Telerik blogs
Last Saturday was quite an eventful day! Me and Zhivko attended the WebDD conference in Reading, England, and I have been meaning to post a small review about the entire thing.

The sessions I attended were really great. This was my first time seeing Scott Guthrie present and I can only say that he’s a real presentation machine. He gave 4 talks in a single day and then repeated one of them, so that people that did not have the chance to attend it could do so. I watched Dave Verwer give an incredible talk on writing unobtrusive JavaScript or script that works when it can and leaves your site usable for browsers with scripting disabled. I got some really cool ideas on improving the radControls suite! Glenn Jones really impressed me with his microformats presentation. While I already knew the concept, I could not think of anything usable that you could build with microformats. The presentation was a real eye opener.

I gave a presentation about developing ASP.NET AJAX components. I have been playing with the new framework for quite some time and I wanted to share my experience in creating client-side controls and behaviors as well as using them on the server via script controls and extenders. My opinion is that both ASP.NET AJAX controls and behaviors are a good addition to a web developer’s bag of tricks and having them at your disposal can significantly decrease the time to ship a complex web app. I am posting my slides and demos tomorrow, right after I dig my USB thumb drive out of my suitcase (talk about late packing and unpacking).


Speaking at WebDD was one of my first presentation engagements, and I still can’t just be myself before many people. As some people noticed, I was quite nervous about standing in a crowded room, but I hope I managed to show some cool stuff that aroused some interest in ASP.NET AJAX-style JavaScript. I have gotten some feedback that the tech content is too heavy for a short presentation, and I think I should be splitting it in two: maybe script controls vs. behaviors/extenders. Having more examples and covering some of the trickiest parts in greater detail should definitely make the matter accessible to a broader public.

As a conclusion I would really like to thank Dave and Phil for a great event. Adding Zi’s geek dinner made that Saturday unforgettable. I am really looking forward to meeting you all, folks, again!

Oops! Almost forgot about the photos! Check out Dave’s photostream!


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