DevConnections - Day One

Right now I'm down in beautiful Orlando, FL for the 2006 Microsoft DevConnections conference that my company was gracious enough to send me to. Today was day one and I just returned from the reception and keynote speeches by Scott Guthrie and Matt Nunn. Both speakers were excellent and I'm looking forward to the sessions tomorrow.

There's a ton of stuff going on during the next three days but I'm going to concentrate on the ASP.NET track. It looks like one of the more interesting topics is going to be "ATLAS", Microsoft's new framework for implementing AJAX functionality in ASP.NET. Mr. Guthrie did a brief demo of it during the keynote and it looks very impressive. With just a few lines of code, he took a DataGrid with paging, sorting, edit, and deleting, and made the whole thing AJAX-enabled. It looks both easy and powerful, and best of all it's free. You can download the Atlas framework from the asp.net site and try it out.

One of the more interesting things I found out was that the popular social networking site MySpace.com is running on ASP.NET 2.0. MySpace ranks as the #2 most popular site on the Internet (Yahoo! holds #1) with 1.5 billion page views per day. That's some serious traffic. Later this month they plan to role out a new profile personalization engine using Atlas so that'll be something to look for.
More info on how MySpace takes advantage of Microsoft technology.

There're conference sessions and events from 7AM until 9PM tomorrow so I'll hope to have some more good info to report then.