I attended four sessions yesterday that are worth commenting on--and one that's not.

The first session was entitled, "Building Customizable Applications using .NET" and was all about Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) that was previewed during the morning keynote. VSTA consists of two parts: (1) the VSTA IDE, which is a simplified version of Visual Studio.NET targeted to application customization; and, (2) a runtime engine that's embedded into the "host" application (that is, the application for which you're developing customized add-ins). The VSTA IDE only supports VB.NET and C#, not any of the other .NET programming languages. The VSTA IDE can be customized by adding a "New Project" wizard, customized help, sample code, snippets, start-up context, etc. It looks like it would be possible to create a customized version of the VSTA IDE for developing CFX tags to be deployed on BlueDragon.NET. In that case, the VSTA host run-time would probably replace the current CFX implementation in BlueDragon.NET. It's interesting, but I'm not sure how much demand there might be for something like this, since creating CFX tags in Visual Studio.NET currently is pretty straightforward.

The second session was, "Writing Performant Managed Code in .NET 2.0". There were two items of good news from this session: (1) we're already following most of the recommended "best practices" for writing high performance code for .NET; which means that, (2) most of the performance enhancements that are being made in .NET 2.0 will be realized by BlueDragon.NET without us having to change a single line of code. In addition, there are some new features in .NET 2.0 that we should be able to take advantage of to get a further performance boost--I'd added this to our "to-do" list for BlueDragon.NET 7.0.

The third session was, "ASP.NET on IIS 7". This turned out to be a dive into details of information presented at the IIS 7 Overview session that I attended earlier. One thing that it did serve to emphasize is the tight integration of ASP.NET and IIS 7, to the point that it really doesn't make sense to refer to them as two separate products anymore. They did present information about some interesting new caching features in IIS 7 that are probably worth investigating in more detail to see how we can take advantage of them in BlueDragon.NET.

The final session was, "ASP.NET: Developing RIAs with Atlas (Part 1)". Atlas is Microsoft's name for their ASP.NET-based AJAX implementation. Atlas consists of three components: (1) a client-side JavaScript library; (2) server-side ASP.NET extensions; and, (3) client-side "application services". Regarding the latter, it's unclear to me whether some of these "application services" are specific to IE 7 or why they're considered separate from the client-side JavaScript library. The client JavaScript library consists of a type system for JavaScript (classes, interfaces, inheritance, etc.), and a base class library with support for debugging, tracing, networking, etc. The server-side ASP.NET extensions consist of a "web services bridge" that provides access to server-side objects, and a set of ASP.NET server controls that encapsulate complex HTML/DHTML and avaScript. You can find out more about atlas on atlas.asp.net.