ASP.NET Roadmap
Matt Gibbs covers where ASP.NET is going and what new features the ASP.NET Futures team is working on. First he covered new AJAX support coming in the next release of ASP.NET. One major problem with AJAX currently is that as the user moves around your AJAX page their history button does not record anything. They are adding history support to the ScriptManager which means you can add history points to the browser that will replay AJAX events. With all this AJAX support coming and everyone writing in javscript, one problem they are tackling is a way to combine javascript files to limit the round trips and increase browser caching. New media player control introduced in ASP.NET. The control will render a silverlight control that will handle all the streaming for you. You can skin the control and add chapter support. AJAX has multi language support straight out of the box with a few lines of code. Matt showed a nice demo of ASP.NET Dynamic Data, showing how out of the box it will give you add / edit / list and view support. It creates the page code on the fly based on your database model in LINQ to SQL. Currently it only support LINQ to SQL but entities support is on the way. The major feature coming to ASP.NET is MVC support. I'm really excited about this as I believe that this will give us much simplier pages and more testability on our sites. There is a CTP in December coming and hopefully it will include MVC support.
ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC)
This is another talk by Matt Gibbs but this time its just on the MVC and its also interactive session. Matt started off explaining MVC for the newbies and then showed some nice samples of what you can do using MVC. He also covered some testing senarios and how MVC helps in those situations. MvcUtil.ActionLink is a function to allow you to get urls to actions on the controllers. If you have different type of thing to render, you can provide your own view using IViewController and IView. So instead of rendering pages, you can render xml or binary or anything you like.
Deep Reflection - Things You Really Need to Know About Reflection 2.0
My favourite speaker, Roy Osherove gave a session on the power (and problems) with Reflection. Showed some awesome classes to create code on the fly. The example he gave was that you want to Clone a bunch of objects. The usual way you would do that would be to use reflection to copy each property to the new object. This turns out to be extremely slow with thousands of objects. Instead he used the CodeDom to generate a new method that copies each property. This runs as quick as any normal code as its just compiled to normal code. The CodeDom mode is very verbose and can get a little scary after a while. Roy then showed us the Flection.Emit which allows you to write IL code directly into the method. The lines of IL required are usually alot less than the verbose classes. Finally he showed us a library called RunSharp which generates IL from a friendly model. Fantastic talk, great job Roy!