Heroes Happen {2008} - wrap up : Nicholas Rayner

Heroes Happen {2008} - wrap up

Following on from my previous post. After a great lunch, courtesy of Microsoft, it was off to the Visual Studio 2008 and ASP.NET presented by Dave Glover. Dave presented on some great improvements made to Visual Studio 2008 around Web Authoring. VS2008 now sports the same Web Authoring engine found in Expression Web, a huge improvement over VS2005. Some of the major improvements are:

Better CSS support
Javascript debugging and Intellisense
Target multiple frameworks (.NET 2.0, 3.0 & 3.5) from the one environment
Built-in tools for Windows Presentation Framework and AJAX

After another break, more free food and coffee, it was off to Andrew Coates' session on Visual Studio 2008 and the Office Development Platform session. This was another great session around Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) to customise Microsoft Office Applications, improve user experiences with using the Ribbon customizations, Sharepoint workflows and Office Application management improvements in the 2007 suite.

Next was the Visual Studio 2008 and Application Lifecycle Management presented by Anthony Borton, Visual Studio Team System consultant & Microsoft MVP. This session was around Visual Studio 2008 Team System and the tools included to improve the Application Development Lifecycle challenge.

This was one of the best Microsoft events that I have been too. Everyone there, both the speakers and delegates, were very passionate about the tools being shown and there was a lot of excitement in the air.

The Heroes Happen {2008} launch now moves onto: