DDD7 - ASP.NET Scalability

I'd like to thank the organisers and attendees for giving me the opportunity to present 'This One Goes Up To 11, or How To Write Scalable ASP.NET' yesterday at DDD7 at Microsoft in Reading. It was my first time presenting at DDD, and I really enjoyed it. My session seemed to go quite well, there were a couple of demos I need to go through again to figure out why they didn't work, but overall I felt it was quite well received. All the sessions were videoed for Channel 9 , which is both quite exciting and means I'll get to see the sessions I couldn't get into :-)

A session I did get into was Phil and Dave's ASP.NET 4.0 runthrough. A lot of things are still under wraps, but one of the most useful things they demoed was the ability to set a control's ID and not have it munged with the control's container name when the html hits the browser. Which is nice. I feel validated in being unsure about MVC now I've heard that Phil's not keen on. It'll be interesting to see the new provider-based caching model when it arrives, especially as this will fit really well with Velocity. I'm not, however, at all sure about the new WPF-based Studio.

Edit: My slides and code samples are now available at www.philippursglove.com/ScalableASPNET.

Goodbye Windows 3.1

In amongst all the Presidential news going on today, this headline caught my eye: Closing Windows. Microsoft are ceasing to sell licences for Windows 3.1/11, the operating system I cut my teeth on (which probably dates me hugely although probably not as much as my recollections of loading programs off tape on my Commodore 64 - ah happy days).

I did my first professional coding on Win3.11 in 1997, using VB4.0 (ugh) for the client and Access 2.0 for the database (double ugh). Fortunately I didn't keep a copy of the code, although I think about reworking it occasionally as a web app with all I've learned since then.

I confess I had no idea MS still sold licenses for it as an embedded OS, though I guess it makes sense as a solid OS and if you have no need for a display etc it probably worked quite well.

Velocity CTP2

CTP2 of Velocity was announced at PDC last week - the announcement on the Velocity blog is here, you can download the bits here.

First thoughts are that they've done a lot of work since CTP1.

I installed this CTP tonight and ran up a super-quick demo, and it worked perfectly first time. And by perfectly I mean once I'd fixed my code. And by first time, I mean once I'd updated my web.config. This is good as it means all the problems were on my end, not theirs! (Same old story)

I'm going to have a bit more of a play today/tomorrow and will post some more details then. I've also got the PDC videos to watch.