Some decent sessions today.  I think I've gotten a little better at weeding out the bad ones by title :)  By tomorrow I may have a complete day of worthwhile sessions. 

AGN301: Dealing with Long Running Requests in ASP.NET

I wasn't sure if I was going to learn anything in this one, but I took away a few new things I didn't know already.  Rick Strahl covered three main ways to deal with long-running requests (each may be better/worse to use depending on what you really need to improve): 1) modify the user interface (disable buttons after clicking, hide the UI and show an "in progress" message), 2) use ASP.NET Async Page Tasks to allow a single request to run on multiple threads, and 3) fire-and-forget and query another data source (e.g. SQL) for information about the process's progress as it updates.  I know that Async Page Tasks existed before today, so that was a new nugget to take home. 

HDV313: Advanced Feature Development

Fellow Inetiumite Neil presented this one.  I'm completely biased, but he did an awesome job :)  I actually learned a few things too.  This presentation was on the SharePoint track, and covered all of the down and dirty ways to develop and work with Features in SharePoint.  Neil covered the ridiculous number of caveats to Features, implemented a custom Feature receiver in C#, and demonstrated what will be now known as the most famous custom Feature you can add to SharePoint: the "Your boss is coming, look busy" menu item.

HDV303: Prescriptive Guidance for Developers Building Publishing Sites with WCM in MOSS

This one was about how to develop and author the non-compiled artifacts in a SharePoint project such that you can take advantage of things like source control and repeatable/automated packing and deployment.  Andrew Connell presented this one. His presentation helped drive home the point that Web Content Management (WCM) artifacts such as master pages and page layouts can be authored in SharePoint Designer (SPD), but you should not rely on SPD as a means to promote those artifacts to other environments.  SPD is a necessary evil for certain tasks within MOSS WCM, but it was relieving to hear Andrew say that SPD should not replace well-known (and much more comfortable) development tools like Visual Studio, even when working with non-compiled resources.