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