Soliciting feedback on event descriptions...

We're putting together some of our marketing materials for next quarter's MSDN Events. I'm interested in your opnions of the session abstracts below. Do they make you feel compelled to see the content? Do you like the titles? Are these too "markety" for developers?

Your feedback is welcome! Thanks.

 

 

ASP.NET 2.0 – Bringing the Web Platform into the 21st Century


ASP.NET is a powerful set of tools for building dynamic, high performance, data-driven Web applications. ASP.NET 2.0 makes it even better by making you more productive, reducing the amount of code you have to write, making your Web sites easier to manage, and improving your Web site's scalability, reliability, and performance. In this three-part tour-de-force, you’ll see aspects of ASP.NET 2.0 from user interfaces to data to performance that will make creating your web applications better and easier than ever before.

Session 1: Developing Compelling User Interfaces with Ease in ASP.NET 2.0


Creating web user interfaces has come a long way since the days of hand-coding HTML and dealing with form postbacks. But even with ASP.NET 1.x you still have to deal with the complexities of maintaining a common look-and-feel across your site, as well as providing navigation. ASP.NET 2.0 takes web UIs to a whole new level with a rich set of new controls and IDE features. In this module, you’ll see how ASP.NET 2.0 solves these issues and more. We’ll start with a tour of Master Pages and show you not only the benefits at runtime, but during design time as well. We’ll show you how easily Themes will let you establish a consistent appearance across your entire site. And we’ll show you how managing site maps - including menus, trees and “breadcrumbs” for navigation - is as easy as X-M-L.

Results

By attending this session, you will learn:

  • How to establish a common look and feel for your web application
  • How to manage and customize that look and feel
  • How to build dynamic navigation elements for your site

Outline

This session will illustrate the following:

  • Architecture of Master Pages
  • Interacting with Master Pages from an ASPX page
  • Architecture of Themes
  • Working with Themes at design time and programmatically
  • Navigation Controls and Site Maps

Session 2: Data Access with ASP.NET 2.0


What’s an application without its data? And what’s an ASP.NET application without having to use DataSets, DataAdapters and Connections? Well, if it’s an ASP.NET 2.0 application utilizing new features of ADO.NET 2.0, the answer is “more powerful.”  In this session we’ll explore the new concept of declarative data sources and the numerous ways you can work with data without writing a single line of code. You’ll see several powerful new data-bound controls in action including the GridView and DetailsView. We’ll also take a look at improvements to typed DataSets and the new TableAdapters, as well as sophisticated ways to handle hierarchical data. Finally, we’ll see how ObjectDataSources brings together the wonderful world of data binding and the business objects of a true n-tier architecture.

Results

By attending this session, you will learn:

  • How to use the new databound controls like GridView, DetailsView and FormView
  • The architecture of declarative data sources
  • How to integrate SQL Server Reporting Services with a windows application

Outline

This session will illustrate the following:

  • Working with declarative data sources
  • Data binding to data sources
  • Passing parameters to data sources without code
  • Binding to hierarchical data
  • Binding to business objects
  • Using typed DataSets and TableAdapters

Session 3: Building High Performance Applications with ASP.NET 2.0


Your website may have great functionality and a stunning user interface, but if it can’t scale it’s practically useless. In this session, we’ll explore the many improvements in ASP.NET 2.0 that will help you get the maximum performance out of your sites. We’ll start by comparing options for page output caching and data source caching. Next, we’ll cover how ASP.NET 2.0 can invalidate the cache in response to data changing in the database. We’ll show you how to use client-side script callbacks to avoid posting entire forms back to the server, a technique gaining popularity under the term AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Finally, we’ll walk you through various ways to deploy your site to provide the highest performance possible.

Results

When you leave this session, you will understand: 

  • The various ways that caching in ASP.NET 2.0 enhances website performance
  • How ASP.NET communicates with SQL Server to prevent stale data in the cache
  • The benefits of using out-of-band communication from web browser to server
  • Performance considerations when publishing an ASP.NET 2.0 site

Outline

This session will introduce key performance-enhancing features of ASP.NET 2.0: 

  • Configuring Page Output Caching
  • Caching a Data Source
  • SQL Cache Invalidation with SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005
  • Post Cache Substitution
  • Using Client Callbacks from your ASP.NET page
  • Deployment techniques to optimize performance