Last 14th and 15th april were the TechDays 2005 at the Ramada Park Hotel as every year. During these two days, different speakers explained and demonstrated the next Microsoft technologies we will use the next few years. This was a good opportunity to do some networking or simply chatting with other colleagues or speakers. For the first time this year, there were 3 different tracks for infrastructure, architecture and, of course, development.

Day One
Soyez pr??t(s) pour ASP.NET 2.0 / Be ready for ASP.NET 2.0
Christine Dubois and Bernard Fedotoff of AgilCom exposed some new features of ASP.ENT 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. Now, it will be possible to split class definition in multiple files in order to put all designed-generated code in one file and to write our code in an other one. That feature is called partial class. If that notion sounds interesting, it is not so new and exists already in other programming languages like Objective-C and its categories. Moreover, on large projects, finding a class in a big tree is already hard, so let’s imagine if we start to split classes over multiple files, it would not be easier…
Then, there was a presentation about Master Pages, skins and themes. Master Page concept is the most interesting to me, allowing to no more inheriting pages. On the skins and themes side, it is no more than CSS files for server components.
The main goal of that presentation was to write zero line of code. But all designer generated code was in the .aspx page remembering me my old good asp 3.0 pages some years back. The programmation showed is more declarative, using attributes instead of code behind.
Good point for Visual Studio 2005, refactoring. It will be possible to change a public class variable to a property in just one right click. Changing a variable name will also be easy without doing a search-and-replace…

L’acc??s aux donn??es sous ASP.NET 2.0 / Data Access with ASP.NET 2.0
The same speakers for that presentation about data access and spoke about new related classes. Caching, using a table and some triggers to call client code, was also the subject of the show.

Nouveaut?? dans les langages / New Language Features
Nicolas Clerc of Cross Systems was the speaker for that subject. He presented the generics for C# and VB.NET, allowing these languages to know all the goods of the C++ templates. Generics will allow to specify types for some data structure such ArrayList for example. Type problems will be detected at compile-time instead of run-time.

Nouveaut?? des Windows Forms 2.0 et d??ploiement “Click Once” / Windows Forms 2.0 New Feature : “Click Once”
As I understood, Windows Forms will be called Smart Clients….
Click Once seems to be a very good deployement technology with pros from rich clients and pros from web applications. The lasts allows to update without any impact on the client side. On the other hand, rich clients have a more complex user interface. With a link in an intranet (or internet), the application using Click Once will be downloaded on the client side and then run. That application can be really installed on the client side, showing it under the “Add / Remove Programs” of Windows or it can just be in a user cache. What is interesting is on the update side. When an update is available, the application will prompt the user if he want to update or not (the update can be forced). In the case of a real installation, it will be possible to roll back of one (only) version in the configuration panel. Click Once will offer a framework to update the application programmatically.

L’acc??s aux donn??es sous Windows Forms 2.0 / Data Access in Windows Forms 2.0
That presentation was a bit a recap of the one abount data access with ASP.NET 2.0. The new DataGridView control and asynchronous data access was also presented. Moreover, Visual Studio 2005 will offer a real dataset designed.

Day Two
L’ergonomie avec ASP.NET 2.0 / ASP.NET 2.0 Ergonomics
ASP.NET 2.0 will generate XHTML which is an XML compliant version of HTML, adding closing tags the ones that were not mandatory (<br>). A little recap about Master Pages, skins and themes is done. Finally, with Visual Studio 2005 will come about 50 new controls.

L’ergonomie avec les WinForms 2.0 / WinForms 2.0 Ergonomics
The most of that presentation was about ToolStripControls. A cool feature in Visual Studio 2005 seems to be the property editor.

Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005
Some examples with Word and Excel were showed. Seems to be easy…

Windows Mobile Applications
Features of Visual Studio 2005 for mobile developments were showed. Most important point was the true mobile emulator.