Today I attended, along with the keynote, the following sessions:

• Developing Rich Web Applications with ASP.net AJAX - Shanku Niyogi
• ASP.net Developer and Designer AJAX Bliss with Visual Studio and Expression - Brad Abrams
• Triple XXX - XML, XPath and Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) - David McMahon and Richard Costall
• A Lap Around the New Enhancements for Web Developers in Visual Studio 'Orcas' - Bradley Millington

All of todays sessions were great and very interesting. In Shanku's session he talked about the Beta 2 release of ASP.net AJAX and the advancement of the control toolkit, plus he illustrated the intended roadmap. I've spent the last 11 months hearing about ATLAS/Ajax and have to say I had been tending to switch off, but this session has reignited my passion for ASP.net AJAX and rejuvenated my fervour for investigating further.

Brad Abram's session focussed on splitting the work of the Designer and the Developer over two products Expression Web Designer and Visual Studio. But maintaining the fact that both could work on the same project, but work seamlessly to bring their own expertise to the fore.

Triple XXX - Dave and Richard presented a highly interesting, easy to understand an appreciate session. I have been using XSL/T on a website, which I inherited from a former colleague, www.yachtpaint.com/trade, and have had to pick it up fairly quickly and this session helped me to learn more and reinforce the work I've been doing so far.

Final session of the day, for me, was a lap around 'Orcas' by Bradley Millington. This session gave an insight into what is coming next in the next version of Visual Studio. A lot of powerful additions have come from user feedback such as improved performance, better designer support - indeed Orcas has a new implementation of the designer which includes such things as split view (code and UX). Also added is full support for AJAX integration, better CSS support, LINQ and JScript Intellisense and debugging to name just a few. Certainly, Orcas seems feature packed and is something I expect to see/hear/blog more about in the coming months!