Last week I headed down to Brighton for d.Construct, a conference I'd not normally attend. It was Phil's suggestion and I'm glad I went, for a couple of reasons (not including the good company, beer and Chinese/Indian food). First it's good to actually attend a conference where I can watch all of the sessions, rather than presenting, preparing to present, or networking / having meetings. The second reason was the content - sort of Web 2.0 based, but not completely; less hype and some interesting topics. It's made me think about things I wouldn't normally think about, which is good; too often we in the ASP.NET server space get stuck in our existing way of doing things.
One topic of interest was Microformats - a simple way of marking up things like contact or appointment details. In reality I don't see much happening with microformats since there is no intrinsic browser support for the rendering of them; there are plug-ins, but that means you have to pro-actively know about the formats before you can see them. Still, from small acorns etc. To that extent both Phil & I have started writing ASP.NET server controls that can output hCalendar and hCard markup; if the support is there at the control level, then maybe they'll get used more, even if the user experience of them isn't available yet.
I you want to find more about d.Construct, then Phil's blog has a review and links to Photos, plus a much longer review. There are also some videos available if you want to catch up.