On Saturday 18th April, I attended WebDD '09, a community-led event for web developers held at Microsoft's UK headquarters in Reading.

The event came close on the heels of MIX '09 - the grand-daddy of events for Microsoft-focused web developers, which was held in Las Vegas.

The big news at MIX '09 was the beta release of Silverlight 3. Silverlight is a lightweight, cross-platform browser plug-in, similar to Adobe Flash player but which runs on a cut-down version of the .Net framework. This allows regular .Net developers to create rich interactive web applications which has until now been the preserve of graphic designers and the like.

I saw Microsoft's Mike Taulty give an excellent overview of the many new features coming in this release, including several new animation effects,  and the ability to run outside of the browser. Exciting possibilities ahead.

I also attended a session on jQuery, a JavaScript library which is getting a lot of attention at the moment. Like Silverlight, it's very small and lightweight (~20KB) and allows you to spruce up your web pages with animation and Ajax interactivity with very little effort. Microsoft have announced that they will support jQuery in Visual Studio 2010.

I went to another session on the new ASP.Net MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework, which looks like a great model for building web applications.

And last, but by no means least, I went to an eye-opening presentation by Barry Dorrans on website vulnerabilities – scary stuff indeed. Barry did an excellent job of explaining the vulnerabilities in layman’s terms and describing the various defences against them. This session should have been compulsory for all attendees.

To find out about other community events coming up in the next few weeks, please visit the DDD website.