In a full week of sessions at TechEd Developers 2007 in Barcelona, there is a lot of information to be assimilated, new contacts made and because of a professional change in the near future still very much a different TechEd.

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 features
With a RTM release by the end of this month Visual Studio 2008 is finally there. There are so many new exciting features to the C# and VB.Net languages and new functionalities in the IDE.
There is a great demo project called Dinnernow.net that uses several of the new technologies like LINQ, ASP.NET Ajax Extensions, WCF, WF, Powershell, etc. I went to two TechEd sessions (presented by David Aiken and Matt Winkler) that gave an overview of the whole project and what I can say is this: check it out, it will really help you understand ways to use these new technologies and features.

LINQ: I got the chance to learn more about LINQ in two sessions at TechEd. The good news for SharePoint developers: there is already a LINQ to SharePoint implementation on the way which is part of my Resources for WSS and MOSS for some time now :-)
Bart De Smet currently has an alpha version available at codeplex. There is a small video interview with Bart about this feature on the TechEd site:
http://www.mseventseurope.com/teched/07/developers/news/Pages/day5.aspx. Scroll down to “LINQ to SharePoint Implementation” for the video.

Microsoft Search Server 2008
Microsoft is working on a new search server that is based for on the search feature found in MOSS 2007. Checkout Joris’ great post on this for more details. 
There is also an “Express” version of this server, the release candidate is available here: http://blogs.msdn.com/enterprisesearch/archive/2007/11/06/announcing-microsoft-search-server-2008-express.aspx

Let’s make Popfly mashups!
With social networking sites like Facebook becoming more and more popular with all kinds of users, I love playing around with Popfly.
The Popfly explorer beta is out for download by the way.

I also had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people about all kinds of subjects. The Belgian party on Wednesday was such a great opportunity. See you at a next event!

Check out some photos of the event:

Yesterday I had the chance to ask two quick questions to Spencer during TechEd:

What is your favorite WCM feature in MOSS?
Definitely Content Query Web Part: this is an extremely powerful feature that is largely underestimated. This web part is very efficient both in performance and very easy to customize its look without one line of code (compiled code that is, you still need some XSLT code).

How is your book on WCM together with Andrew Connell going?
It’s coming along very well, a bit slower than we had hoped. The first draft version has just been finished for a first review and people should be able to get it in the beginning of next year.

Thanks Spencer for the time!

I just went to my first session on SharePoint during this edition of TechEd: “Building a High Performance .com Site on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007”.
Spencer Harbar brought us an informative overview of the top things to take into account in regards to performance in WCM SharePoint sites.

Here are some of my notes:

• Performance considerations must be taken into account at the start of the project so that optimization is built into the project from the start.
• Long running processes in web parts: make use of the asynchronous programming techniques to run processes in parallel.
• Accessing the object model:
  - always call .Dispose() on SPSite and SPWeb. These are actually managed wrappers to unmanaged code. The .Net garbage collector does not automatically release these objects in a timely fashion.
  - use the using()statement. This statement automatically calls the .Dispose() method for you.
• When accessing collections via a property of an object, make a local variable to hold the collection and then access the local object. This going much faster, up to 25% performance increase.
• Use the Content Query Web Part CQWP): it’s optimized and uses internal caching of queries that no custom web part can achieve, by far.
• Use output caching in MOSS: this is not active by default but is a great increase in performance and can very easily be activated via the site settings interface.
• Loading of core files (core.js mainly): this added a runtime by SharePoint but is often not useful for pure front-end WCM sites. There is a workaround to delay load the core.js file so that the rest of the page gets sent to the client and loaded first.
• When creating WCM sites do not use the default WCM publishing site and those master pages as the basis. These contain a lot of embedded tables that do not load fast. Create a clean master page and CSS files, taking advantage of CSS2 features for example (that’s my own addition here).

That’s a quick list of things to take into account. Spencer will probably post on this on his website so do check out at http://harbar.net

BTW, check out Joris’ blog post about the keynote at TechEd. Some interesting announcements were made there.

Microsoft TechEd Developers 2007 is almost there! Starting next Monday 5th November 2007 in Barcelona.

I'm looking forward to this big event, there are so many interesting sessions I don't know which one to choose for most of the time slots.

Check out the agenda at: http://www.mseventseurope.com/OnlinePub/Public/sessions.aspx?EventId=HbLEvtKcPE4%3d
There are a few sessions on SharePoint from Ted Patisson, Patrick Tisseghem and Spencer Harbar. Spencer is one of my SharePoint heroes :-) I'll certainly go to his session.
And of course there are tons of sessions on Visual Studio 2008, LINQ, .NET 3.5, Silverlight and so much more.
So many sessions... so little time...

This year I will certainly do a few posts on sessions I'll attend and some general information about the event.

See you in Barcelona!