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!