I just got in from Las Vegas where I attended a Microsoft .NET conference. There were a few particularly interesting sessions this year. The things that I found particularly interesting had nothing to do with .NET 3.0 or the impending release of Vista. Rather, I found some appealing yet subtle topics to be the real stars of the show.
Microsoft is increasingly showing a love for dynamic languages running on top of the .NET CLR like Python. In fact, they have just released IronPython for ASP.NET Community Technology Preview so that developers can now use that language to develop dynamic websites. It was disheartening to see so many developers walk out of that session prematurely. I'm not quite sure they understand the impact that this will have. Efforts like this will be Microsoft's answer to "cool" technologies like Ruby on Rails, and will make current ASP.NET development in VB and C# look like Java development.
There are some data access improvements in the works. LINQ will probably find greater adoption soon, especially when Microsoft adopts a domain centric data access pattern for it. Right now it's a table-centric pattern, but word on the street is that this will be changing in an upcoming release of the .NET framework.
There were some great practical sessions on topics involving high-traffic websites like MSNBC and blogs.msdn.com. I found both of the sessions that focussed on these websites to be very beneficial to projects I'm working on currently and will likely push to have some of their recommendations implemented on these projects.
In any event, as much as I enjoy Vegas (I was there in July too!), there's nothing like being home.