Toronto - A Success; See You In Ottawa!

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What a fantastic day!  I'm back in my hotel after a pretty long, but very good day.  Up this morning at the crack of dawn and over to the Toronto Congress Centre for the VS 2005, SQL 2005 and BizTalk launch events.  This was the first of a 10 city Canadian launch tour, and it was fantastic!  Over 4,000 people, one of the biggest product launches in Canada. EVAR.  ;)

The day was kicked off by the president of Microsoft Canada, who then turned the stage over to Craig Symonds, the General Manager of Visual Studio (and fellow Canadian).  The excitement level for the keynote wasn't as high as I would have hoped, but it was pretty fantastic.  We had some GREAT presentations, and really cool videos and lots of very informative stuff.  I didn't realize how powerful and how BIG a change SQL Server 2005 was.  Sure, I knew it was this big cool thing, but wow, that sucker ROCKS!

Post keynote, the "experts" all headed into the pavilion where we had an opportunity to talk to you!  We answered tonnes of questions, and there were lots of you with ASP.NET questions, which was great!  I was able to answer most of them, and if I couldn't I did give out a few business cards so that people can contact me to get more info about what they need. 

The top 3 questions I had for the day were:

  1. ASP Classic to ASP.NET migration - how the heck do you do it?
  2. What is the story on moving web parts from VS2005 to SPS or SPS to VS2005
  3. What's Atlas or what is Microsoft's AJAX story. 

One of the coolest things was being able to answer these questions and get people excited about VS2005 and ASP.NET 2.0.  Lots of people who have read my blog are familiar with ASP.NET 2.0.  But lots of the launch event atendee's were familiar with ASP and haven't done much ASP.NET work, so they have some interesting work ahead of them.  But they now have a product team contact, and they love that.

At the end of the day, they got a few of us up on stage, in front of a few hundred people and let them throw questions at us.  I'm a bit of an attention junkie. I love being on stage and having an opportunity to either present things, or answer questions, and so to the guy who asked about master pages today.  Thanks :)  Sorry I couldn't give you the answer you wanted (you can't nest master pages in design time, but you can in runtime).  And to the few others who gave me an opportunity to speak, thanks!  I enjoyed!

Tomorrow I'm heading up to Ottawa.  I'll be at the MVP event at the Microsoft Office tomorrow evening, so if you're there, say hi!  Or, if you're at the launch event on Thursday, be sure to find me!

Oh yah, pictures.  I took a few but haven't posted them yet.  The launch team here is posting a bunch of htem on flicker at https://www.flickr.com/groups/launch2005/ so be sure to check that out!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 09, 2005
    Hi Pete,

    Great meeting you yesterday in Toronto. I had a question regarding SqlCacheDependency for you and you had mentioned that you could pass the question on to a colleague down the hall from you...

    What I am looking for essentially is an example of how to use this. I was able to use polling with SQL Server 2000 and as well on 2005 but would rather use the cachedependency alone with change notifications.

    What I am doing now - and getting varied results - is creating the cache dependency from the DALC like this:

    Dim _dep As New SqlCacheDependency(_cmd)
    httpContext.Current.Response.AddCacheDependency(_dep)

    This seems a little bit strange to me because everytime this gets called it will recreate the dependency... Do I have to somehow check to see if this data is in the cache and valid??

    The _dep dependency has a HasChanged property but that dependency object is lost with the scope of the method... Unless all of these dependency objects need to be global to the application... just thinking as I type...

    Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

    Andrew Renner
  • Anonymous
    November 09, 2005
    "ASP Classic to ASP.NET migration - how the heck do you do it?"

    Sign me up for the answer on that one too! I hate the "just rebuild it" approach. :)

    Cam
  • Anonymous
    November 09, 2005
    Hey Pete,

    I had one other question as well... When Publishing a site in VS 2003 all dlls were named via namespace class.

    i.e.
    Mynamespace.Dalc.dll
    Mynamespace.Bll.dll
    Mynamespace.Webui.dll
    Mynamespace.Webui.Usercontrols.dll

    Now in 2005 - I was shocked to see one dll for each aspx in my project as well as for each ascx... and the combined app_code.dll... not only that but every dll that is produced has guid like randomness appended to the name.

    My questions:
    1) is there a way to compile into the old style namespace/class dlls or is this the new way of doing things?

    2) If this is the new way of doing things - could you shed some light as to what the reasoning was for the change?

    I could be missing a very simple setting but I have not seen it.




  • Anonymous
    November 09, 2005
    Hey Andrew & Cam,

    I'm just about to leave the hotel for Ottawa, but I'll try to make a post about those either later today or sometime this week.

    The SHORT answer is check out ScottGu's blog for the reason we changed the way DLL's are compiled. Check www.asp.net for migration and I'll need to follow up on the SQL cache dependancy.