All that glitters...

Session 12
Hidden gems in ASP.NET 2.0

I must admit, I had not noted who would be delivering this session and my heart sank as I ascended into the auditorium and immediately recognised the distinct and lush facial hair of Stefan Schackow. It's not that he is not extremely knowledgeable, for he is. Its' more that the style of delivery does nothing to impart his knowledge into my grey matter.

Again, there were a copious amount of demo's based around a number of ASP.NET themes:

Ajax Callbacks
Why not implement ICallbackEventHandler instead of full blown AJAX in your applications. This will give you the ability to update a particular portion of the page without full-page postback. The method getCallbackResult returns the data from the server for the page portion as a string. It is then upto the developer to parse and repopulate the page.

Expression Builders
We were exposed to the magic behind the $ expressions e.g. and advised to use expression builders to extend the parsing engine. The Web.Config is the place to register your custom expression builder. A couple of demo's followed at this point.

Encrypted Configuration Sections
We were shown how it is possible to encrypt sections of your configuration files such as Web.Config. The encryption used is triple DES and can be applied via the Aspnet-regiis.exe. Connection strings containing username and passwords could be protected using encryption although it was pointed out that this is probably bad practice anyway.

Adapters
Next on the agenda were adapters and more specifically, control adapters and page adapters. Given a control, a custom piece of code can observe and effect the rendering of the control. As a demonstration, Stefan implemented the render method of a textbox. He discussed the benefits of creating your own browser definition file and dropping into the appbrowsers folder.

Other topics up for discussion were custom cache dependencies, post-cache substitution, Virtual path providors, session state partitioning and async pages.

I must admit, I thought that some real 24 carat nuggets would be revealed in this session but was left feeling a tad disappointed.