Tuesday 22nd Feb
 

Keynote - John Robbins - http://www.wintellect.com/about/instructors/default.aspx#2
 
Whatever John Robbins talks about he keeps his audience interested (as I subsequently discovered after attending one of his later sessions). His keynote speech discussed the new features of VS.NET 2005 and covered a whole bunch of stuff from the new refactoring tools (which looked a lot like Re-Sharper) to Code Snippets to smarter debugging features like Data Tips. Very enjoyable.
 

Visual Studio Team System - Benjamin Mitchel - http://benjaminm.net/
 
Sadly a last minute change to the schedule meant that the double session originally planned didn't go ahead. Even worse the session was marred by the speaker having to present a whirlwind tour of VSTS using an extremely flaky build.
 

Building Managed Code Office Solutions with Visual Studio 2005 - Mike Pelton - http://blogs.msdn.com/MikePelton/
 
Its been a long time since I did any Office programming so I thought'd take a look at what was new in this space. Unfortunately Sharepoint and InfoPath were excluded from the session. However, we did get into Office Primary Interop Assemblies, Smart Tags, Smart Documents, The Information Bridge Framework (briefly) and VS Tools for Office. The session was a good primer for developers who need to get started in this area. Many of the examples also came from this book (http://www.compman.co.uk/scripts/browse.asp?ref=697430) which was recommended by the speaker.
 

What's New in ASP.NET Web Services - Tim Ewald - http://www.pluralsite.com/blogs/tewald/default.aspx
 
Tim's session covered new Type Sharing features that overcome .NET 1.x shortcomings, nullable types, IXmlSerializable which allows a type to customise the XML serialisation process, response compression (gzip'd responses), sequence support , partial class support and support for hosting