Tonight I attended an IADNUG[^] meeting where Jeff Brand[^] did his ASP.Net 2.0 overview[^] presentation. As usual, Jeff put together a great presentation for the record crowd of approximately 58 62 people, highlighting some very interesting topics within ASP.Net 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. However, the 'Live Meeting' techs were a bit unprepared. :-) Oh, and a note to everyone that attended or is planning on attending future IADNUG[^] presentations: TURN OFF YOUR CELL PHONE WHEN SOMEONE IS SPEAKING IN FRONT OF A GROUP OF 60 PEOPLE!! I counted at least 6 different phones that rang, some of them more than once. Show some respect people.

Moving on...

During Jeff's presentation, I put together a few questions, and comments regarding ASP.Net 2.0, Visual Studio 2005 and the .Net 2.0 framework. Be forewarned that this will probably sound a bit like a rant, but trust me, I am most certainly looking forward to VS.Net 2005 and the .Net 2.0 framework in general. 

1. Why does Microsoft hate namespaces? It's bad enough that C# gets different tools than VB.Net (hello... refactoring! wtf?!). But then to see Microsoft is just omitting namespaces all together, for both C# and VB.Net?! I have no idea who invented the idea of namespaces, but I am thinking more and more that it must have been Steve Jobs or some other Apple founding member. Next you're going to tell me that Option Strict and Option Explicit are defaulted to 'Off' as well.
   
   
2. During one of the demo's, Jeff showed us how to click and drag an object to a page, and view it in a browser. The point was not the click and drag, but was instead showing how you don't have to compile to see your changes in a browser. That half way makes sense since viewing a ASP.Net application for the first time in a browser causes framework to rebuild its assembly anyways. And that seems neat and all, but what if I have bad syntax due to something I typed? I have to view the project in a browser to see the error? I'm sure this is not the case, but it concerns me that people would see this as a benefit. Think of how many bugs would be released to QA, or worse yet, production if there was no compile time debugging. Wow, that hurt my head. This also brings up my question on how partial classes, and one ddl per page benefits us. A topic I want to do more research on.
   
   
3. I don't think this is any fault of Jeff, or his presentation. Almost every Microsoft person I have spoke with, or have heard speak about Visual Studio 2005 says the same things. But it seems to me that we are hearing a lot of the same stuff we heard when when Visual Studio 2000 and 2002 were in beta. Everyone was talking about how little code you have to write to get something to work, and how easy it is to create these super duper pages. I hope for all that is holy that is the case this time around. I'm not saying I'm doubting these features, because I have not tried them. I just saying we've all heard this in the past, and then when we needed to create a datagrid that displayed data from SQL, and allowed the user to update it back to SQL, it was anything but 'click and drag'.
   
   
4. Jeff talked about a bit about the built in functionality of themes with ASP.Net. For the most part, themes seems pretty cool. But how practical are they? I certainly see value in using a single theme for a site so that when changes are requested for a site, they are easy to make, but I'm not so sure about allowing users to make these changes. In a well designed, simple to use site, sure. But in a site with a lot of business logic, I'm not sure. Also, based on Jeff's presentation, a master 'styletheme' will override style settings throughout an application. I do see value in that, but what happens when business logic requires a style to change? RequiredFieldValidators could be a good example. I think I need to invest some time into themes and see how flexible and unobtrusive they really are.
   
   
5. With all of these new controls available within Visual Studio 2005, how extensible are they? I'm assuming that developers will have the ability to inherit functionality from these controls just as we have in the past. If that is the case, I'm lovin 90% of the new controls I have seen. The other 10% need more thought. Another thing I like seeing is that every control seems to have a fairly robust API already built in. This point partially clarifies the first part of this item, but again, I need to spend more time in this area and try creating my own control that uses some of the built in controls.
   
   
6. Microsoft seems to be spending a tremendous amount of time developing additions to Visual Studio 2005 that other vendors, or open source communities have already done. On that note, I think those existing vendors/communities have a leg up on Microsoft, however, Microsoft has a much larger following than any community in the world, so it's my guess that it's only a matter of time before those products are made obsolete. No, I'm not generally a conspiracy theorist type of guy, in fact, I generally thing Microsoft has done good in the past, and will do good in the future. I'm just not 100% clear why Microsoft felt the need to create Master Pages and built in theme support. I personally would have liked to of seen this time invested in giving VB.Net the refactoring tool set, or had namespaces added to all objects.
   
   
7. Web Site Administration Tool. This one was completely new to me tonight. My first gut reaction is, Why? Intellesense in the web.config is outstanding! That's enough for me. I'm not 100% comfortable with the ability to make changes via a web browser. I'm sure with all of the security emphasis at Microsoft, everything will be fine. However, there's a reason I turn off the built in admin website in pre 2003 IIS.
   
   
8. Last, but certainly not least, built in controls that use XMLHTTP for client side calls to server objects. Jeff touched on this topic briefly, and I've heard talk of this before (in a CodeProject article I believe). This is another feature I hope makes it to release. I have done an extensive amount of work using JavaScript to execute XMLHTTP calls to some server side code that fired 'X' functionally, and it was not pretty at all. I question whether this will be cross browser compliant or not, but for the most part, I see this addition as a wonderful thing. From a user perspective, a site becomes more 'polished' due to the reduced amount of postbacks. From a developer perspective, complexities are added. However, I think that gets out weighed by the additional functionality. I would love to hear more about this topic.

So that's that. Jeff did an outstanding job with his presentation tonight and I hope we see him back very soon. BTW, congrats to the guy sitting in front of me who won the software package. I hope it's put to good use, and not eBay. (Jeff: Make sure I win it next time!) 

Thanks to Jeff Brand[^] for taking the time to visit Des Moines[^] and sharing his thoughts on ASP.Net!