DevConnections Slides & Wrap-up

Now back in sunny (and unusually cool) Texas, I'm happy to report that DevConnections 2011 was another great developer conference! (Especially if you managed to attend my sessions and workshop on HTML5.) Developers from around the world trekked to the city made famous by the House of Mouse to spend 5 days learning about everything from HTML5 (my favorite) to SharePoint.

For my part, I delivered one half-day workshop on HTML5 and CSS3, plus two sessions: one on practical HTML5/CSS3 techniques you can actually use today, and another on LESS for CSS. Special thanks to everyone that attended (especially those of you that paid for the workshop)! My hope is that you left Orlando with a better understanding of "HTML5" and are now the experts in your offices.

For everyone else, I've made the slide decks from all three sessions available via SlideShare below. If you're really diving in to the content, you'll definitely want to download the slides as I've embedded lots of extra info and links to useful resources in the slide notes.

Finally #1: I created a new Twitter feed during DevConnections EXCLUSIVELY for sharing HTML5/CSS3/modern standards web dev resources. Follow @htmlUI or visit htmlui.com, which will soon re-broadcast and enrich the Twitter content for those of you morally opposed to social media.

Finally #2: Miss DevConnections and still want to talk HTML5? Come find me at MIX11 in Vegas next week (Telerik will have a booth), or visit my HTML5 session at TechEd Atlanta this May.

Slides

Accelerated Adoption: HTML5 and CSS3 for ASP.NET Developers
(Though most of this is generally applicable to any web developer adopting HTML5/CSS3.)

HTML5 and CSS3 Techniques You Can Use Today

Doing More with LESS for CSS

Join me at DevConnections for HTML5

Looking to get a better grasp on HTML5 and CSS3? I hope so! If you've only casually looked at these technologies, 2011 needs to be the year you start to get more in-depth. With the impending release of IE9, the soon to arrive Firefox 4 (and the expected FF 5, 6, and 7 this year), and the near constant updates of Chrome, the world of HTML5-enabled browsers is hitting critical mass. Don't get left behind in the next major wave of web development technologies!

You can jumpstart your HTML5/CSS3 learning by joining me at the upcoming DevConnections conference in Orlando. I'll be doing a half-day HTML5/CSS3 pre-conference workshop, and two sessions during the conference on these topics. It's the perfect way to learn HTML5, enjoy some sunny Florida heat, and maybe visit some famous Orlando destinations (work hard, play hard).

What do you need to do?

Register for DevConnections. Book a quick trip to Orlando. And join my workshop and sessions for some fun HTML5/CSS3 learning.

New divisions at Telerik, DevConnections wrap-up

In case you weren’t watching the Telerik Blogs, or the Telerik Twitter account, or the Telerik Facebook Page, we were in Las Vegas this week celebrating the launch of Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight 4, and…the introduction of two new divisions at Telerik! A busy week to say the least. We also re-launched Telerik.com and launched a beta of the new Telerik TV (more details soon).

On Monday, we introduced two new divisions at Telerik:

• Team Productivity Tools
• Automated Testing Tools

Team Productivity Tools
This brand new division has been created to focus on building tools that help teams better collaborate and work efficiently through the entire application lifecycle. At Telerik, we recognize that building great software doesn’t start with writing code, it starts with capturing ideas, planning requirements, and managing the software development process. As a software development company ourselves, we see gaps in the tools available today for accomplishing these tasks and we aim to fill those gaps with the tools coming out of this division. This division is based in Winnipeg, Canada and headed by ALM and TFS expert (and Microsoft RD) Joel Semeniuk.

We introduced the beta of the first new tool out of this division this week:

1. TeamPulse (licensing TBA)
   TeamPulse is best described as a planning sandbox for TFS. It helps teams quickly capture project requirements, define application personas, and plan the work that must be done to build software. It’s an innovative tool built on Silverlight 4 that we think will be essential to any TFS shop.

Automated Testing Tools
This division is the result of a merger with ArtOfTest, the company Telerik has been partnered with for the last year to provide WebUI Test Studio. Now that we can operate as one company, we can more effectively combine our efforts and bring new solutions to the automated testing and QA world. This new division establishes a Telerik office in Austin, Texas (my neighbor), and it is headed by Christopher Eyhorn and Faris Sweis.

At the same time, we’re introducing two new versions of WebUI Test Studio:

1. WebUI Test Studio QA Edition ($2499)
   Aimed at the non-technical QA, this is a standalone version of WebUI Test Studio that does not require Visual Studio. It’s brand new and super easy to use. It sports TFS integration to ensure dev teams can easily collaborate with QA teams.
2. WebUI Test Studio Developer Edition ($1499)
   This is the “replacement” for the original WebUI Test Studio edition. It’s aimed at developers and it is a Visual Studio plug-in that provides all of the features found in the QA edition.

Clearly, with news this big, it dominated our time at DevConnections and demanded that we do something special. Something like our in-your-face green .NET Ninja shirts that over 200 people wore to the Silverlight 4 keynote, our Telerik VIP Lounge party bracelets, our green Telerik guitars given away by Carl Franklin and his band (that we flew to Vegas to perform), and no less than 4 unique t-shirt designs given away at the booth! It was a big week and everyone that engaged with Telerik went home a winner.

Stay tuned for much more news about our new products, our new divisions, and new things happening across all of the existing areas where Telerik is working hard! Also, be sure to visit our Facebook page for more photos from DevConnections and new videos coming soon.

Join Telerik at DevConnections this week

Hot on the heels of MIX is yet another opportunity for you to interact with Telerik "in the wild." This week most of the Telerik Evangelism crew (sans yours truly) is in Orlando for Spring DevConnections 2009. Telerik is in full-force at DevConnections this Spring with a full booth setup and plenty of t-shirts and prizes to give away to those of you that stop by. We're set-up in booth space 101, so feel free to stop by and check-out some of the new stuff just released in Q1. Further, you've got an opportunity to win a full Telerik Subscription License and learn about Telerik's WPF controls by attending a session tonight titled "Building Business Applications with WPF, Silverlight, and the Telerik RadControls." Telerik Evangelist and Microsoft MVP John Kellar will show you how to get started using the Telerik XAML controls and some of the cool features in these related suites. And this is a developer session- not a marketing session- so come ready to learn (and hopefully ready to win the grand prize)! Enjoy the fun in Orlando and stay tuned for some wrap-up comments later this week.

Telerik Watch Minute: Back from Vegas with News

Wow! It has been a long time since I've managed to just bring you some news announcements from Telerik. Hopefully you've enjoyed the updates from the last couple months on the road- from DevReach in Bulgaria, PDC in LA, and most recently DevConnections in Las Vegas. To help close-out the Fall Travel, I've compiled a short video montage of some time in Vegas to open this Telerik Watch Minute. For more "helpful" Vegas video, don't miss the interviews I did with Miroslav from the Telerik Silverlight Team and Lini from the Telerik ASP.NET Team. Also in this video, I cover a few highilghts from the last month, inlcuding Telerik's big Q3 2008 release, the introduction of a new Learning Guide, and the availability of our RadGridView for Silverlight CTP (and soon to be beta). Enjoy!

Telerik Watch Minute: First look at RadFileExplorer

While in Las Vegas last week for DevConnections, I had time to create one more video with the Telerik crew visiting from our Bulgarian HQ. This time I chatted with Stoyan (a.k.a. Lini) Stratev from the Telerik ASP.NET Team about the new RadFileExplorer control added to the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX in Q3 2008. Now, I wouldn't blame you if you didn't notice this new control in the release. It was added very late to the Q3 builds, and it's really more of a Rad "composite control" (in other words, it's made from a few existing RadControls) than a new "fresh brewed" control. As such, it's demos are tucked away in the RadEditor online demos and they may have escaped your attention during our release week. Nonetheless, this is a very usefull control for scenarios when you need to enable an online file browser experience, and Lini and I give you a complete introduction in this video. I hope you enjoy the new control and the quick video introduction!

Telerik Watch Minute: Telerik drag and drop manager for Silverlight

In this special edition of Telerik Watch Minute shot last week at DevConnections, I took a minute to talk with Miroslav Paskov from the Telerik Silverlight Team. Miroslav is one of the developers responsible for creating the new RadDragAndDropManager found in the RadControls for Silverlight, so I thought it would be cool if he could quickly tell us a little about how the new Manager should be used. And he did just that. The interview is about 7 minutes long and in it we see how the RadDragAndDropManager works, what code is required to add drag/drop to any Silverlight item, and how to handle drag/drop events. If you're curious to know more about this control and want to know how to get started with drag-and-drop in your Silverlight applications, check out the video!

Meet Telerik at DevConnections Las Vegas

It should be obvious by now, but Telerik is full force at Fall DevConnections 2008 in Las Vegas. We've got "the booth" all setup and ready to rock the sponsor expo later this evening, and we'd love to meet anyone in town for the conference. At the booth, we'll be showing-off lots of new functionality that shipped in our recent Q3 2008 release, including our brand new OpenAccess ORM. We've also got a crew of developers from the Telerik product teams here, so if you want to meet the guys that actually put in the hard work to make your developer life easier, stop by booth 113. Oh, and back by popular demand, we've got plenty of .NET Ninja and Geekette shirts to hand out at the booth in addition to some cool .NET Ninja posters you can take home to proudly decorate your cube. It's going to be a great week of demos, .NET, and Vegas fun, so if you're not here, you're missing out. But...since we know not everyone can make it, keep your browsers locked-in on Telerik Watch for more updates and a link to another live feed from our booth! We'll do our best to bring a little bit of DevConnections to you online.

LIVE from Vegas DevConnections GuNote

That's right, it's time for another live blog of a Guthrie keynote. I'm all settled in at the Vegas South Pacific ballroom, I've got a full charge on my MacBook Air, and I'm ready to bring the updates as they happen. I don't expect anything new during this keynote (especially since PDC was last week), but who knows? Get ready with your F5 keys and we'll get started here in a few minutes! Click on to read live blog of GuNote 7:59: John Mayer is playing over the PA. Interesting choice for a developer audience... 8:02: Scott is on stage getting ready, but Mayer is still blasting. Looks like we're going to get a bit of a late start. 8:07: Music is down and it's time to start! Scott is getting things kicked-off with an overview of the next hour. Says he's going to focus today on products that are going to be shipping over the next couple of months and things that are coming next year (ASP.NET 4, VS 2010). Says we'll also see brand new "never before seen" demos of VS 2010 web development features. 8:08: Listing products shipped this year: IIS 7, Win Server 2k8, .NET 3.5, VS 2008, Silverlight 2. Not a bad list, especially considering that .NET 3.5 was more like a major version of .NET. 8:12: Time for the first demo. Scott's going to show ASP.NET Dynamic Data. He polled the audience (of at least 1,000 devs) and asked how many people have played around with Dynamic Data- one (!) person raised their hand. 8:14: Building a LinqToSQL data context for his Dynamic Data demo. I'm surprised he's still demoing LinqToSQL given the recent news that it's more or less a dead-end product in Microsoft right now. Demos like this aren't going to help people make the transition to EF... 8:16: He's now showing the Dynamic Data site running. Reaction from audience is weak (no applause or "ooohs", actually). Not sure if that's because people still don't understand Dynamic Data (even after seeing it) or they just don't want it. 8:20: Done with Dynamic Data. Now talking about the new charting controls Microsoft is shipping for ASP.NET. Free for both ASP.NET and WinForms. Supports both 2D and 3D charts. Looks just like Dundas charts...oh wait. Guthrie is now going to show-off the process for building a chart in ASP.NET. People got excited about seeing these demos. 8:23: Ah! It happened. People clapped for the charting demos. Really, with MS shipping these charts for free now, I think they're about to kill much of the 3rd party market for ASPNET charts. 8:24: Moving on. Scott's now talking ASP.NET MVC. He's still stressing that MVC is not a replacement for WebForms (anybody who thinks MVC is replacing WebForms is wrong). Another audience poll, too. How many people have played with ASP.NET MVC- about 20 hands went up. 8:26: No MVC demos today. Seems he recognizes that it doesn't appeal to the broad audience. Moving on to talk about ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery. 8:28: Just reviewing recent changes to ASPNET AJAX (back/forward button support, script combining, Astoria, etc.). Also talking about the jQuery choice and why MS partnered with that project. Showing jQuery IntelliSense screenshots (no live demos). Yet another audience poll. How many people are already using jQuery- at least 150 to 200 hands. 8:32: Demo time! Showing a ASP.NET MVC application that is pulling photos from Flickr based on a supplied tag. Using jQuery AJAX and JavaScript to power much of the UI binding. Very simple demo that shows some of the power of jQuery for client-side programming. 8:36: Shifting gears now. Done talking about what's shipping today, now going to talk about the future. First-up in the future, ASP.NET 4. 8:37: Reviewing details that were discussed at PDC. ASPNET 4 is going to give developers control over ClientIDs, is going to give better control over ViewState (turn-off at page level, then enable individual controls), is going to include URL routing (a la MVC), and is going to enhance features in Dynamic Data (such as enabling Dynamic Data off of business objects), and a new distributed caching model (i.e. Velocity). Guess the news here is that Velocity will ship as part of .NET 4. 8:40: Moving to talk VS 2010 improvements. VS 10 is going to ship a number of "code improvements" (such as new WPF-based source code editor, better snippets support, better code analysis). Also a number of improvements for web dev, including better AJAX Intellisense, better design-time rendering, and better SharePoint dev support. 8:42: Scott just showed the new web.config model that is going to make it easy to manage settings per dev environment. You can now easily have "Web.Debug.config," "Web.Release.config," and "Web.Staging.config" (or whatever) and your VS will automatically consume or package the correct web.config depending your environment. 8:44: VS 2010 demo time! Jeff (last name?) from the VS 10 team is on stage to do the demo. Is starting by showing us code completing of IntelliSense (type two characters, hit tab, VS completes entire tag with runat="server" tag already done for you!). Another example, add a control validator, VS will automatically fill-in all required properties and try to auto fill the ControlToValidate property. Also showed new "Surround With" feature- highlight some code, right-click, select "Surround With," choose what you want to wrap the code with. 8:49: Time for a demo of how many keystrokes new VS features save. They're cranking-up some music. Jeff's now trying to complete page using IntelliSense of VS 2008. He's got 60 seconds on the clock. And he's off! Time ran out, he didn't complete the page, and 232 keystrokes when time ran out. Now time for VS 2010. Eye of the Tiger music starts. And he beats the clock! With 132 keystrokes he finishes the page. Very cool demo and proof of how much time the new code features of VS 2010 could save. 8:53: Jeff is now showing a TDD approach to developing a MVC site with VS2010. VS 10 will make it easy to refactor classes out of your unit tests (or anywhere in VS, for that matter). Type a class name (even if it doesn't exist), VS will auto-add to IntelliSense and give you quick action for generating a new class. Basically, VS will be building-in support for some of what tools like ReSharper do today. 9:00: Jeff is still doing his TDD demo. He's written a test, used it to create his MVC controller (via the VS 10 refactoring features), and now he's going to create a UI. Showing new "Add View" command in VS 10 that will automatically create new MVC ViewPage for a controller. Cool feature, but no reaction from crowd because (remember) no one is using MVC. 9:04: And Jeff is finally done with the TDD demo. Overall though, a cool look at what's coming in VS 10. Definitely going to be a worthwhile upgrade for web developers! Now back to Scott to wrap things up (I think). 9:06: Scott is talking about the VS 10 shell and how it is going to be built in WPF. Promoting the benefit of this transition, such as multi-monitor support, higher performing UI, and, of course, deep customization support. He's now going to show the WPF Editor Comment Extension he demoed at PDC (i.e. using MEF, he's going to build a class that re-visualizes comments in the source code editor). 9:11: Continuing to talk, now about the ".NET Continum." In other words, time to talk Silverlight. Overviewing Silverlight 2's features and some of it's "selling points." Listing all of the big examples of "real" Silverlight use (such as the Olympics, Netflix, etc.) 9:16: Now talking about the UI control story for Silverlight. Talking about MS' goal to ship hundreds of rich UI controls "out of the box" with Silverlight. Not showing any new UI controls, though, or demos. VS 10 will have drag-and-drop support for Silverlight, design-time data binding support, and all the other goodies devs need to be productive developing for Silverlight. 9:18: Scott's now going to wrap-up with some Silverlight demos (guess I spoke too soon a second ago). First Silverlight demo, the Hard Rock Memorabilia Deep Zoom demo (first shown at Mix in March). Scott did just say the Hard Rock Deep Zoom app is "dynamic" and powered by SQL Server. I find that interesting since I wasn't aware you could dynamically build Deep Zoom tiles outside of the Deep Zoom Composer. Fact check needed... 9:21: Now showing the popular Silverlight Patient Journey Demonstrator demo app. Google it and you can play with the demo, too. 9:22: Final wrap-up slide. MS is aiming to improve web development by providing greater productivity, flexibility, and power. Think their offerings today are great; think the future "gets even better!" 9:23: That's it! Music is up and Scott is done. Thanks for tuning-in. Hope you enjoyed the coverage. Stay tuned for more updates from DevConnections this week.

DevConnections Presentation Follow-up, Slides and Code

In addition to being Platinum sponsors of this year's spring Dev Connections, Telerik also had the opportunity to do one "vendor session" presentation. I took the stage last night with Tervel Peykov from the Telerik ASP.NET product teams to deliver this session, and I am happy to report that it was a huge success! More than 150 people turned out to fill the room and catch our presentation on developing "rich, responsive, high-performance" applications with the new RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX. The presentation generated a lot of good questions- both on the general technologies covered and the RadControls- so all-in-all, we were very happy we had this chance to get in front of a big DevConnections audience and talk about our controls.

If you were among the crowd at the presentation, thanks again for coming out! It was a lot of fun to meet you- most of you - and I hope you enjoyed the content we covered. As promised, the slides and code from our presentation are being made available at the bottom of this blog post, so whether you were in attendance or not, you can download the slides and code and learn how the RadControls can help you as a developer. I also want to congratulate again the three people that won full RadControl subscriptions after our presentation- if you're reading this, send me some lucky lotto numbers!

Download the slides and code

LIVE from DevConnections 2008 Expo Floor

Now that you've vicariously attended the big Scott Guthrie ASP.NET Connections keynote, it's time to visit the spring DevConnections 2008 Expo floor! The expo space at DevConnections is not huge- especially by TechEd standards- but it is packed with a lot of good companies showing their wares. And Telerik is on the expo floor this year in a big way- a big, big way. We unveiled for the first time our brand new, 20' x 20', custom-built booth!

The booth (pictured above and in a new gallery) features a ton of hands-on demo space and it has a couple of big screen HDTVs for large audience viewing. When you visit us at a conference now, it will be easier than ever for us to show you all of our great product demos and even let you take the controls and try the demos for yourself. We've also got a swank audio system pumping out the tunes from our demo videos, giving our booth a nice laid-back, modern vibe. I think we have more than a "booth" now; now we have "Club Telerik."

We've already had some great conversations on the floor with people interested in our controls. Our dedicated fans customers have also shown-up to say 'hi', meet some of the guys from the product teams (there are 5 of them here), and tell us how they're using our tools. That's always the best part of these shows.

Finally, we also unvield a great new t-shirt at this conference. If you've been to any of the big conferences Telerik attended in the past, you may know that we've established a reputation for always giving away some of the "best" .NET t-shirts you can find. Among our big "hits" from the past are the ".NET Superstar" shirt and the female-oriented "Geekette" shirt. This year, we're proud to introduce the very cool ".NET Ninja" t-shirt!

I'll soon post details (and a picture) on how you can win one of these shirts for yourself, so keep your feed readers tuned-in for continuing "live" coverage of Connections 2008.

LIVE from ASP.NET Connections ScottGu Keynote

Note: Due to connection problems, this coverage was previously recorded.

8:00 AM - Okay, we're here, settled in to our seats, trying to get the Sprint wireless Internet to work. Hopefully things will work soon. Scott's on stage finishing some Starbucks and waiting for people to finish streaming-in.

8:03 AM - Here we go. Scott's welcoming us to the show and commenting on his past trips to speak at DevConnections. He's also running through the crazy list of teams he manages. This guy is a machine.

8:05 AM - Talking about VS 2008 and .NET 3.5. Just running down the basic list of features and benefits of these new releases. Nothing new if you've been following .NET and Visual Studio actively.

8:08 AM - Shreeeeeek! His wireless mic just had some major feedback that really woke-up this sleepy-eyed crowd. Now everybody's paying attention.

8:09 AM - Still talking Visual Studio features. Talking now about support for debugging in to the .NET framework. He polled the audience to ask how many people have used the feature before. No many people here have.

8:10 AM - Demo time! Scott's showing-off the ability to browse and debug the core ASP.NET code in Visual Studio 2008. The feature downloads the .NET source on-demand from Microsoft's servers so you can view it in the VS debugger. Pretty cool learning tool, if nothing else.

8:13 AM - Back to the slides and now time to talk about IIS7 and ASP.NET. Again with the basic feature coverage.

8:17 AM - Time for another demo. This time we're going to look at some IIS features and how they integrate tightly with ASP.NET. Scott reminded us that the IIS7 Manager communicates over HTTP, which means you can easily use the IIS7 Manager to manage servers through firewalls wherever they're hosted. Pretty cool. He's also showing us how you can use the IIS7 Manager to directly manage your ASP.NET Membership users and roles. You no longer have to build your own custom page or UI to manage your .NET Membership users- just use IIS7.

8:20 AM - Slides again. We're now talking IIS7 support for web farms. Mentions that Dell.com and some other huge commerce site are already running on .NET 3.5 and IIS7. Point: IIS7 can scale very well.

8:22 AM - Time to shift gear and talk about what's coming (vs. what we already have). Finally.

8:23 AM - First-up is talk about the extensions being added to ASP.NET this year, like Dynamic Data, history support in ASP.NET AJAX, and MVC. He said we can also expect additional improvements in VS 2008 that deliver better JS formatting and that make it easier to support other Ajax libraries (like JQuery).

8:25 AM - Demo. He's now showing us how Data Dynamics works and how you go about creating a Dynamics site in VS 2008. Just a minute before he polled the audience to ask how many people build SQL driven websites and again got crickets. This audience is -really- dead and just not than excited this morning. Scott made a joke that he thought he may be at the wrong conference speaking to an audience that's never heard of .NET that was received to chuckles.

8:33 AM - Still showing a Dynamic Data demo and how the scaffolding automatically builds a CRUD interface. He's also talking LinqToSQL/LinqToEntities and how those technologies play a central row to Dynamic Data's features. Actually, he's going to show us how to use LinqToSQL to do business rule validation when data is updated. With this dead crowd, though, nobody is "oohing" or "awing" when he shows a what is supposed to be a cool feature. Poor Scott. It's like talking to an oil painting. Finished the demo by saying Dynamic Data stuff would be officially released later this summer.

8:38 AM - Back to the slides and now on to ASP.NET MVC. Scott started talking about MVC as a "new way" to do ASP.NET programming then quickly caught himself when he switched slides and revised his language to "new option." It's clear they're -really- trying make sure people understand MVC is not going to replace WebForms. Case in point: the first bullet on his MVC slide called it a "new option," the last bullet said "it's not for everyone." Get the theme?

8:42 AM - Just talking about how MVC works. Nothing new or shocking here, but definitely look for Scott's slides later if you're interested in his diagrams.

8:44 AM - Now for the demo. Scott's going to show us how to build a MVC site in Visual Studio. It's just another MVC catalog demo (showing Product, Category, Detail views), which seem to be about as common as carousel demos for WPF. I understand that this is a very clear and easy concept to demo MVC's functionality, but 'common. Let's see some more creativity with MVC! Scott's also showing us how to write unit tests for MVC, which is actually a good way to demo MVC and get people familiar with seeing TDD.

8:55 AM - ...writing code for MVC demo...

8:58 AM - We're finally done with MVC and now we're back to the slides. Scott's talking ".NET Continuum"- essentially, the story of Silverlight. "We're coming-up with a plug-in called Silverlight." Really?! Shocking. Honestly, who is forking over $1800 to attend this conference without knowing about Silverlight?

9:01 AM - Scott's covering Silverlight's basic feature list (multi-language support, WPF UI framework, LINQ support, etc.). Says Silverlight is about 1000 times faster than JavaScript running in the browser in terms of processing time!

9:04 AM - Scott says Silverlight currently has 35 UI controls. Really? Last time I counted there were no more than 29. Maybe there are some new controls that haven't been revealed he's counting. He also says there will be over 100 controls provided in Silverlight in a years time! That's news (finally).

9:08 AM - Silverlight demo time. Scott's getting things started by showing us the Hard Rock Memorabilia site (that premiered at MIX) that showcases Deep Zoom. More evidence that Deep Zoom is a cool demo technology, but hard to demo for practical uses. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Memorabilia app has generated the most crowd excitement and interest so far. Let me rephrase, the most impractical technology shown by Scott today is the only one that got people stirring. Go figure.

9:15 AM - Scott's now moved past the Hard Rock site and is showing us how to build a simple Silverlight site in Visual Studio. Says 99% of the time a Silverlight content will be running in the content of an ASP.NET website. Thinks of it more as rich content enhancements you can add to your ASP.NET site. Interesting perspective.

9:21 AM - ...still building his basic Silverlight demo. Using Blend to show-off design-time features. Showing workflow integration between Visual Studio and Blend. He's now building the simple IM application in Silverlight that he's built a number of blog posts around. If you're interested, refer to his blog posts.

9:27 AM - Demo is still going. Looks like Scott is going to run a little past his 9:30 cut-off.

9:31 AM - "In the future, you may see an ASP.NET server control that uses Silverlight for rich UI presentation but keeps data processing on the server." Interesting! Microsoft is thinking about making Silverlight a core front-end option for ASP.NET.

9:33 AM - Scott's wrapping things-up now. Reviewing what we "learned" today. Still saying Silverlight is due "later this year"- no willingness to get more specific on the time frame.

9:35 AM - And that's it! Hope you enjoyed the coverage (even if there wasn't anything particularly "exciting" in this keynote). Clearly, a keynote at MIX and a keynote at DevConnections mean very different things.

With the keynote coverage wrapped, stay tuned for some live booth blogging from the expo floor soon.

Join Telerik at DevConnections next week

We're here in sunny central Florida again (Orlando, to be specific) for spring DevConnections 2008! Actually, we're really here for ASP.NET Connections, but all of the "connections" kind of run together in my opinion. This is an exciting show for Telerik for a few reasons:

1. We've got a brand new, custom designed, huge booth to premier at this show!
2. We just released Q1 2008, so we've got some great new demos to show-off
3. We've got a cool vendor session to present at the conference
   

If you're in the Orlando area, come on out to DevConnections and say hello. The Telerik crew (and our shiny new booth) will be in booth space 107 on the exhibit floor. We're also a Platinum Sponsor of this event, so I'm sure that means there will be some Telerik swag floating around that you can collect.

If you're not in the Orlando area (or if you just don't want to pay "the man" to get in the door), fret not. Just like I did at MIX in March, I'll be making my best effort to live blog the various keynotes that I attend so you can experience all of the action from the comfort of your keyboard. I'll also be updating the blog with periodic updates from the show floor, complete with pictures, so you'll almost feel like you're here with us at the event...almost...

These events are always a lot of fun and we love meeting customers in person. Stay tuned for all of the DevConnections updates- things kick-off Monday morning with ScottGu's keynote!