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Ok, pushing www.asp.net/whidbey/ now…

You can now discuss ASP.NET “Whidbey” in the new “Whidbey” forums here:

http://www.asp.net/Forums/ShowForumGroup.aspx?tabindex=1&ForumGroupID=26

The www.asp.net/whidbey/ site is just about complete. We’re still on target to go live around noon Pacific Standard time.

If you’re not at PDC then you’re also not aware of the wonderful fact that half of California is on fire — well maybe not half — but looking outside it looks like a scense from Apocalypse Now with the orange haze from the grass fires around the state.

I had every intention of blogging yesterday when I arrived at PDC, but unfortunately the plane that I had to sit in for 9 hours yesterday didn’t have an Internet connection. LAX as well as most other Southern CA. airports were shut down due to the fires — apparently the fire encroached on the FAA building that managed the airspace for Sourthern CA.

Nevertheless here we are 🙂

Today the ‘ban’ finally lifts on much of the new .NET Framework features in “Whidbey” as we’ll be showing them off here at PDC. Today we’ll also launch the www.asp.net/whidbey/ site where we’ll post all of the slides / demos from PDC as well as some whitepapers and screenshots — oh yeah, and don’t forget about the new ASP.NET 2.0 book 🙂

If you’re coming to my sessions, be sure and visit www.asp.net/whidbey/ first so you can download the slides/demos. In tomorrow’s Cache presentation we’re going to chat about some of the really cool new caching features in ASP.NET “Whidbey”. Including: database cache invalidation for SQL Server 7, 2000, and the new “Yukon” version — really great stuff. We’ll also look at the new ability for you to plug-in your own custom cache dependencies, i.e. you’ve always wanted to invalidate the cache when a web service result changes … now you can (we’ll actually build out that exact demo). Lastly we’ll also be showing the new ‘Post Cache Substitution’ feature for output caching the entire contents of a page and then replacing items in the buffered content … very powerful stuff.

Ok, off to go finish building www.asp.net/whidbey/ … stay tuned!

The long awaited PDC 2003 is almost here – we’re really excited because we can finally talk publicly about some of the awesome new stuff coming in ASP.NET 2.0. If you’re coming to PDC, please stop by and say hi. I’m giving 3 talks:

1. ASP.NET: Programming with the Membership, Role Management and Security System in ASP.NET “Whidbey”
2. ASP.NET: Programming with the Personalization System in ASP.NET “Whidbey”
3. ASP.NET: Programming Using Advanced Caching Techniques in ASP.NET “Whidbey”

These sessions are going to be really (REALLY) fun with tons of demos. I’m personally really excited to show some of the work we’ve done for the ASP.NET Cache. Many people have asked for so long about database cache invalidation — that’s just one of the awesome new features supported in ASP.NET 2.0’s cache. The even more exicting news is that as complete as “Whidbey“ will appear at PDC it’s only an alpha build — inclusive of only 2/3s of the total work/feature set for ASP.NET 2.0. Yes — that means there is even more new stuff that will show up in the ASP.NET 2.0 beta!!!

Next week several people from the ASP.NET 2.0 team will be presenting at ASP.NET Connections in Palm Springs. Scott Guthrie will talk about ASP.NET 2.0 in his keynote and whet your appetite for things to come 🙂

I love what you can do with regular expressions, but I hate writing them.

Steve Smith put together a great site that I use all the time: http://www.regexlib.com/

A friend of mine on the ASP.NET team forwarded me this:

http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

It’s an interesting read – albeit incredibly dense – but interesting nonetheless.

The term ‘social software’ is an interesting idea. I guess you could call the www.asp.net/forums/ a ‘social software package’.

Speaking of the forums we’re making great progress over at http://forums.asp.net/ we’ll be working on integration with DotNetNuke shortly.

I’ve also promised (again) to start blogging some more… I’ve just finished all of my chapters for the upcoming MSPress book ‘Inside ASP.NET with the ASP.NET Team’ as well as chapters for a secret new title due in late October with Addison-Wesley. Here’s clue, it doesn’t discuss ASP.NET 1.0 or 1.1 🙂

For the last several weeks I’ve been trying to get through a new writing project that myself and Matt Gibbs (a developer on the ASP.NET team) have been working on:

Microsoft ASP.NET Coding Strategies With the Microsoft ASP.NET Team

Last night I finally finished my last chapter (woohoo!).

I’ve posted all of my slides/demos from TechEd at www.rob-howard.net.

Yawn. Who did the scheduling this year? Somehow I must have pulled the short straw since I’m standing on stage at 5:38 Seattle time. Tomorrow I get to sleep in …I don’t present until 8:30 Seattle time.

I got in late last night and was up until about midnight working on the Tips & Tricks presentation. Should be good, we’ll see — the plan is to not even open powerpoint 😉

Yet another conference 🙂

Actually, TechEd doesn’t really fall into this category since it’s actually a friendly audience vis-a-vis Linux World which we attended last fall. However, I – as I’m sure many MS presenters do – am only finalizing my slide deck today (presentations on Wed. and Thurs.).

This time I’m going to try something new though: no slides. I’m giving 2 talks at TechEd: Tips & Tricks as well as a drilldown on how we run the www.asp.net site. I’ll have some slides for the drill-down talk, but for the Tips & Tricks I thought it would be fun to have 0 slides and just use VS .NET the whole way through. This will be an adventure, but it will also make the presentation easier to follow since there won’t be as many ‘flips’ between applications.

We’ll see how it goes.