Vince began his talk giving a quick overview of New Atlanta's products - with an obvious emphasis and details about BlueDragon. The purpose of the keynote is an overview of the future of BlueDragon.

Short term goals: IIS 7.0 integrated request pipeline and integrated admin & config.

IIS 7.0 - new web server for Vista and Server 2008 (Longhorn). IIS 7 will be the exact same version on both Vista and Server 2008. One of the key features of IIS 7 on Vista is the ability to run multiple sites.

Request pipeline is the sequence of events that occur during HTTP request processing. Defines the extensibility points at which programmers can modify request processing by implementing event handlers (think Application.cfc). IIS 7 has one integrated request pipeline that can be extended in C++, .NET or CFML and it is invoked for all requests.

New App.cfc events:

• onRequestAuthenticate
• onRequestAuthorize
• onRequestLog

Allows replacement of IIS authentication by integrating into App.cfc. Vince shows how onRequestStart is invoked for .asp, .htm and .cfm pages on the same site. Demo shows preventing deep linking and image leeching.

IIS 7 administration - New IIS manager replaces tabbed dialog of earlier versions. Much friendlier and easier to use. Allows install of only the features you need. Extensible by third parties (BD). Supports feature delegation by the server administrator to web site or application administrators. Seems to me to be similar to the ability to allow additional restricted logins in CF 8. Config settings are stored in clear text XML files (no more metabase). Same config files are used for both IIS and ASP.NET and are extensible. Config files are hierarchical, from server to web site to application. Vince shows another demo of managing settings in IIS7. Adding global custom tag paths can be inherited by individual sites and those sites can override or remove them individual. Demos are a little buggy since he's showing unreleased features.

AJAX overview - talks about Client-centric vs. Server-centric. Client-centric involves raw JS coding, Server is tag based (tag creates code on the server side). BlueDragon web services support ASP.NET AJAX remote method calls (supports client-centric model). They are creating a new set of tags for AJAX. CFUPDATEPANEL for partial page rendering (sounds like cfdiv/cflayout, etc). Tag is nested within a CFFORM. Form submission renders the content of the update panel only. Shows a demo of paging through a recordset. Pages can have multiple panels (uniqueness defined by a name attribute). CFUPDATEPROGRESS tag can add a loading indicator when AJAX calls are in progress (think spry loading state or the built in indicator shown with the CF 8 stuff). More details can be found here.

Showing some Silverlight stuff - Silverlight 1.1 includes embedded lightweight .NET CLR which support client-side programming in CFML, C#, Ruby, etc. .NET Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) new layer on the CLR to support dynamic languages. CLR is the .NET equivalent to the JVM.