Today was filled with a lot more varity as it was the first day of Dev Connections. The beginning of the day started off with Scott Guthrie doing a keynote speach called Bringing the Web to Life with ASP.NET AJAX where he demonstrated Microsoft AJAX on ASP.NET.

Following the keynote was an interesting presentation by Davide Ebbo and Jeff King regarding developing ASP.NET web applications with IronPython. One of the cool things about IronPython is it's a dynamic language instead of static, so you have a lot more flexibility. They also demonstrated an upcoming addition to the IronPython framework that will make displaying, searching, editing, and adding data as easy as naming the web form after the database table you're targeting and then dropping a control on the form. Imagine how easy it would be if all you had to do was this to render a GridView with data with no data source controls involved:

<asp:List runat="server" />

There's another control that you can use that is one line like the one above but will also add searching, rendering a GridView, and adding records to a web form with just 1 line and no data source controls.

Next, Gert Drapers presented on an introduction to Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals. One cool thing about this version is it makes database unit testing easy. It's also the version that is tailored to the database professional, which was the missing persona when Visual Studio Team System was released.

The next presentation was on using VSTO and VSTO SE by Mike Hernandez where he demonstrated the power of VSTO. The cool thing about VSTO is you're developing for a platform, Microsoft Office, which is already well adopted so the cost of adoption is very low.

After that Scott Guthrie presented on ASP.NET 2.0 tips and tricks and covered topics such as app_offline.htm, caching, cache profiles, and SQL Server cache invalidation. There was a lot of informative info in his presentation. For those of you interested in seeing any of Scotts presentations, he'll be posting them on his blog shortly.

The last presentation I attended today was Using Visual Studio Team System to Design, Develop, and Test Enterprise ASP.NET Web Applications by Jeff King. It was mainly geared towards covering the basics of VSTS.

Next I was off to expo hall where I got to see a lot of vendors as well as finally meet Richard Ersek from Microsoft and the man behind Telligent, Rob Howard.

The last event of the day was Microsoft "Unplugged" Night where a handful of Microsoft employee's and people from the community presented on various technologies like IIS 7, Windows Vista, Windows Mobile, and ASP.NET. Scott Guthrie demonstrated an upcoming CodePlex project that will most likely be released in the next couple of months that will make unit testing for the web layer much easier.