Mike Taulty kicked off with a look at ADO.NET Entity Framework and Data Services.  The Entity Framework stuff looks pretty familiar to anybody who has played with LINQ to SQL.  The main differences being support for non-SQL Server databases and less coupling between the entity model and the underlying schema.  It was a pretty good demo, but something I’ll need to play around with for a bit before I make my mind up.  If it handles n-n relationships it will already be a long way ahead of LINQ to SQL.

The Data Service part is all about providing RESTful access to your data object automatically.  The demos of this are all cool, but sadly there wasn’t time to look at how security is handled.

Mike Ormond talked about some new ASP.NET features.  The ASP.NET Silverlight and MediaPlayer tags are OK but not hugely exciting.  I wasn’t wild about the Dynamic Data stuff either.  It’s kind of OK but there are other toolkits out there, and I couldn’t help feeling that by time you’d customised and secured everything it wouldn’t be that much quicker than rolling your own.  I was a bit deflated by MVC as well.  I’ve played around with it and I do like the way the MVC model works, but the price you pay is currently pretty high.  Performance seems to be poor (unless you are an MS staffer with a preposterously over-specced laptop), the loss of most of the server controls and the incompatibility with AJAX are all expensive losses.  Hopefully we’ll see some of these issues resolved in the next few releases.

Mike also covered accessing the browser history stack from AJAX applications to push navigation points onto it that didn’t occur from page transitions.  This is all good stuff and something I found very useful.

I guess the excuse for lunch is that they didn’t want us sleepy in the afternoon while we digested a large meal.  So they didn’t provide one  Ironically the best part of it was an Apple…

Daniel Moth kicked off the afternoon with a look at Silverlight.   This was the best talk of the day both in terms of coolness of technology and presentation.  I’m looking forward to getting into Silverlight and writing some code, and in a short space of time Daniel gave us a good overview on how to go about that.

Neil Kidd ended the talks with a look at some of the features of VS team suite.  It’s a pity that lots of the demo didn’t work, but there was enough there to to see the potential.  DBPro obviously rocks and it’s nice to see database management and refactoring in the main IDE.  Once that finally gets linked into code so that it’s possible to refactor from the GUI right down to the schema in a single operation an awful lot of headaches are going to go away.  The rest of team suite is great too (don’t worry Neil, it works on *my* machine), but to get all of the features you want you pretty much need the team suite edition which costs an arm and a leg so I’m not so sure how many people are going to be getting that any time soon.

As well as his technical woes Neil wasn’t being helped much by the audience.  More people do continuous integration than unit testing?  WTF?

We ended the day with a Q&A panel which was quite interesting, but as much for what wasn’t said (and questions not asked).  I was left with the impression that there’s a heap of cool stuff there, but it’s going to be quite some time before it all works together and is ready for production use.  I’m not wildly convinced that designers will dump their Macs for Expression, and I still can’t see why MS Unit Testing is any better than NUnit, even if they did hire the NUnit guy.  But at least we’re going in the right direction.