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by Peter van Ooijen.
Original Post: MSDN activities in the Netherlands
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In the North we were the first to have the MSDN/TechNet briefings. A couple of times a year MS organizes this to present their latest news. New was the amount of fun in the presentations. Usually you are bombarded with flashy videos on a heavy techno beat. This time we had a hilarious video on how MS processes error reports. The keynote-slides were presented with a live water-cooled pc which outclassed the oneI saw at Cebit. The keynote itself contained the usual, but nevertheless impressing demos of Vista and Office 12. It was the first time I saw Office 12. In one word : "Yessss".
Despite all that the developer track was quite serious. Alex Thissen gave a very good and very interactive survey of building ASP.NET 2,0 apps with Visual Studio 2005. Not just bulleted list with new features, but in 3 sessions a lot of the real details were covered. I had done a lot with beta1, the current beta2 was less known to me. Now I really do understand the new compilation and code behind model. In the new model every page gets compiled into it's own DLL. I think it is OK but the only bug we've seen in all the demo's might have to do with it. It sometimes appears when you do a crosspost from one page to the other. Your app pops up an error complaining about "cannot cast WebForm1 to WebForm1" (or something like that). Inside the .NET runtime a class is not just identified with it's name but also by it's build number. Looks like the other webform is still looking for the previous version of WebForm1. One page got recompiled, the other didn't. Wild guess, but that does make sense to me. The good thing about the new compilation model is that your pages can inherit from a custom page class. You can do that in 1.1 but could not do that in beta1. The custom page base class goes in the APP_Code folder of the website; or in a referenced assembly. It might look a little confusing at start but at the end of the day I felt comfortable with the new style of website projects.
The only thing I felt under-covered were object datasources. SqlDatasources on a webform are nice but, as somebody remarked, hinder the separation of layers into tiers. Objectdatasources were part of the talk but not of the live demo's. I did some exploring in beta 1 and it looks like they still work the same. Perhaps they will not automagically generate proxies for the object provider, needs some further exploration.
Next week Alex will be giving his talks in the other parts of the country. Absolutely recommended. The launch of VS 2005 will be a big party over here as well. In yesterdays meeting the location was said to be a secret, but the pre-invitation and the video clearly state the old van Nelle factory in Rotterdam. What a location ! See you there ?
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