ACS302: Building Custom ASP.NET AJAX Controls

I feared that this session might cover the basics of AJAX, but it didn't.  The speaker covered two main ways to develop custom AJAX controls (using extenders and the AJAX toolkit or through your own complete customization).  Not a bad presentation for someone like me who has done little that is useful yet with AJAX.

VWF306: Build Workflow Activities Using Objects

Rocky presented this one, and drove home the point that you should create your own custom activities (deriving from the Activity class) and use dependency properties when developing workflows with Workflow Foundation.  There ended up being a lot of questions about CSLA from the audience ("what is that ProjectTracker.Library.Save method??"), and I don't think Rocky was able to really finish all of his presentation points as a result.  That disappointed me because I hoped to get more out of the Workflow side of the presentation and not hear Rocky field questions on using business objects.

HDV301: Building and Incorporating Custom Applications in SharePoint v3 Sites

Another Andrew Connell session.  Unfortunately it was very similar to his presentation yesterday on "prescriptive guidance" for SharePoint development.  The general topic was the same, but the focus was more about strategies for developing custom apps within SharePoint rather than how to develop and deploy your project artifacts within the apps. 

AGN302: Compression, Encryption, and Hashing

This session was a letdown as it was nothing more than a walk-through of .NET's encryption and hashing API's.  The presenter suggested (generally) that you should use public key encryption and never use private key encryption, but only walked through a demo of private key encryption.  ????  For the compression topic, he just walked through an open source .NET compression API to compress and decompress to/from zip, gzip, bzip, etc.