Workshop with Dino Esposito: ASP.NET 3.5, AJAX and Silverlight

Last week I attended to a great workshop with the man himself: Dino Esposito. If you don't know who he is (you should) Dino specializes in web applications built in .NET technologies, he has been writing the column Cutting Edge for MSDN Magazine for the past 10 years. He is also the author of many great books published by Microsoft Press. He does many other interesting things too.

This was a very unique experience... to be in the same room with someone so highly regarded in these technologies and learning from him so many things was really inspiring.

The theme of the workshop was "ASP.NET 3.5, AJAX and Silverlight". It focused on these items but we also had the opportunity to take a peek at ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions' MVC Framework and ASP.NET Dynamic Data.

The workshop was supposed to be a hands-on experience but it was mostly Dino who really had his hands on the keyboard. The rest of us were merely drinking from his knowledge.

The workshop was held in 2 days.

Dino started with an introduction where he mentioned that AJAX is the technique we are using today to improve the user experience on the web. Silverlight and XAML will be the next generation of web interfaces.

In the first day, Dino talked about ASP.NET and AJAX. He divided the day in two parts:

• AJAX: The Easy Way - also known as Partial Rendering using UpdatePanel Control. In this first part Dino emphasized the fact that partial rendering is only a trick. It doesn't change anything architecturally. It reduces the flickering of the postback, improves the user experience and reduces the http response size.
• AJAX: The Not So Easy Way - in this second part Dino talked about the "real" ASP.NET AJAX. He talked about Script Services and WCF Services. He showed how the http request and response sizes decrease enormously when using this technique.

In the second day, Dino Esposito talked about many things. Unfortunately, and because he had so many different things to talk about, he didn't focus so much attention to one topic as in the day before. Anyway it was very nice to learn so many things:

• ASP.NET 3.5 Widgets
• ASP.NET 3.5 Extenders
• AJAX Control Toolkit
• Silverlight 1.0 and 2.0
• Silverlight and AJAX
• ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions: MVC Framework, ASP.NET Dynamic Pages

In the next few days I will be posting some things I learned from this workshop, including Dino's controversial opinion about the MVC Framework.

I still have to find time to really have my hands-on experience with all these things.

Until then, Ciao!