Ok, so this week I'm taking a little time off my current project that I never write about ;) to attend VS Live 2005.... Basicially the word of the day is VS.NET 2005. While interested, and eager to learn more, I fully intended to be met with the ho-hum, and oh, yeah I've heard that before..... I haven't played a lot with Beta1, but enough to see a lot of the major features.... They're billing the bits they're showing here as “pre-beta2” and I have to say they've spent some time on polish, polish, polish.... The apps demo really well. The IDE is leaps and bounds above VS 2003.... Especially in HTML/XML editing. No more does the HTML editor screw your code when flipping design view.... It's also got intellisense up the wazoo.... Everything, including <% %> tags, CSS, etc is intellisensed....
Stuff I'll be checking out more of:
Multi-file classes (Partial) - small but cool.
Resource file - auto-gen'd classes
Registration Free COM - yes COM. Got a COM dll that needs to be autodeployed in your SmartClient app, just a property and you can plop that sucker right in, and it won't screw up existing COM registries on the same machine....
ASP.NET 2.0 Application Services
Page Framework -
Master Pages
Themes/Skins
Localization (yes WebForm localization)
Adaptive UI - don't like how ASP.NET 2.0 renders your HTML - then change it!
Built-in web server - no need to be a box admin and monkey with IIS to develop web apps, no need for IIS to even be on the box!
Data Cacheing poll or push (from SQL 2005)
DataBinding up the wazoo....
More and more and more.... And I've only been here a half day.... Looks like some major changes are afoot.
Big key phrase of the day is “with no coding“ a dangerous thing to say to a room full of a few thousand developers, but it seems to work. They've gotten rid of the crap, simplistic code and let the tools take care of it. We get the heavy-lifting.
Demos all look good, but as they say the proof is in the pudding, where's beta 2???? They say end of 1st Quarter.... Too bad they couldn't get it out for us here..... Major mometum loss... They don't even have Beta1 on the conference boxes we can use here....
That's all for now...
-Andy