Web Application Development with Microsoft Technologies

Last week I finally had some time to install new Visual Studio (codename Orcas) Beta 2 Version in my laptop. Installation took almost 1 hour withouth MSDN.

I’ve heard from Microsoft this will be the last version of Visual Studio, as we know it by now. They will just throw it away, and build it from zero. Although we will still have support for another couple of years, so don’t worry about it and just keep using it

I heard a lot about this new version features in posts, presentations and online videos.

Now it is time to do a short post about it, focusing in major enhancements to improve Web Application Development With .NET, so you get involved with it. I will be writing more in detail about the new features in future posts.

Visual Studio 2008 have several enhancements and will integrate almost all technologies we have been seen around during past last year.

Some of the cool features I was just trying:

Multi-targeting. You can select which .NET version you are targeting. Then everything in the IDE like toolbox, debug, intellisense, will be restricted to the version you chose.

Improved ASP.NET Page Designer, including:

• CSS Manager. You can easily attach any css to your project. Create one from zero, manage and refactor it. After you have your css, you can design your web page easily in a great visual way, and assign a class to any of your controls. It also shows you the cascading settings inherited from the various CSS rules. This is something all web developers were waiting for.
  This will help us a lot to create more Search Engine Friendly applications (Soon I’ll be posting more about it). This CSS Manager is the same one you will find in the Microsoft Expression Design, which is part of the Expression suite and the successor of the Microsoft Frontpage. (Stay tuned to this blog to read about it later).
• Split View. You can view both views (Design and Source) while editing an aspx file. You won’t need to wait until controls are created, or waste time switching from one view to another. Great one.

• Nested master pages are supported in the new designer. You can also inherit an existing masterpage, or add a new contentplaceholder to the root file and use it across child master pages, to easily cascade changes to all pages.

JScript enhancements such as:

 
• Intellisense Support including rich type inferencing.
• Debugging will allow you to set up breakpoints from server code, having a full watch window, and the files being debugging listed in the Object Explorer. This one would have helped me a lot last week when I was trying to debug some Infragistics Web Tab Controls.

AJAX.NET will be now fully integrated in the Visual Studio. But you will need to download the Ajax Toolkit because ’till now is not included by default.

AJAX Server Control and AJAX Server Control Extended Projects will be now available to easily create your own AJAX controls

.NET 3.0 Projects will be integrated and available from New Project menu. You can chose to add a new WPF, WCF or WF Project

In future posts I’ll be covering WPF Integration Features, for those who are interested in building Rich Winform Applications. But what I am interested the most, is in learning  Silverlight (previously named WPF/e), and every web application developer around the world is talking about it.
So, I’ll be telling you more about it in my next posts. I’ll also cover Expression Blend, since it is the designer tool that will help us to create the xaml files for our Rich User Interface Web Application.

Well, this post is going too long, so let’s summarize Some other Visual Studio features coming up:

• Data Access: LinqDataSource (Just Announced ), asp:ListView features control, Dataset in separated files and ADO .NET Entity Framework . (I’ll cover this later)
• LINQ and Scaffolding UI generator
• C# 3.0 language innovations
• VSTO Integration, this will help us to deploy Visual Studio Add-ins in a more easy way (now it is a pain to deploy them)
• New ASP.NET controls: SearchDataSource Control, Dinyamic Data Controls and Silverlight Controls Integration as part of the Microsoft ASP.NET Futures (I’ll review them later).
• And many, many other features that I will try to post about in the near future…

So, what do you thing guys ? Do we have a chance to improve our Web Application Development with all of these new cool features ? I think so