TechEd Take-away

As many of you may know, I went to TechEd last week. Here’s the first batch of sessions I attended and the information I gathered from them.

WEB320 ASP.NET: Best Practices and Techniques for Migrating ASP.NET 1.x Applications to ASP.NET 2.0

• .NET Framework
• Existing ASP.NET 1.1 applications can run on top of ASP.NET 2.0
• Different virtual directories can run different versions of the .NET framework.
• VS 2003 à VS 2005 project
• One-way conversion via a wizard.
• The conversion wizard logs ALL of the changes.

DEV341 Microsoft Visual C# 2005: IDE Tips and Tricks

This session had great tips on how to be more productive while writing code by using theVS.NET 2005 IDE new features.

• Code Gen
• Type in a new method call.  Right-click on the new method and select generate Method stub
• Type in a new un-imported method call.  Right-click on it and select “add using”
• Intellisense is smarter now
• Categorized member views
• DataTips while debugging can be expanded like in the Watch window
• “Edit and Continue” – My fav. New feature
• Modify code while debugging at a breakpoint.  Hit continue and the new code is used.   No more days of stopping and starting the debugger everytime a minor change is made.

DEV340 Microsoft Visual C# Under the Covers: An In-Depth Look at C# 2.0

• Generics
• Don’t need to create a custom Collections for strongly typed collections
• Use Collection<T> where <T> is the type of the collection.
• Anonymous methods
• A way to pass methods as a parameter to other methods
• Works like Lambda functions in LISP!
• Code for eventhandlers can be written inline
• Delegate keyword signifies anonymous methods
• Iterators and Partial Types
• I feel asleep here.  Hey it was after lunch!
• Need to read up from Anders’ Book

WEB342 Improved IIS Debugging: Understanding and Using the Newest Tools and Theories for Debugging Web Applications  

• DebugDiag – new diagnostics method for debugging that is extensible
• Debugging is boring