Yesterday was another busy day at TechEd. This is my third time attending TechEd and I must admit that this one is different than the last two I attended. The sessions this year are very technology focused (less PowerPoint, more code) and packed with tons of demo. Many of these sessions and demos will be available online at the end of the convention. I will post the links as they become available to us (TechEd Attendees).
One of the sessions that I attended yesterday was Heather Solomon’s SharePoint branding session. Heather explained the branding in a very different way. She started the session with normal master pages and page layouts and took her conversation into site structure and content structure. Site Structure is what Heather calls an inverted “L”; it is essentially everything in SharePoint top (Global Navigation) and Quick Launch (Current Navigation) area. The content structure is all the stuff (web parts and page fields) in SharePoint content page’s content placeholders. As the content structure is usually controlled in web parts code behind thru HTML layouts and CSS classes, it is not easy for designers to change it. To avoid dependency between .NET code behind and CSS, I would advise that you use user control approach of creating web parts. This approach will allow your designers to modify ascx markup files directly without you (developer) to compile code for them on every CSS style change and layout change.
Another thing about SharePoint master pages which puzzles many developers is SITE MASTER PAGE and SYSTEM MASTER PAGE. SITE MASTER PAGE is used by all pages in the “PAGE” library. All other pages that are not application pages and are not in “PAGES” library use SYSTEM MASTER PAGE.
My most productive session yesterday was on ASP.NET AJAX Controls, SilverLight Controls and AJAX Control Toolkit. Microsoft is making some new improvements to ASP.NET AJAX extensions in .NET 3.5 SP1. ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 AJAX will provide “History” for partial page post backs. There is also a new object coming in SP1 called ScriptReferenceProfiler. ScriptReferenceProfiler allows combining multiple JavaScript references into a single JavaScript reference. The current version of ASP.NET AJAX calls web resource handler multiple times to download JavaScript files to a client. With this new class the web resource handler will be called only once and hence will result in better performance. Also something that was known as “ASP.NET Futures” is gone from ASP.NET framework. The new “futures” features of ASP.NET will now be kept at ASP.NET CodePlex site.
All in all, yesterday was as much fun as day one.
