Last night, I went to the NYC presentation of the Asp.Net Roadshow event. Overall the presentation was worth seeing. Not to mention the freebees… they gave out pizza, soda, and a bag of goodies. The bag of goodies contained a bunch of cds and promotional wares from various companies. But the more useful thing that they gave was the ASP.NET Coding Strategies with the Microsoft ASP.NET Team book.
The first part (30 minutes) was a basic presentation describing the differences between classic asp and asp.net. Rob went over a server controls, etc just generally. This part was for those in the audience that have not switched/upgraded to asp.net. He mentioned that there is a 30%-40% performance gain just by strong typing variables in scripts. Also, he showed a graph for the number of page views per second… Asp.Net not only scaled almost linearly, it was about 3 times higher than classic asp. The huge increase is mainly due to the code being compiled rather all script based.
The second part (30-45 minutes) was titled Tips and Tricks. Basically Rob went through various things that you can accomplish with Asp.Net. Some of the things that he demonstrated was generating dynamic images, file upload capabilities, displaying an interim page for long processes (Orbitz as an example), and a touch on a Sql injection example.
The third part was the food… it happened to be the part that I was looking forward to the most at this point. The organization was horrible, but the amount of pizza was impressive. They had enough pizza for each person to have 2-4 pieces. They also provided all of the soda that you could enjoy. Though, one thing struck me as sort of odd… I heard one lady ask if they had any bottled water and get no for a reply. They only had soda.
The fourth part (30-45 minutes) was all about security. A lot of this was general security information not related directly with asp.net. He went through examples of Sql injection and cross-site script attacks. Rob specifically brought up points on how Asp.Net is helping to reduce these types of attacks, but got the point across that it is up to the developer to be aware these things…
The fifth part was all about Whidbey. Rob mentioned that he had been using Whidbey bits for his examples. Having seen Vs.Net 7.0 and 7.1, I realized that he was using it, due to all of the intellisense and other visual happiness going on. He showed off some of the wizards that will ship with Whidbey and I must say that they’ll be a nice addition to the tool. Another main point is that it’ll be shipping with Cassini, a Web Server written in managed code. The cool part of that feature is that developers will no longer need to have IIS installed to work on web projects. Also, another really cool feature that’ll be a part of Asp.Net 2.0 is the addition of datastores to the outputcache. This will dramatically reduce the amount of time for requests to databases.