Tonight I had the pleasure of listening to Scott Guthrie talk about ASP.NET 2.0, Atlas and IIS 7.0 at the Keynote for the 1st Irish National Developers Conference. I kinda new most of the content before from listening to DotNetRocks and attending the VS2005 launch presentations, however seeing Scott use the stuff for real was awesome. The crowd in Dublin was great as well, asking in depth questions which Scott really seemed to enjoy and was not afraid to just show people how to do things even when it wasn’t something he had ever tried before himself. Tomorrows session from Scott also promises to me a must see talk.
I’ve never really been a huge fan of the ASP.NET 1.1 way of doing things. As a guy that has grown up with the internet I already know how to do the low level stuff and so taking me that one level of abstraction away from the bits and bytes just wasn’t a pleasant experience for me. However, seeing how ASP.NET 2.0 and Atlas does everything and how it works really makes me want to try the stuff in anger again. Even though I’ve always considered myself fairly proficient in Javascript and cross-browser support – developing AJAX applications is just really hard work. Atlas looks like it takes out a lot of the pain.
The INDC is kinda like the “Code Camp” style of conference. The sessions are all very in depth and all of the speakers (including myself) are writing presentations from scratch for this audience. It is one of those conferences where I really wish I was in the audience being able to attend the sessions I wanted to listen to – there are a couple of things on at times were I am “working” that I would to see. Anyway – if you are in the Dublin area tomorrow, I would urge you to come along. Should be well worth it.
