Scott Guthrie was in Belgium and an udpate on Designertopia in London

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While I'm currently in London, attending Designertopia, the VISUG/MSDN meeting with Scott Guthrie in Belgium was a success! 250+ attendees saw Scott deliver two excellent sessions on the newest ASP.NET technologies:

  • First Look at Visual Studio and ASP.NET “Orcas”
  • ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET AJAX Tips and Tricks

It was the first time Scott was in Belgium. Our VISUG-community appreciated it. Microsoft Belux appreciated it. And therefore I want to thank Scott, Hans Verbeeck (for the support) and last but not least, all of the attendees! I've also noticed that Jan blogged about the event and the question whether the UpdatePanel works in web parts.

UPDATE: Tom posted Scott's first video on his blog at https://blogs.msdn.com/tommer/archive/2007/02/03/video-of-scott-guthrie-s-newest-presentation-first-look-at-visual-studio-orcas.aspx.

You are probably wondering how Designertopia is going, right?

The first day, yesterday started off with a keynote by Eric Zocher, General Manager Expression Tools. The keynote covered Microsofts approach towards designer and developers. Of course the Expression Tools were featured. Some news that I missed earlier this week - probably due to the Wow - were some new product releases of the Expressions Tools Suite:

Both downloads are available from the Expression website. More info on these releases can be found on Robert's blog.  

The keynote was filled with demos - that unfortunately - failed a couple of times. Some cool demos of ASP.NET AJAX, WPF, WPF/E and the Expression Tools were shown though. They gave a good overview what Microsoft technologies can and should be used, and in which scenario (on/off line) to create the richest user experience possible. Personally I was most impressed by Expression Media. This is due to the fact that I already played around with the other tools that are part of the Expression Suite. But the demos of Expression Media convinced me to give it a try soon.

Later on the day I was really impressed by the presentation on "Participatory Design" by the director of the Webby Awards. The Steel-Software Blog has an excellent wrap-up of day 1 where the "Participatory Design" session details are covered. The session showed how user participation can (Doritos) or cannot (Chevy) work.

In the evening we had dinner with all the Belgian agencies that attended Designertopia. It was the first time that Geert and myself brought these people together at a Microsoft event, but it turned out very well. Thanks to all of you for joining us!

Technorati tags: Scott Guthrie, ASP.NET Orcas, ASP.NET AJAX, VISUG, Designertopia, Expression Tools