Microsoft Days is an event where Microsoft visits four of the larger cities in Norway. They provide interesting content both for business decision makers, it administration and last but not least developers. One of the speakers this round was Sondre Bjellås, giving a presentation on web development in Visual Studio 2005. I’ve known Sondre online for some years now, so it was great finally get a chance to meet him. I only got a chance to se the last hour of the presentation, but the bit I got a chance to see was great. All the content was home made, and Sondre had a strong focus on code and demos instead of lots of power point presentations. The cool thing about his presentation was that he showed off most of the cool parts of ASP.NET 2.0 with out using the standard demos.

Here are some of the things he showed off (and I got a chance to see)

• Portal personalization
• Making custom webparts (consuming RSS)
• XmlDataSource (consuming RSS Podcast, transcribing it using Speech Server)
• Web testing and web load testing using Team System
• Provider model, writing custom map providers for Google and MSN maps
• Administration, extending the default administration webpage to enable map provider configuration.
• Localization

As I said, I only got a chance to see the last hour, but telling by the list of things you can imagine it was propped full with cool content. If you got a chance go see him in Oslo February 15. You can download his slides and example code on his blog.

After the presentation we attended the after tech, a new thing Microsoft is adding to their “Microsoft days” program. Basically they serve beer and pizza, and you get a chance to hang out with the presenters and check out stuff like Media Center, Xbox360 and talking to Microsoft partner companies.