a hard time keeping up, but it was very, very interesting. GAX (Guidance Automation Extensions)/GAT (Guidance Automation Toolkit) has been around for a while, but I never really used it so far.

Later on that afternoon, we sat down with Don and Olaf for a beer discussing their presentation and ended up having drinks at the Hilton and later on dinner with 12 people. It was great fun to watch all these nationalities (English, Finnish, Israeli, Dutch) sitting at one table talking about lots of (non)geeky stuff and having a great time. The perfect end of a rather special day!