Friday was the last day of the convention. The vendor booths closed around 1:00 PM and by 4:00 PM almost 90% of the developer crowd was gone. Many Friday sessions were repeat sessions from day 1 thru day 3. Here is the conference summary for Web/SharePoint Developers:
· SilverLight 2.0 will be big. Learn it.
· Microsoft announced that SilverLight 2.0 Beta 2 is coming out next week. Be careful; there are some incompatible changes in SilverLight 2.0 Beta 2 from Beta1.
· No SharePoint developer left behind – SharePoint developer community has gotten very strong in the last 2 years. When I attended TechEd 2006, SharePoint platform was not very well understood by the Developer community, but this year SharePoint was not an unknown among developers. In my opinion it will still take a while before web developers start feeling as much comfortable with SharePoint as they do with ASP.NET, but we are on the right track. It seems like the SharePoint online communities, developers’ blogs and Microsoft SharePoint MVPs have been working hard to meet the goal of no SharePoint developer left behind.
· The Microsoft web 2.0 technologies (AJAX, SilverLight, etc…) utilize JavaScript heavily. JavaScript is here to stay no matter how much you dislike it, so get a JavaScript book and get up to speed on JavaScript 1.5 (including advanced topics like JSON, Prototypes, etc…).
· ASP.NET team is introducing new improvements and enhancements with .NET 3.5 SP1 (see my previous TechEd posts). ASP.NET has a new CodePlex site at www.codeplex.com/aspnet. ASP.NET team will be using the new CodePlex site as test bed for future ASP.NET features.
· Visual Studio 2008 provides a lot of improvements over 2005. Testing features that were available in only Team System edition with Visual Studio 2005 are now also available in Professional version of Visual Studio 2008. JavaScript IntelliSense is amazing in Visual Studio 2008. With SP1, Visual Studio 2008 will also provide type based IntelliSense for JavaScript types. For e.g. when working with “string” type in JavaScript, IntelliSense will show “string” functions in Visual Studio.
· SQL Server File Stream Data Storage allows large binary data to be stored directly in an NTFS file system, while preserving an integral part of the database and maintaining transactional consistency. The File Stream Data Storage will be huge for SharePoint in terms of performance enhancements. Whether SharePoint will use File Stream Data Storage with the next version or not is unknown at time.
It was a fun and exhausting week. I will definitely remember this TechEd for a while.
