Scott Gutrhie's keynote at DevConnections earlier this month was, as always, very enlightening. As someone who presents at conference, I'm always amazed at how much content he can get through (and with such clarity) in the alloted time without ever seeming rushed or dizzy.

Scott talked about and demonstrated where we are today with ASP.NET and what's coming in the next version of VIsual Studio.

Because MVC is the hot new thing for ASP.NET and a completely different way of developing web sites than ASP.NET, Scott paused to make a particular point very clear.

MVC is not overriding ASP.NET. It is another tool and is aimed at developer who prefer that style of web development. But ASP.NET is still here, still strong and the team continues to make heavy investments in ASP.NET in the future, including for VS2010.

What struck me about the fact that he wanted to be very clear about this point was because Microsoft has definitely fumbled on messaging lately with respect to the evolution of their products. The two that bubble quickly to the top of my mind are WCF vs. Remoting and of course LINQ to SQL vs. Entity Framework. (I bet that second example was no surprise.)

The difference between those situations and MVC vs. ASP.NET is that the ASP.NET team had their plans in place as they created MVC.

WIth LINQ to SQL and EF, the two products were originally created by different teams (LINQ to SQL came out of the C# team, EF from Data Programmability) in vaccuums and there was much surprise when the teams that were working on those two products learned about the other. So it took some time (that's an understatement) to figure out exaclty what they wanted to do with the two products in relation to each other. In the meantime we were all left wondering.

WCF vs Remoting wasn't quite the same scenario. It seems as if it just took that team a while to look up from all of their work on WCF to realize that there was most definitely some confusion about the tools that it was poised to replace/absorb and they needed to figure out what their best plan would be. In the meantime many different messages came out of Microsoft which only confused people more.

So I really appreciated how important this was for Scott to make sure there is no confusion about what MVC means to the future of ASP.NET and taking advantage of the very large audience of developers listening to him at this conference.

Therefore I'm doing my bit to help spread that message. ASP.NET has a big, bright future. You have lots of options and will continue to down the road.