I followed the web development track today. Jeff Prosise delivered great content in his sessions on ASP.NET AJAX and WPF/E. I'm still a bit brainwashed by the propaganda, but I'm really impressed by his speaking and teaching capabilities.
I loved the part were he urged to not use the UpdatePanel control. This because the amount of data between the client and server is too much overhead. He advised and showed us how to use some client-side JavaScript to do the trick without sending too much over the wire.
In his session on the Microsoft AJAX Library, he covered some of the undocumented features and their capabilities. Very nice overview, putting his own experiences into the open.
His session on WPF/E was also nice, but one that could not match the level of the earlier sessions. Maybe because WPF/E is still CTP and lots of it's details is still subject to change.
The only downside of the Microsoft Web Story is it's lack of testability and it's abstraction leaks. As Jeff stated in one of his sessions: ViewState sometimes can get in the way. Well put!
For testing the client-side part, I definitely should take a closer look to what WatiN has to offer. I'm really looking forward to some MVC/Rails framework from Microsoft.
To conclude this post, the overall quality was great and well worth its the time. Two thumbs up!
