Earlier this week I presented at the ASP.NET Connections conference in Las Vegas. This is a great conference that is held twice a year (the fall show is in Las Vegas, the spring show is in Orlando). This past week we had over 1,500 attendees for the ASP.NET conference alone, and more than 4,700 total for all of the DevConnections conferences held in parallel (VS, SQL, SharePoint, Mobile and Office Connections are all held in the same place - with attendees allowed to attend any session).
I presented an overview keynote to everyone at the conference on the opening night, and then three ASP.NET specific talks:
ASP.NET AJAX Keynote
This talk kicked off the first full day of the conference, and provided an overview of our ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 plans and some "from scratch" demos of it in action. You can download the slides+demo here.
The highlight of the talk for me was having Ben Noonan from Burton join me on stage and show off some of the cool ASP.NET AJAX usage they are currently doing at Burton on their live sites. Ben did a great job walking people through some of the ways they've used it, as well as highlighting some of the great business results they are seeing -- both in terms of increases in the average length of time spent by a user on the site, and the increase in sales and revenue they are realizing.
One of the fun things we did for the conference was to commission a custom Burton ASP.NET AJAX snowboard to be built (see picture on the right for what it looks like). Bill Gates and Jake Burton both agreed to autograph it, and we raffled it off to a lucky conference attendee yesterday.
ASP.NET Tips and Tricks
This talk covered ASP.NET UI, Caching and Deployment Tips and Tricks, and Visual Studio 2005 tips/tricks. You can download the slides+demos here.
You can learn more about the Visual Studio build performance optimization suggestions by reading this past post of mine on improving build performance. You can also find several dozen more ASP.NET and Visual Studio Tips/Tricks of mine by browsing my past blog posts marked with the "Tips and Tricks" tag.
ASP.NET and LINQ
This talk provided an overview of the new LINQ technology that is shipping next year, and demonstrated some of the dramatic productivity improvements it will bring for ASP.NET with data access. Click here to download the slides+demos for this talk.
You can learn more about LINQ and how to use it with ASP.NET by reviewing some of my past LINQ posts. Here are a few in particular worth reviewing:
As I've said in the past, I think LINQ is one of the coolest new .NET technologies. It is definitely worth reviewing and trying out.
My Upcoming Speaking Schedule
I'm actually done speaking at conferences for the year - which is something of a relief since I've already done events in Amsterdam, Helsinki, Nice, Dublin, Auckland, Sydney, Boston, Orlando, Dallas, and Las Vegas (twice) this year. I am looking forward to being able to stay in sunny Seattle for the next 2 months and actually do my day job. :-)
I am still finalizing my speaking schedule for next year. I will be speaking at the CodeMash conference in Ohio in mid-January, at the Spring ASP.NET Connections Conference in Orlando in March, potentially the SDWest conference in San Francisco in March (I'm still finalizing my plans here), and definitely the Microsoft MIX07 conference April 30th-May 2nd.
Beyond May I'm not sure of my exact plans yet -- although I'll probably present again at TechEd US, potentially squeeze in a trip to Europe, and most likely be making my first trips to India and Japan next year.
Hope to see you soon,
Scott
P.S. People sometimes ask me whether they can re-use some of my slides + demos for their own talks. The answer is absolutely yes! Please re-use any and all content you find on my blog or in presentations -- no need to ask permission or give credit. I post this content to have as many people as possible learn from it, so having you deliver it to others is exactly what I'd like to have happen more.