Friday, November 03, 2006

Scott Guthrie came to Dallas

So, last night Anderson, Zach and I went to the North Dallas .NET Users Group meeting, with a very special guest: Scott Guthrie!

It was a great presentation. From the slides he was showing - looked like a presentation he'd already given at Tech-Ed this year. The information was great, and you can get the slides and source code he demoed last night here (not available yet, but he assured us it would be soon), so I won't go over everything, just what I was excited about.

First, CSS Adapters. Very cool, especially if you have, or you've got some people with the mad CSS skillz. His overview of speeding up build performance and the "new" Web Application project model for ASP.NET websites was good to see too. And of course, server-side comments. He talked about Atlas ASP.NET AJAX (that's a lot of acronym) too, but there's a lot to that and I won't go into it here.

LINQ was great - I see a lot of possibilities there. There were some concerns in the audience about LINQ was trying to "replace DataSets." Personally, I don't see it that way - it's just a new way to strongly-type your data layer. The thing I thoguht was cool was the possibility of doing joins across different data sources - a SQL database and an XML file, for example. That may be more of a "look what I can do" thing to try, but it's interesting to think about. Extending the LINQ provider model was also something that was exciting - apparently, there's already and Amazon LINQ provider out there that lets you search for books directly in C# code without having to wire up the Web Service.

Plus, I won a copy of Quicken 2007. Yay?

Edit: Updated link to Scott's blog post.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We were in the middle of discussing that we never win these raffles when they said his name.