Upcoming Talk at the SoCal .NET Technical Summit

On Saturday, September 23rd, I'll be speaking at the SoCal .NET Technical Summit in Irvine, CA at the Hilton next to the John Wayne Airport. I'll be doing a “Top 10 ASP.NET 2.0 Tips & Traps” talk, which makes me the biggest Scott Guthrie/Rob Howard fanboy (Scott recently presented an ASP.NET Tips and Tricks talk at TechEd in New Zealand, and Rob Howard's done a “Top 10 Tips for Writing High Performance Websites” talk before).

Anywho, the reason I'm posting this is two-fold. First, I want you to come to the Summit! Yes, I'm talking to you. Come on, go, it will be a day full of fun and educational value, with talks broken down into Architecture, Web, Data, and .NET 3.0 tracks. It's only $79 for the conference. Go ahead and register now.

Second, I'd like to get some feedback/suggestions on my talk. Here are my proposed Top 10 Tips & Traps:

• TIP: Use HttpContext.Items as a per-request cache (stole this shamelessly from Rob Howard's performance talk, but it's my favorite of his)
• TRAP: Not setting applicationName setting when using Membership (a trap many people getting started with Membership fall into)
• TIP: A walkthrough of cool Visual Studio 2005 features (I'm thinking about some of the XHTML validation stuff, code snippets, opening an ASP.NET 2.0 website through the command line/Explorer, etc.)
• TIP: Client-side enhancements (the new OnClientClick property, the Focus() method, etc.)
• TIP: Efficiently paging through large resultsets with SQL Server 2005's new ROW_NUMBER() feature
• TIP: Using Reflector (not really ASP.NET-specific, but a tool/knowledgeset every .NET developer should have)
• TRAP: How to handle broken images/links in images, CSS files, etc. A common problem when using a Master Page in one folder and having ASP.NET pages in different folders. In short, use ~
• TIP: Disabling view state for data Web controls to reduce page bloat
• TIP: Use caching. An overview of data caching, output caching, and SQL-dependent caching
• TRAP: Avoid race conditions when caching - see http://scottonwriting.net/sowblog/posts/1982.aspx

I'm a little wishy-washy on some of these, this list was what I came up with a couple days ago. Care to help me shore up this list? Any suggestions for tips/traps? Any tips/traps you'd prefer removed, or relegated to “Only cover if you have adequate time?”

Any suggestions, comments, ideas, and constructive criticism is most welcome. You can either post it as a comment here, or drop me a line at mitchell@4guysfromrolla.com

Hope to see you at the SoCal .NET Technical Summit!