I attended Microsoft's Tech Days 08 today and was pretty happy with it. Aside from the expected Microsoft sugar coating and shameless plugs of their products, some of the sessions they offered actually taught me something.

The most worthwhile sessions in my opinion were:

ADO.NET Data Services for web developers - an overview of the new data services available for ADO.NET. Very slick access via a URI and will return your dataset in AtomPub or JSON format. As a side note, this was the first time I've ever even heard of JSON, but it looks pretty handy - especially since XML is so verbose. I believe this is something I can use in my .NET programming for sure.

Choosing the ASP.NET MVC Framework - this was a beginner's guide to MVC, and MVC the Microsoft way.

IE8 for developers - while this was very light on the tech side, there were some handy new features such as accelerators and web slices. Accelerators were of particular interest. They allow you to connect to web services from within your page to display dynamic content. Say you have an address on a web site and you want to find out where that address appears on a map, you can highlight the content, right-click to bring up the context menu and then connect to your favourite mapping service (which of course was Live Maps at the conference, who uses live maps?).

The other nice feature is that IE finally has a proper web developer toolset that actually ships with all installations of IE. The lack of this feature previously was one (of many) reasons that Firefox is my browser of choice. I doubt my preference will change, but at least it will make debugging a lot easier. I did find it humourous that they toted it as this new great thing despite the fact that both Chris Pederick's Web Developer plugin and Nikhilk's Web Development Helper have been around for years.

During the seminars that didn't offer much in the way of content I had brought along a book that JP had lent me (CSS Mastery by Andy Budd). I learned a lot in the 6 chapters I managed to fit in today and it will hopefully help me become better friends with CSS.

In addition to the seminars, the conference was top notch. We had a great hot and continental breakfast, and a healthy brown bag lunch. Lunch actually came in a brown bag which was great for feeding hundreds of people efficiently. I felt like a kid again - they even had carrot and celery sticks, an apple, and a cookie for desert!

I look forward to what Tech Days has to offer in the future.

Shendy.

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