The ASP .Net Connections conference formally kicked off last Sunday with keynote addresses from Scott Guthrie and Christian Kleinerman of Microsoft. Scott spoke about the AJAX toolkit and gave some insight about what will be coming in the future with the upcoming ORCAS Visual Studio release. He mentioned some AJAX “futures” that won’t be available until ORCAS is released. Scott also mentioned some of the high volume customers using .Net Framework 2.0, including myspace.com. AJAX is a free framework that helps create more interactive web experiences across multiple browsers. The AJAX 1.0 library is available for download from http://ajax.asp.net, as well as ASP .Net 2.0 AJAX extensions, and the ASP .Net AJAX Control Toolkit. In addition to the Microsoft team, there also are controls and samples provided by the developer community outside of Microsoft. Scott stressed that the Microsoft team is very quick to turn around and bug fixes and/or feedback.

Christian Kleinerman, Group Program Manager for the SQL Server Relational Engine discussed the explosion in the amount of data available throughout the world and also pointed out recent releases of the SQL Server team. These include SQL Server 2005 Service Packs 1 and 2, as well as the “Data Dude” product. He pointed out some of the features in SQL Server 2005 that add great productivity, such as Service Broker, still have yet to be widely adopted. He also discussed at a very high level what the next release of SQL Server, code named “Katmai” will include.

Also special kudos are in order for South Florida’s Stacy Draper, who filled in at the last minute to provide a SharePoint demo, when the original presenter was stuck in Chicago. Stacy filled in admirably, before a large audience and was able to deliver his demo successfully!