I gave two talks at the Microsoft Days 2008 in InterExpo Center Sofia on 24 and 25 April:

What is New in ASP.NET 3.5?

This session focused on the exiting recently introduced features and technologies in ASP.NET 3.5. Starting from ASP.NET and LINQ integration and ASP.NET dynamic data, the I went through the new ASP.NET MVC framework (ala Ruby on Rails) and further through the ASP.NET AJAX and the AJAX Control Toolkit and finally presented the new ASP.NET controls for Silverlight. I presented just few slides and all the rest was a rich set of live demonstrations.

Download the presentation: ASP.NET 3.5 – New Features @ MS DevDays 2008 – PowerPoint Presentation (4.8 MB).

Download the demonstrations: ASP.NET 3.5 – New Features @ MS DevDays 2008 – Demos (2.1 MB).

Best Practices for Optimizing Transactional Code in SQL Server 2008

Transaction management is the most important technique to handle concurrent access and data consistence in the database systems. In this session I talked about optimistic and pessimistic concurrency, database transactions and isolation and explained how SQL Server 2008 handles transactions and isolation by locking and row versioning. The talk started with a deep overview of the traditional isolation levels (read uncommitted, read committed, repeatable read and serializable) and locking mechanisms in the database and presented the “snapshot” isolation level in SQL Server which ensures transaction level data consistency while providing better concurrency with less locking.

Download the presentation: SQL Server 2008 Transactions @ MS DevDays 2008 – PowerPoint Presentation (0.7 MB).

Download the demonstrations: SQL Server 2008 Transactions @ MS DevDays 2008 – Demonstrations (0.1 MB).