I spent close to three weeks on the road giving talks at Tech-Ed Europe (Berlin), PDC (Los Angeles), and the Los Angeles Code Camp (Los Angeles). I got to talk about two topics that I am very passionate about: ASP.NET MVC and Ajax. Thanks everyone for coming to all my talks!

At PDC, I announced all of the new features of our ASP.NET Ajax Library. In particular, I made five big announcements:

1. ASP.NET Ajax Library Beta Released – You can download the beta from Ajax.CodePlex.com
2. ASP.NET Ajax Library includes the AJAX Control Toolkit – You can use the Ajax Control Toolkit with ASP.NET MVC.
3. ASP.NET Ajax Library being contributed to the CodePlex Foundation – ASP.NET Ajax is the founding project for the CodePlex Foundation (see CodePlex.org)
4. ASP.NET Ajax Library is receiving full product support – Complain to Microsoft Customer Service at midnight on Christmas
5. ASP.NET Ajax Library supports jQuery integration – Use (almost) all of the Ajax Control Toolkit controls in jQuery

For more details on the Ajax announcements, see James Senior’s blog entry on the Ajax announcements at:

http://jamessenior.com/post/News-on-the-ASPNET-Ajax-Library.aspx

In my MVC talks, I discussed the new features being introduced with ASP.NET MVC 2. Here are three of my favorite new features:

1. Client Validation – Client validation done the right way. Do your validation in your model and let the validation bubble up to JavaScript code automatically.
2. Areas – Divide your ASP.NET MVC application into sub-applications. Great for managing both medium and large projects.
3. RenderAction() – Finally, a way to add content to master pages and multiple pages without doing anything strange or twisted.

There are demos of all of these features in the MVC downloads below. Here are the power point and code from all of the talks:

• PDC – Introducing the New ASP.NET Ajax Library

• PDC – ASP.NET MVC: The New Stuff

• Tech-Ed Europe - What's New in Microsoft ASP.NET Model-View-Controller

• Tech-Ed Europe - Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX: Taking AJAX to the Next Level