Sessions are a way of preserving information on a web site between page hits, allowing the programmer to emulate a stateful application when, in fact, web pages are not really stateful.  They are also one of the banes of web development, since sessions eventually timeout when there is no interaction between the user and the web app for a prolonged period of time.  In ASP.NET, this period has a default of 20 minutes, which is really hardly enough time to pick up a donut, refill one's coffee, and chat with fellow workers before returning to one's computer.  What this often means is that the user, upon returning to their computer and continuing work after a 20 minute break will find that all of the data entry they have been doing has been lost.  Worse, strange errors will begin to appear in his web browser if the loss of a session is not handled gracefully.

AJAX Patterns Time Out

Imaginative Universe Session Expired article

“With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 we can work with a much simpler, standard, XML format called Open XML which opens the door for many types of applications that cannot work via COM. What if you needed to build a scalable web service that processes many documents in high volume? What if you wanted to quickly read or write to these formats from a client application but wanted to have minimal dependencies on other applications? These types of programs do not want to require Microsoft Office be installed to run. The cool thing is you have the tools already with Visual Basic 2008. XML Literals are an easy way to manipulate any kind of XML, including Open XML”

Read Beth Massi's article

Another good example is Adding Image to Word document’s Header

The 2008 Code Camp in Tampa was a great success.  There were over 200 local and semi-remote technology professionals in attendance.  These events are great.  They let us gather with people who are similar to our otherwise unique selves.  We mingle with people who are genuinely excited about the latest technology. 

I was able to attend several interesting and enthusiastic topics.

• Data Binding LINQ to SQL in Silverlight by John McFetridge was enlightening. He demonstrated his architecture method that though it may be more work upfront the payback is in flexible maintenance and modification. 
• Building Real-World Line-of-Business applications by Brandon Kelly http://brandonkelly.com - He gave us 'cloud' level view of the 4 tiers of applications for cloud or uncoupled computing.  The newest tier being the Business/Service tier using the soon to be released product code-named Alexandria.
• AJAX client script library - Jay Kimble.  I think only Jay could make JSON be that exciting. 
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data - Amit Trivedi - If you haven't seen the dynamic data feature of VS 2008 sp1 then you have to see it. 
• An Introduction to WPF by Christopher Bennage - http://bluespire.com I was sold when he created a window and listed all the fonts on his laptop in the first 3 minutes. 
• Standing Out by Michael Knopf http://mknopf.com provided great insite into the things we can do to 1) standout a little from the crowd 2) demonstrate our true capabilities. 

There is a larger MSDN day on December 11th. http://www.msdndevcon.com/

.Net has a wonderful menu control.  But, the control can be very tricky.  Here is a article that simplifies it tremendously.  Piyali even demonstrates how to store the menu items in a SQL server.

http://gridviewguy.com/Articles/415_Creating_a_Site_Map_for_a_ASP_Net_Page.aspx