Last week Friday, I attended the MSDN Northeast Road Show. The event was hosted at the Rochester Institute of Technology and was hosted by Jim O'Neil, Chris Bowen and Bob Familiar. Here are my impressions/opinions on the new technology presented at the event.

Windows 7 has a lot of nice features which will prove useful for developers. One of the coolest things to be bundled with Win7 is XP Mode. XP Mode will allow users to run legacy applications through virtualization. As a developer, this means you can keep a copy of IE6 on your desktop along with IE8. I discussed XP mode in a previous blog post but Friday was the first time I actually saw it in action. In any case, I was impressed by the overall seamless experience that XP mode apps provide. This will prove to be very useful for companies and individuals who still rely on legacy applications.

Windows 7 has also published the APIs for the taskbar. Taskbar buttons can now be manipulated by the developer so we can do things like display progress bars and build custom preview windows for them. The preview windows are more then just thumbnails because you can also add controls to them. For example when you look at the preview window for Media Player in Windows 7, the window has buttons to start and stop the music.

At the conference they also addressed several updates to the web stack. The IE8 browser has new ways to deliver content via Accelerators and Web Slices. There are also advances being made with the new version of Silverlight.

• Web Accelerators can be thought of as shortcuts to online services. For example, if you are hovering over an address in your web browser you can right click on it and display a popup map from Google or Bing maps. You can view the map without navigating away from the current page which allows you to get information without having multiple windows to deal with.
• Web Slices are basically a way to deliver partial page content to users by marking sections of your HTML content with predefined CSS class name of "hslice". eBay is using web slices on their auction pages so people can bookmark items they are bidding on. Once the web slice is bookmarked in IE you can hover over it and view the popup window which displays the HTML content. If you are viewing an auction item, you will get the updated content so you can instantly decide if you need to increase your bid or hit the "buy it now" button. Again, web slices allow users to get HTML content without navigating away from the page they are currently reading.
• Silverlight 3 will give developers new abilities such as sending messages between multiple browser windows. Joe Stegman has two samples of this technology posted on his blog. The other standout feature in Silverlight 3 is the out of browser experience. Developers using Silverlight 3 will have the option to allow end users to install the application directly on their workstation in addition to using it remotely on the web. When a user installs the app locally updates to the application are automatically deployed. This functionality is probably just a slight modification of the existing Click Once technology.

The underlying theme between all the web technologies is that Microsoft is focused on providing a more continuous user experience to users of their web technologies. They are delivering content in new ways that allow you to get the data you need without having to open multiple tabs or windows. In addition, IE8 is finally going to be in compliance with HTML standards. Hopefully this means that developers will spend less time trying to figure out why something works in Firefox but not in IE and vice versa.

My favorite talk of the day was 20,000 Leagues under the MVC by Chris Bowen. Basically the session was a walkthrough of the Nerd Dinner tutorial created by Scott Guthrie. When you really start to dive into MVC you come to the realization that MVC is not a new technology but rather a design pattern that leverages the existing power of ASP.NET. After all, I wrote an MVC web application 3 years ago in Java using J2EE. Anyway, When you create a new MVC web application using Visual Studio 2008 you get a great head start. The structure and layout of the project helps you organize your code and allows you to immediately start focusing on business problems rather then jumping technical hurtles. In addition, the detailed instructions provided in the free 14MB PDF are priceless.

The one topic which I found irrelevant at the conference was titled Data Quest - Pinning Down Approaches to Data Access.  According to the agenda I thought this session was going to help developers choose the appropriate platform for accessing data. In my mind, I thought this was session would help developers to create a mental decision tree to figure out when to using a technology like LINQ to SQL over the ADO Entity Framework. Instead this session was more like a history lesson on Data Access. There was no real "meat" to the presentation and I could have gotten the same information from reading MSDN or Wikipedia.

Overall, the conference was very informative and worthwhile attending. The conference really motivated me to start learning these new technologies. When I got home Friday night, I immediately started rewriting one of my old web applications in MVC. If you are a .NET developer you should really consider these conferences as mandatory.