Houston Techfest was held on Saturday, August 25 at the University of Houston, and it was a great success for HDNUG and the event organizers.  Brad Abrams flew in from Seattle for the keynote, and he and I had a great conversation late-morning about the Cider tools for creating XAML-based applications in Visual Studio 2005 and the future in VS 2008.

Speaking of VS 2008, I saw two new features which look very promising and immediately valuable to our clients.  First, there’s a new type of database project – not to be confused with the db projects released with .NET 1.0 – that look like a great way to finally manage and deploy database schema changes as part of an automated build process.  The demo only touched on them briefly, but I’m going to look around on Scott Guthrie’s blog to see if I can learn more.

Second, it looks like Microsoft heard me groan when I learned that there’s not a built-in web interface to invoke WCF services.  With ASMX, I could launch a service, type in any required parameters (assuming they were not complex types), and then click the Invoke button.  With WCF, this was not possible, so basic testing became a slight bit harder because now I had to setup a unit test project and adjust my configurations appropriately so that I could establish a connection for testing.  Visual Studio 2008 (and the corresponding release of the .NET 3.5 framework) have tools that will address this need.  Specifically, there’s a service host executable that will enable you to quickly host a WCF service without setting up lots of configurations, and there’s a corresponding service client executable that will then allow you invoke the hosted WCF services.  The interface feels almost exactly like the ASMX interface for invoking services, and the results display in a very readable format so that I don’t have to comb through XML.  While this isn’t an enterprise hosting solution, it will certainly make setting up a Hello World services example much quicker.

Finally, I gave a presentation on Building Content Managed Websites Using ASP.NET 2.0 (the DotNetNuke counterpart).  The presentation covered master pages, navigation, security, and web parts, and the demo compared these technologies to the features available with the DNN portal.  Click this link to download my presentation and source code:  http://media.parivedasolutions.com/Public/HoustonTechFest/.

Thanks again to the event organizers.  Great job!