Tech Ed 2005 Day (-1) – INETA and Pre-con

Tomorrow, Tech Ed officially begins with day 0.  Today is the day before as well as the pre-conference sessions.  This morning I slept a little later than I should have, but I didn’t go to sleep until 4AM anyway.  Scott Bellware and I went straight to the JW Marriott for the INETA summit.  I met Julia Lerman and Chris Wallace in person and saw some familiar faces from Party with Palermo the night before. 


Now I’m at Jeff Prosise’s pre-con session: The Zen of ASP.NET 2.0.  He’s doing a great job of going over all the new features in 2.0 for ASP.  When doing demos of feature-sets, it’s quite difficult because you want to set a good example, but how do you demo the SqlDataSource control without calling data out of your UI layer?  You can’t, but afterwards he made sure to mention the drawbacks of the absense of a dedicated data layer.  We all know a lot of RAD programmers write all code in Page_Load, and their applications are very hard to change after version 1, so I recognize the difficulty in demoing the cool new features without encouraging bad design.


Later tonight I’ll be attending the INETA party, and I can’t stay too later because I really need some sleep.