TechEd 2007 Australia/New Zealand Slides and Code

I just got back into Redmond after doing a couple of presentions at TechEd Australia and New Zealand as well as spending a few weeks vacationing down-under. I did both an Ajax talk and a Silverlight talk. It was great to see the turnout for both talks at both locations, as well as get a chance to many folks who were new to both ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight.

Here is a quick outline of what I covered in those talks that you can use as a guide to the slides and code.

Ajax Patterns with ASP.NET AJAX (Slides and code)

• ASP.NET AJAX OOP pattern - I wrote some script classes to demonstrate the pattern first-hand. I also took this opportunity to demonstrate the script class browser working against the pattern, in much the same way that script intellisense in VS2008 works.
• Behaviors and script attachment - how the ASP.NET script framework provides a structure and pattern for encapsulating script functionality that is separated from HTML content, facilitates designer/developer workflow, and starts you down the path of creating Ajax-enabled server controls.
• Logical navigation - I demonstrated that despite the fact that Ajax apps have a bad rap of breaking the back button, Ajax actually allows providing a more intuitive back/forward/bookmarkability experience to the user.
• Search optimization - I demonstrated a search engine optimization approach that is based on embedding data as semantic markup and using Ajax to provide a rich visualization over the data and to page between different views of data.

The last two topics caught the most attention from the audience - the slide deck contains some new slides I added for these topics to help get the concepts across. Feel free to suggest any other patterns or techniques you'd like me to add to this talk, or blog about. I like to introduce at least a couple new concepts with each iteration of this talk.

Extending Ajax Applications with Silverlight (slides and code)

• Hello World - I did the Clock demo, the Silverlight equivalent of 'Hello World' in script and managed code to demonstrate the basic programming model. Silverlight was new to well over 3/4ths of the audience.
• Embedding Media - I showed the media server control from ASP.NET AJAX that allows embedding audio/video playback to an Ajax page in a super easy manner... while providing full flexibility for customizing the skin to match your site using the Expression tools, and power to savvy developers who might want to leverage the client-side events to implement functionality such as closed-captioning.
• HTML and script interop - I showed how Silverlight isn't meant to be a disconnected island on the page. Instead managed code in Silverlight can access the HTML DOM to enable managed HTML programming, and can support standard Web concepts like deep-linking. On the other end, managed code can be exposed to script thereby allowing easy incremental use of Silverlight in existing Ajax apps.
• Offline storage - I showed how isolated storage in Silverlight can enable you to do interesting things such as saving off drafts of partially completed forms in addition to the more traditional uses of offline storage and data caching.
• Local file I/O - I combined the ability to open and read local files with the Silverlight networking stack to demonstrate a multi-file upload control that works well in Ajax scenarios, i.e. without requiring postbacks and the standard browser UI for file uploads or with custom ActiveX controls (which one member of the audience in fact had done so). As expected, this perhaps got the most number of heads nodding in interest.