Day 2

Keynote by Eric Rudder focussed on development tools and featured demos of ASP.NET V2 "Whidbey". What really surprised me however was the focus on VB.NET. Since the .NET Framework was released I have heard so much propaganda about the superiority of C#. Well it appears that in "Whidbey", VB.NET will actually have a leg up on it cousin - VB.NET gets an "edit and continue" debugging feature and C# does not!

The first session I attended was ASP.NET: Programming with Master Pages, Themes/Skins, and Navigation Controls in ASP.NET "Whidbey". I had already seen these features at the Dev Labs I attended in Redmond this past summer but it was worthwhile to see them again. These features will definitely impact DotNetNuke and it is best to prepare for them now.

The next session I attended was ASP.NET: Programming Using Advanced Caching Techniques in ASP.NET "Whidbey" presented by Rob Howard. I would have to say that Rob is one of the best presenters on the ASP.NET team - his energy and enthusiasm for every topic he dives into is cantagious and without parallel.

In the evening I attended an MSDN Subscriber feedback session at the Bonaventure hotel hosted by the MSDN team. The session was run by a professional facilitator which was an experience unto itself.

Upon returning to the Convention Center I attended a Bof session on SharePoint and had a good chat with Stan Schultes from Visual Studio magazine.