If you have not seen Glen Gordon present you are really missing out. Every time I see one of his MSDN Events they are always better than the one before it. This time the parking lot was full because right after the MSDN event Star Wars 3 was showing. Glen really showed his love for Star Wars when he got there at 7 something AM to protect his space runner from being over taken.
This was a very interesting MSDN and the topics were intriguing considering I had just heard the Indigo presentation from David Chappell that morning. The reason I found it intriguing is because the first topic was on Web services and WSE 2.0. Glen did a great job of showing how to create and consume the services. Next Glen showed us how you can WSE 2.0 for your web services to make them more secure, trace their output, and many other options just by clicking the options from the WSE 2.0 screen. You still ask what was so intriguing about David Chappell with Indigo and WSE 2.0 by Glen. Well it appears that Indigo will only support WSE 3.0 so you will have to rewrite your applications that are WSE 1.0 and WSE 2.0. I wouldn’t think that Microsoft would make an MSDN event focused on pushing these technologies without making the point of best practices for moving forward.
After a short break and the popcorn people running out of popcorn temporarily we headed back into the theater for the next presentation. Glen started out telling us it was SQL 2005 so I was interested in that, but then he showed us so really cool features of SQL 2005 like creating a web service from inside SQL. This was a really cool feature if you just want to expose some data without writing a wrapper class. He also showed us how to use Reporting Services to create a URL that you can call from a browser. Once he had the URL he created an application that called the Reporting Service (SSRS) web service. He used the Render method of the web service and put tiff files of the report in a Winforms application. Really cool idea!
The last topic Glen talked about was Click Once deployment; it had the most amount of questions. It was Click Once deployment. This was a neat feature to see, but nothing really new from the App Updater Block. He showed us how you can easily deploy your project with a few settings for another person to download. You have the option of creating the application to put a Start Menu item in the Start Menu or just running from the web. He changed the background of the main form and downloaded it with the options. To do the coding demos Glen showed off some of the capabilities of Snippets.
I really enjoyed the sessions and hope everyone there had a great time. The content was given out in DVD format and so was VS 2005 Beta 2. Check out both of these resources for the code shown and the tools to build them with. See you at the next MSDN Event for ASP.NET 2.0.
— Brendon Schwartz
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