This week I presented two talks at VSLive in New York. I love speaking at this conference because of its technical focus and because I've done it so long -- eleven years -- there are always a bunch of people I run into at this conference that I only see when I'm there.

I've posted here several times about how I'd been trying to get the conference to let me talk about interesting yet sorta-non-mainstream topics such as unit testing (which I pitched to them unsuccessfully back in 2000) and open source (which I succeeded in doing in 2006 with the first talk on MySQL for .NET developers). In the past few years the conference has been much more open to talks on the kind of tools and technologies that are important to me (as well as many other developers for whom Microsoft's out-of-the-box offerings are not always sufficient).

So my "Data-Driven ASP.NET Ajax" talk is an attempt to take the ASP.NET demonstrations and tutorials that …