Session 1 - Managing Memberships and Roles
One of the things ASP.NET 2.0 was designed for was to increase productivity and save developers time. To that end, Microsoft has added a suite of controls and components that allow for easily setting up login forms, creating users, managing permissions, etc. These components and methods take much of the work out of some of the more tedious tasks such as hashing password values, enforcing password creation rules, and locking users out after too many failed login attempts.

Since most of us will be using this with the SqlMembershipProvider for storing the data in SQL Server, it should be noted that by default, this is setup in Visual Studio to work with SQL 2005 Express. For use in a production environment with a full version of SQL, you'll need to prep the database first. There's a utility called aspnet_regsql.exe included with Visual Studio that will do just that. It can be run from the command line or there's a nice GUI if you run it in Windows.

The presenter, Bill Evjen, is also a member of INETA.org, which is an organization of Microsoft user groups that can be a great asset to continue learning.

Session 2 - ASP.NET 2.0 Essentials for building Professional Websites
This was a decent if somewhat repetitive session, which seemed to just recap some best practices from earlier sessions such as:

• Use master pages to control page templates.
• Create user controls to reduce complex and duplicated code
• Plan for localization when you build your site so it's easy to add in later if needed
• Always provide custom error messages to your users. Use the global.asax to create a custom error handler to log errors and/or alert administrators.
• Design and test a caching strategy to improve overall site efficiency.

Session 3 - The Atlas Application Framework
More good stuff on Microsoft's new AJAX-enabling framework for ASP.NET 2.0 by Dino Esposito. This session contained a lot more technical information that I don't have the space to recount here. I plan on trying out a lot of the Atlas demos in the coming weeks and will post some more in-depth info at that time. This is pretty bleeding-edge so I recommend that anyone who's interested simply download the Atlas framework and start playing with it.

Session 4 - Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability
There is always a bottleneck. Find it. Remove it. Repeat.
That was the overall message of this last session of the conference. For any application that manages data and/or supports multiple users, tuning your application for performance should play an important role. Here are some good tips and tricks:

• Minimize round trips for data. Write stored procedures that retrieve multiple recordsets rather than running multiple queries
• Acquire late - release early - open your connection at the last possible moment and close it immediately after you're done. In most cases it's better to have multiple open/close statements than it is to open it once, do all your processing, and close it at the end. ALWAYS make sure to close your connections, SqlDataReaders, etc.
• Put the processing closer to the resources it needs - If you need to sort or filter data, do it in SQL instead of returning a large recordset and doing it in code
• Defrag and rebuild database indexes regularly
• Use the StringBuilder class for string concatenations within loops

Parting Thoughts
I am exhausted. I've crammed more new information into my brain in the past four days than I have in the past four months. Although very tired, I'm also extremely encouraged. With tight budgets and tighter deadlines, often the emphasis is on getting the project done and not necessarily on getting the project done right. Conferences like this provide a great venue for developers to learn in-depth details about the new technologies being offered and how to effectively utilize them. I have several projects coming up this summer that should be able to take advantage of things like Atlas, localization, fragment caching, and web parts. The knowledge I learned this week should help prevent a lot of late nights in the office and allow me to catch up on something I've been missing for a while... sleep.