ASP.NET Futures in Visual Studio 2008

With the imminent release of Visual Studio 2008, a new set of features have

been planned for ASP.NET. Although continuing to use ASP.NET 2.0 as the base

platform, VS 2008 builds upon this by adding many new capabilities. Let's take a

look at how you can work with some of them.



Currently, the ASP.NET Futures stack is available as a July 2007 Community Tech
Preview (CTP). You can use this CTP with both VS 2005 (you will need to install

.NET Framework 3.5 first) and VS 2008. Download the CTP release and install it.

Once you have done so, you will get a new project template under 'Web Sites,'

called 'ASP.NET AJAX Futures Web Application.' Select this to create a new

Futures project.

So what can you do with this new release? You can of course do everything

that ASP.NET 2.0 could do-since this is still the base platform. However, with

the 'Futures' release, you also get a brand new set of functionality.

Ajax & Toolkit



You get a new release of ASP.NET Ajax and the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit

built-in when you use this CTP. ASP.NET Ajax allows you to quickly create Ajax

enabled websites without needing to code anything-all you really need to do is

create your page normally and then mark all the Ajax enabled content by

enclosing them in a control called the UpdatePanel, and then letting the

platform take care of doing the Ajax callbacks for you automatically. This has

eased the creation of Web 2.0 type applications. The Ajax Control Toolkit is a

community driven initiative from Microsoft that delivers a large number of ASPX

controls that provide common Ajax functionality out-of-box. For instance, in

this release, you have controls that will show and hide panels as in MS Outlook

(AccordianPane), get Google Suggest like autocomplete words from the server

while the user types (AutoCompleteExtender), add masking to textboxes to allow

only certain types of input (MaskedEditExtender), provide a rating star

(Rating), and many more. You can get all this functionality by simply dropping

the controls on the page.

Using a DragDropExtender to create an Ajax enabled calendar that can be moved around on the page by a user

SilverLight controls



SilverLight is a new technology by which you can embed extremely rich

mini-applications on your Web page by using Extensible Application Markup

Language (XAML) which is part of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). This

technology is available on Windows and Mac on IE, Firefox and Safari with more

platforms and browsers to be added.

With SilverLight controls, you can create richness into your pages quite

easily. There are two SilverLight Controls available for you to use:

1. The XAML Control: This is a highly generic SilverLight control that allows
   
   you to specify a .XAML file to load and a .JS or .PY file for its code. This
   
   allows you to create the XAML UI as per your needs and host it within the
   
   page.
2. The Media Control: This is a pre-defined XAML control that displays a
   
   media player on the screen to play audio/video content using SilverLight. A
   
   high degree of customizability can be enjoyed with the control by just using
   
   its properties.
   
   

   Adding Live search to the website using the SearchDataSource is as simple as using the Wizard

Dynamic Data Controls



This is a completely new way of creating pages to manage data within your

database. The dynamic data controls actually query the database for the schema.

They generate a bunch of functionality that lets you view, sort, filter, edit,

insert and delete data within tables by just adding a page with the same name as

the table. For instance, to work with a table called 'authors,' all you need to

do is create a page called Authors.aspx with a DynamicAutoData control. We'll

take a detailed look at Dynamic Data Controls next month.

Application services



These are new capabilities to allow a website to use or expose

functionality. For instance, one of the new application services is the

inclusion of a SearchDataSource control to which you can bind any standard data

control. The data source control works currently out-of-box with Windows Live

Search, but can be used with any search provider.

To enable this, first sign up for an application ID for your website at

http://search.msn.com/developer. Next add the following lines in the Web.config

file:

Now create a simple page that uses the SearchDataSource to query values and

feed it into any data control.

Dynamic languages



This is another new feature of the 'Futures' release that allows developers

to use managed language extensions for programming in ASP.NET. Currently, there

are two new languages added to the system-IronPython, a version of Python for

ASP.NET and Managed Jscript. Ruby is also being planned to be included as a new

language in this.

Overall, there's a bunch of new stuff that's going to be available in the

upcoming release of ASP.NET. We'll take a detailed look at some of them in the

coming months.

A Dynamic Data page with just a single DynamicAutoData control brings up this page that allows you to edit, sort and filter data and subscribe to an RSS feed