Yesterday was the first day of the Belgian DevDays 2007.
There were lots of interesting sessions, unfortunately with 3 simultaneous developer sessions at the same time it was hard to choose.

The opening keynote by David Chappell:
David Chappell is a great speaker, it was nice starting off the conference with his session. He gave an overview of .NET 3.0 centered on the developer audience. The second part was for the system administrator’s audience, focusing on the new sysadmin products by Microsoft.

The other sessions:

MOSS Policies and Records Center: presented by Patrick Tisseghem. Policies and the Policies object model Some very nice things can be done by using the Policies framework. Hopefully more on that later.

The .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) Framework, by Raj Pai. We got a preview of the new LINQ syntax and its possibilities.

Extending ASP.NET Ajax by Jeff Prosise: this was my favorite session. Some tips he gave:

• Always define the UpdateMode=Conditional when using multiple UpdatPanels on a page. If you leave it to default all UpdatePanels in a page get updated without you noticing it. He proved this to us by using a tool called the “Web Development Helper”. This IE plugin developed by Nikhil Kotari offers tool to trace HTTP information, ASP.NET and Ajax. Download it at http://projects.nikhilk.net/Projects/WebDevHelper.aspx
• Use the ASP.NET client JavaScript libraries and extend the client object model.
• ASP.NET Ajax client libraries allow for implementation of kind of OOP in JavaScript. He showed us how we can use namespaces, inheritance of objects, defining “classes”. There is some information on this on the ASP.NET Ajax docs site: http://ajax.asp.net/docs/tutorials/CreatingClientComponentPrototype.aspx

Now, let’s get Orcas CTP and start coding :-)