VS Live 2008 - Las Vegas - Day 3

Day 3 - Boy talk about information overload.

Best Practices in ASP.NET 2.0 - 3.x
This session basically talks about ways of avoiding to rewrite code. Think about writing a bunch of common libraries that performs simple tasks that would allow you to reuse them, regardless of application. Strings - use constants, static properties, and/or objects.

Cassini vs. IIS - use objects so that you don't have to rewrite code. Using Cassini, ApplicationPath returns / while in IIS, it actually returns a path.

IE8 and its impact of your website
This session talks about some of the new features of IE8. It is currently still in beta. You can find more information here.

In IE8, you can specify document mode for older browsers by using X-UA-Compatible. If you wish to force IE8 to use a specific standard ( for example if you have not had a chance to test your website in IE8 or have determined that some pages in your website breaks in IE8 ... and this is a temporary solution), this can be done in the config (server) level or on the page level. On the server level, you can specify a custom HTTP header ... X-UA-Compatible:IE=EmulateIE7. On the page level, you can use a meta tag like <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />. Remember, page level settings will override server settings.

Accelators is a contextual service to quickly access a service from any web page. It simplifies the copy and paste between web pages. It is described with an XML file

Web Slices allows you to subscribe to content directly within a web page. It behaves like a feed. WebSlices are easier to embed in traditional HTML content and it has a more prominent placement in IE ( favorites bar ).

Data URI is embedding small files directly into the URL. Primary advantage is it does not require a separate download. However, it has limitations such as only usable on <object />, <img />, <link/> and in CSS. No scripts are allowed and maximum size is 32K. You cannot set expirations and base64 encoding can increase size by 33%.

AJAX Enhancements and also CSS improvements.