posted on Tuesday, September 13, 2005 1:54 AM by davidboschmans

PDC 05 - 1: ASP.NET 2.0 Pre-conf

Yesterday and today were the pre-conference days at PDC 05.

Yesterday we did some LA sightseeing but today I attended the ASP.NET 2.0 pre-conference. This was a day fully packed with ASP.NET 2.0 tips and tricks, do's and don'ts, in's and out's. Fritz Onion and Ted Pattison did a very good job by bringing this content in an entertaining way. The Pluralsight-guys started by giving an overview of the new ASP.NET 2.0 features. After this overview they left the "classic" ASP.NET 2.0 demos - that we've already seen a number of times - alone for some more exciting and in-depth demos. 

In the "Architecture and Compilation" section they highlighted the new code behind model, partial classes, the new compilation model and its directory structure and how to do localization with resources. In this last topic they showed two diffrerent ways on how to achieve localization with resources in ASP.NET 2.0. The first technique consists of

  1. generate a local resource file for a page: create resource keys for each localizable property and mark these properties with meta:resourcekey=...
  2. add UICulture = "auto" to the @Page directive
  3. create additional .resx files with culture name

The second technique consists of:

  1. create your own .resx files either under /App_LocalReousrces or /App_GlobalResources
  2. add UICulture = "auto" to the @Page directive
  3. explicit resource evaluation syntax:

Next topic to be covered were master pages, navigation, controls and themes.Fritz went through the concepts of master pages and control generation, how to efficiently work with themes and explained the navigation control architecture.

In the declarative data sources and data binding chapter of the presentation the data source controls were used; they showed how to achieve databinding with no code and the use of DataSource Parameters with the new data-bound controls.

The fifth part consisted of membership and roles which showed the membership and role providers, the security controls and how they rely on the provider. Ted Pattison covered the web parts and portal components in gread depth by explaining the differences of ASP.NET 2.0 web parts and SharePoint web parts, the use of the WebPartManager Class and Web Part Zones. He also mentioned the SmartPart and showed how to build web parts with user controls.

Finally cross-page posting and how to access personalization information were covered.

This session gave a very good overview of what one can expect from the new features of ASP.NET 2.0 and how they should be used to build manageable and scalable applications in an efficient way. Despite the power outage this was a great start of PDC 05!

Tomorrow is the official kick-off of PDC 05 with the keynote at 8.30 AM. For those of you not attending PDC make sure to watch Bill Gates' keynote which is broadcasted live and available on-demand.Watch it here!

pdc05

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