ASP.NET Futures in Visual Studio 2008

Features in this release include ASP.NET Silverlight server controls, new functionality for ASP.NET AJAX Extensions, dynamic data controls, enhancements to dynamic languages, and more

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

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

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