One of the last things I've been asked to do at work before I start my maternity leave is to do a short presentation on .NET 2.0 one lunchtime next week. Something, anything, on .NET 2.0, for the benefit of those developers who've not seen much about it yet. That's about as specific as saying "just talk about development". I've vaguely tied it down to talking about ASP.NET (I figured that, since I co-wrote a book on the subject, I should know something about what I'm talking about), but there's still so much stuff in there that deserves to be talked about that it's hard to come up with a list of topics.
I'm being given half a day to prepare for this, so at least I'll have some time to pull something together, but given that the audience will all have different levels of knowledge of the latest .NET stuff, it's not going to be an easy task to tie it down and make it useful to the majority of my colleagues. My current lines of thinking are around the new 'n funky web controls that they've added to the toolset, followed by a discussion of how useful they are when it comes to accessibility. It's one of my pet hates of the moment - the world of RAD fighting with the world of the accessible website, but it's important for developers to know how and when to use built-in quick 'n easy controls, and when to roll up the sleeves and build one yourself. All I need to do is some research into the subject to see exactly what the ASP.NET team have given us - the Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 book was aimed mainly at the RAD audience, helping new developers get exciting sites up and running quickly, rather than spending time on making each and every page accessible, and we all knew (and mentioned as much in the book) that this approach would have its downsides. I stand by that approach where it relates to that book because it was a book about ASP.NET 2.0, not building accessible websites, but it still pains me to consider the amount of evil <TD> tags in the rendered code!