ASP.NET Futures in Visual Studio 2008

Continued from page: 1

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

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:

<microsoft.web.preview>
<search enabled="true">
<providers>
<add name="WindowsLiveSearchProvider"
type="Microsoft.Web.Preview.Search.WindowsLiveSearchProvider,
Microsoft.Web.Preview"
appID="YOURAPPID"
siteDomainName="YOURWEBSITEURL" />
</providers>
</search>
<microsoft.web.preview>

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

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