Web Application Development with Microsoft Technologies

And more…  ASP.NET Futures, means that, the features coming up in the ASP.NET World.

This Microsoft Team works  in new features and release them for preview, test and to get feedback from users before they include them in the Visual Studio package.

Brad Abrams, from ASP.NET Futures team, posted about the July 2007 release in his blog. Sadly, this package will ship AFTER Orcas, but you can download it now, to test it in your Visual Studio 2005 or Orcas Beta 2.

In summary, this new release includes some good features and controls such as:

• New controls for Silverlight Support:

Xaml control: now you can have Rich Interactive Applications (RIAs) through embedding your Xaml, a managed-code assembly, a managed dynamic-language script module, or client JavaScript librariesDynamic, using the new Xaml control. You can include a JS library or Xaml just by setting the Script Reference and XamlUrl properties of the control, and your application will be rendering Silverlight content, as in this simple calculator demo from ASP.NET Futures website.

Xmedia control: this control enables you to integrate audio and video (wmv,mp3 or wma) in your web application without knowing Xaml. This one is also really nice, you just drag and drop the control, set the properties and that’s it, you have a cool media player with skins, music libraries and a very cool look & feel. I encourage you to see this cool demo from Fox Movies to se how the player could look like. It looks pretty amazing, don’t you think ?

Disclaimer: you need to install the Silverlight components in your computer for the demos to work. Every time you find a Silverlight application when browsing, if you don’t have the components (framework) installed, then a message will be displayed instead, with the download link. If you haven’t already installed, download Silverlight now. Inevitable question comes to my mind, even it will ship with Internet Explorer, would all companies allow Silverlight components to run in their security policies? This is something that usually don’t happen when talking about ActiveX objects. I hope they change their minds with Silverlight.
 

• Enhancements to ASP.NET AJAX  Extensions:

CSS Selectors: new methods to get DOM objects querying by the CSS class. Usefull to apply behaviors to multiple controls at once.

History server control: you can set history points and navigate to them by using the back and forward button in IE. It will simplify the use of history in Ajax applications.

Script Resource Extraction tool: if you are using javascript files and you are embedding them into an assembly, or you are registering your js with the ScriptManager, which is the same, this tool will let you extract these files from an assembly to individual JS files, so you can serve them directly from their path over IIS.

• Dynamic Data Controls for ASP.NET:

I will dedicate a full post to this new trend because it looks interesting. Essentially, it is a new framework that will infer the database schema at runtime and populate controls dynamically to manage the data. There are already 7 controls to populate the data meeting different customer needs.

• ASP.NET Application Services:

Capture Javascripts errors and log them, add a Search to the web site or a Site Map for Search Engines (so you can increase the ranking in searches).

So, this is a snapshot of what is coming for ASP.NET Developers. Even not so many things, I believe these features address some issues we face day to day, and gives a good hand in improving the User Experience in our web applications through Silverlight and AJAX.