The Application Development Experiences of an Enterprise Engineer

Afternoon - Day 2

Posted by bsstahl on 2003-10-30 and Filed Under: event 

With the exception of the previously mentioned security problems the remainder of day 2 went quite well. I attended sessions on Web design using ASP.NET Whidbey, the new features in Visual Basic.NET under Whidbey, as well as a talk on using Whidbey to program mobile devices such as Pocket PCs and Smartphones. Some of the most interesting topics from these sessions included the concept of Master Pages, which is similar to a frameset without actually using frames, the new navigation controls provided with Whidbey such as the breadcrumb, sitemap, and menu controls, and the use of SQL Server Cache invalidation to improve the application performance by caching objects without having to worry about those objects becoming stale.

By far the most interesting items were in the Visual Basic features update. The new version of VB that ships with Whidbey will include even more tools to promote code reuse such as Operator Overloading which will allow us to define how operators such as the plus sign (+) or multiplication sign (*) work with our objects. We will also be able to define both narrowing and widening conversions for our objects which will allow the use of cType with those objects, we will have access to strongly typed collections (i.e. new collection(of myObject)), and will be able to make use of Generics which, among many other things, will enable us to create items such as nullable scalars.

I’ll post more from my information overload as time allows!

Tags: pdc aspdotnet master pages