I saw Scott Hunter kick off the Dallas Day of Dot Net convention last month.

Interesting things he mentioned:

• Web Essentials is a Visual Studio plugin. This portrays it as the second most downloaded, and shows it providing IntelliSense for HTML tags, attribute IntelliSense for CSS, etc.
• In the future Microsoft will distance itself from the GAC and having one install of the .NET framework for a given environment and will instead allow for different applications running at the same laptop and server to have different customizable varieties of .NET. I read onto this that some of the namespaces under System for example may become optional to include in a given project lowering the overall footprint of ASP.NET. The selective inclusion allows for the ASP.NET team to make changes for some configurations which might otherwise be breaking changes. This will speed their development.
• AttributeRouting is a NuGet package (Install-Package AttributeRouting) which empowers a new variety of attribute-based routing for ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API.
• A PowerShell editor for Visual Studio is to be. As I look at my notes from the talk I cannot tell if it exists already or if it is coming in the next Visual Studio.
• There is to be a way to debug against apps deployed to Azure.
• Browser Link is a feature for allowing edits in the browser to make their way back up into your code at Visual Studio.
• What is Owen? If you use ASP.NET Web API or SignalR you are actually using Owen. ASP.NET is presently monolithic and the big ball of caching, session, state, etc. makes it hard to turn pieces on or off. Owen will be more componentized going forward. It came out that the decision for this (and the one in the second bullet point above) are inspired by Node.js not unlike how ASP.NET MVC was inspired by Ruby. The HttpContext currently comes with a 30K hit, but this will no longer be set in stone as your customizations may reduce this footprint. Everything will be an opt-in in Owen.
• "Bare metal" as a term came up. I had not heard it before. I Googled it and it seems to imply a device that has not yet had an operating system installed.
• Scott mentioned that ASP.NET is to run on both Mac and Linux! Microsoft wants ASP.NET to run everywhere to compete with Java.
• There is to be a way to make changes in Visual Studio without stopping the debugger. Finally.

Addendum 7/27/2014: I think "Owen" is actually spelled: "Owin"