Web Developer 2008

In this article, we will be discussing what new we can do with Web Developer

2008, which is one of the components of Visual Studio 2008. The new .NET 3.5

framework ships with Visual Studio 2008 and even with Web Developer 2008.

The good thing about this framework is its out-of-the box support for ASP.NET

AJAX, which was previously not there . Along with that it has enhanced support

for Language Integrated Query i.e. LINQ. Iit also includes intellesense support

for Visual Studio 2008 and in Web Developer for ECMAScript i.e. JScripts. Apart

from these new server controls, types and client-side scripts are also added to

help you in building AJAX enabled websites. A whole new merge tool is added

which merges precompiled assemblies for deployment and release management. With

the webpage design window of the latest release, you can work in source-view,

design-view or even split-view in which you can view the source code and design

on the same window.

Here, we will show two different things that one can do with: by using the

multi-targeting option and the 'List View' control in the .NET 3.5 framework and

Web Developer 2008 component.

Muti-Targeting



Using the multi-targeting option a developer can customize his/her

applications to run on a specific .NET framework version. For example, if you

are going to deploy a Web project on a server, which supports.NET 2.0 only then

Web Developer 2008 provides you with an option using which you can build your

website specifically for .NET 2.0 framework. Further during the development of

your website it won't show the control which does not have .NET 2.0 support; the

IDE will automatically update its compilers and feature set, hence saving you

from the trouble of choosing the right control.

To understand how to specify which .NET framework should be used, let's

consider an example: Click on the File > New website, then select the ASP.NET

website templates, select which language you will be using and specify the name

of the website. Let the name be 'demo1' and then click on the 'Ok' button. As

the default layout of the new website gets loaded, right-click on the root

folder which you can find under the 'Solution explorer' window of the 'demo1'

website and select the option 'property pages'. You can even simply go to the

View menu and then select the 'property pages' option. This will open a new

window; on the left you can view three different options: References, Build and

Start options. Select the Build option, there you will find the 'Target

Framework' option, now specify the framework version you want to use and click

on 'Ok'. Finally your IDE is ready to be used in your desired framework.

Moreover, if you go to 'Add references' under the website menu, you will notice

that .NET class assemblies which are not supported by the current framework will

be greyed.

With the new .NET 3.5 framework, you also get support for Web protocol to build WCF services like AJAX, RSS, REST etc.

List View in .NET 3.5



First question, which comes to everyone's mind is that why to use List-view

to display data from the database if there is already a control called Data grid

to do so? Well, the reason is that using the List-view control you can control

the layout of the data that will be displayed on your webpage. It can also be

described as a mixture of data grid control and repeater.

For implementing the List-view control, build a new ASP.NET website as

specified earlier. Now drag and drop the list view control on to your webpage,

which will be found under the Data section from the Toolbox. Select the List

View from the design view of your web page; expand the list view for more

option. From the 'Choose Data Source' drop-down text box select the 'New Data

Source' option. In the 'Choose data type' window select 'Database' and specify

an ID for the data source. In the next step, specify which connection List-view

should use. If you don't have one then click on the 'New Connection' button, the

'Add connection' window will pop up. Cclick on the 'Change' data source and

select Oracle database and hit the 'Ok' button. Now in the server name field

specify where the Oracle server is running; in our case it is the local machine,

so we specify 'localhost'. In username and password field specify the necessary

content and click on 'Ok' . Click on 'Next' to proceed. In the next step it asks

you that whether you want to save the connection string or not. It is better to

save it as it can be used later. Select the desired table and the columns you

want to display in the List-view and click on the Finish button. To test your

website click on 'Start Debugging', this can be found under 'debug' menu. View

it in the Web browser, it will show you whole of the data in grid format, so how

to change the layout? Expand the List-view option in the design-view and click

on the configure List view option. A window which shows different options for

configuration will open. The configuration options are: give list of layout

option such as title, bulleted list, flow, etc. Another option is, i.e. 'Enable

paging', if you've large amount of data which is difficult to be displayed on a

single page, then with the help of this option you can break the data and

display that in multiple pages. You can also notice with this new developing

tool you hardly need to write any code.

WThe list view control is visible but whenever a previous framework is chosen only the controls supported by that version are displayed	With the 'Enable paging' option, the date can be displayed on multiple pages rather than a single page; quite useful when you've huge amount of data to be displayed