Sam Gentile was quite distressed when he had an emergency come up and had to cancel his presentation at our local CNY .NET Developer Group. Luckily, everyone is OK and we held an open "Chalk Talk" type session in lieu of Sam's presentation.

Here are a few notes from the presentation -

System.Convert vs. Parse
A question came up about when to use the System.Convert methods over the "Parse" methods for type conversion. As it turns out, the System.Convert methods will internally call the "Parse" methods for the desired type. However, the Parse methods will throw a ArgumentNullException if a Null parameter is passed...

double value;
string text = null;
// internally, Convert.To* will just call Parse methods for given type..
value = System.Convert.ToDouble(text);
// but Parse will throw an ArgumentNullException for Nulls...
value = double.Parse(text);

So then, what about all of those nifty VB.NET CType, CDbl, CInt, etc. conversion methods? Well, there is a good article here that goes on to explain that the VB.NET compiler is cool enough to optimize the MSIL spit out for those. And in fact, it is recommended to use these conversion methods (this was surprising really, because these conversion methods are mostly considered legacy type functions).

Atlas and Ajax
I also spent some time going over Atlas and Ajax demos showing a simple web service call, AutoComplete Behaviors, and the Resize Behavior I created. I hope to have time to refine this into a full presentation to give later on in the year!

Here are some links for the Atlas/Ajax stuff:
    Fiddler tool - great for analyzing ajax traffic
    Ajax .NET - stable, widely used ajax library for ASP.NET
    Atlas home - download and start playing!

Some Links from Greg
Greg Smalter also provided some great relative links:

      Using Atlas without ASP.NET shows using PHP with Atlas
      How-to Video on ASP.NET Validation Controls