ACS201: An Introduction to AJAX technologies with ASP.NET
Rick Strahl
There's lots of talk about AJAX and rich browser applications these days. But what is AJAX and how does it apply to the applications you need to build today? We'll walk through the technology behind AJAX and explore where it fits in current Web Development scenarios and more importantly where it doesn't. Although the 'hot' topic at the moment, AJAX use should be carefully considered in light of browser requirements, accessibility and application design considerations as it has a significant impact on all of them. We'll look at technologies available to let you utilize AJAX technology in ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0. In the process we'll look at Anthem.NET library for basic AJAX usage in 1.1 and 2.0 applications, Client Script Callbacks in ASP.NET 2.0, a custom implementation for hover windows and the ATLAS framework forthcoming from Microsoft. We'll discuss issues such as balancing complexity vs. cool factor, understanding load characteristics and choosing the right tools to build applications using AJAX technology.

ACS202: Taking ATLAS for a ride
Rick Strahl
ATLAS is Microsoft's new client side/AJAX extension for ASP.NET slanted as an Add-on for ASP.NET 2.0. It introduces a rich client side library that brings many .NET classes and features to browser based JavaScript. It also provides for a rich declarative markup language to define control layout and behavior and all of the plumbing necessary to make client side calls to the server to return rich data to the client. In this session I'll introduce you to the core features that the ATLAS framework provides and walk through a number of scenarios with examples that demonstrate the rich functionality available to build rich client applications running inside of the Web browser.

AIL301: A Data Driven Approach to Internationalization with ASP.NET
Rick Strahl
Localization is a common scenario for Web applications. There are many approaches available and the most common suggestion is to use custom resources to provide translation at compile time. However, for true flexibility and the ability to more easily perform translation tasks, a data driven approach that stores translation text in a database can provide much more flexibility and the ability to dynamically translate applications on the fly at runtime without recompilation. In this session we'll see an implementation of a Language and Message manager framework that is hooked into the ASP.Net page and control model that allows for easy translation of your user interface controls at runtime. Featuring both the ability to perform the task of translation at runtime in the live UI as well as switching languages on the fly. Although focus will be primarily on language translation this session also touches on related localization issues such as assigning Locale information and dealing with character Encodings.

The last session was a bit of a surprise actually <s>. It's on my standard list of talks that submit, but it's never been picked. ASP.NET Connections in fact has been picking some of my 'different' talks which is very cool actually because I don't get to give them often, yet they are often the topics that are most practical in specific situations.

Hope to see some of you there…