Went down to the MDC (Microsoft Development Conference) in Chicago, Came down early to meet up with some of our Microsoft contacts. Great opportunity to network - and line up speakers for the Madison .NET User Group (www.maddotnet.com).
Asked by Larry Clarkin (who did a great job of running the speakers, etc.) to assist with the Community track, so we put some time aside to speak about the .NET User Group as well as the other technologies that were being discussed throughout the day.
Spent time investigating Azure (www.azure.com) - Microsoft's cloud computing implementation. This is Microsoft's way to compete with Amazon, etc with virtual server "Cloud" application hosting -- but they're taking a spin on it by leveraging the existing .NET developer's skill base and tightly integrating it into their development tools. Azure is currently in CTP (Community Technical Preview) - look forward to spending more time on this and identifying when and where it would benefit my clients.
Also, very excited after looking at the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2010. Some of the features that look to be exceptional are the QA features - giving the developer not only a VIDEO of any exceptions as they occur on the tester's machine, but also give the developers the ability to debug into the very code - and hit the exact exception - to see why the error occurred. No more wasting time chasing down errors that are difficult to reproduce...
Also VS2010 has some nice Regression / Unit testing enhancements - including the concept of a "Gated Checkin" - wherein the team can set it up that prior to any code check-in, all code is updated, and built to validate that there will no longer be any broken builds.
Finished up with getting the low down on the latest ASP.NET 4.0 features that are in planning to be rolled out. Check out -- www.codeplex.com/aspnet -- for more details on those.
Thanks to all the folks at Microsoft, very nice one-day event.