TechEd 2007 Day 4: Domain Specific Languages (DSL), new ASP.NET features 

Thursday, day 4 of the TechEd here in Barcelona, I woke up feeling pretty tired. I guess the strain of going to sessions all day - trying to suck up as much information as I can, and meeting new people at night- is finally getting to me. It still is an awesome and exhilarating experience to be here though. So what's been up today? First session of the day was about generating DSLs using the DSL Toolkit and Visual Studio 2008. If you have no clue about what DSLs are (like me ;-)), have a look at this wikipedia article. The DSL toolkit is a very impressive extension of Visual Studio, and will give you  graphic designer tools  to create your models and graphical user interface(s) for your specific DSL.

After that, saw a rather boring session about the new ASP.NET features that are going to be shipped with new .NET Framework 3.5. This doesn't impy that there will be complete new version of ASP.NET, merely that a lot of features are going to be added on top of the existing ASP.NET 2.0 framework. These new features include:  ‘Astoria’ data services (light-weight webservices), built-in AJAX support, Silverlight controls (such as the MediaPlayer control), Dynamic Data controls and the MVC (Model View Controller) framework (see Scott Guthrie's post for more info). Pretty cool stuff altogether, so it surprised me that the speaker was looking so bored on stage.

After lunch I decided to go a not so technical session by David Aiken about the top 10 mistakes developers make. No real surprises there, although he did show the Health Model tool (which isn't available yet, not even in CTP). That was quite interesting although he messed up this demo completely. After a break, went back to see a session about web application security. Quite ok, a couple of security breach scenarios were pretty predictable, but there were some nice demos with a couple of tools that come in pretty handy when you really need to tie things down (such as the Thread Modeling Tool, the patterns & practices Guidance Explorer, and the ACE XSS Detector (still in beta).

The session I was really looking forward to was about Commerce Server 2007 integration with Sharepoint 2007 and WPF representation of the catalog. This turned out to be a big disappointment and was by far the worst session I've attended so far. Not that the technical information was all that boring, it was just the way they presented it. They showed some work in progress on extending Commerce Server 2007 to integrate with Sharepoint 2007 (mainly webparts to present your catalog, products, shopping cart etc.) . If I can get any more information, I'll post it later on.

One more day to go...