Project Cool

After the tremendous amount of interest the VPCs of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 generated, the Beta 1 bits would be available for download for MSDN Subscribers later today.  The general public would also be able to download the bits starting this Wednesday.

Visual Studio 2010 combines the power of .NET 4.0 and the tremendous enhancements done to areas such as Web Development, WPF as well as native development and provides the best so far platform for developers.

While some of the features were available as v1 in .NET 3.5 SP1 as well as individual downloads over the last few months, with Visual Studio 2010, all of these are bundled into one install and has much richer integration support for many of what developers wanted.

While it would be very hard to post all of the enhancements in one single post, to name a few, here below are some of the key aspects

• ASP.NET 4.0 – Support for rich client side development, complete control on mark-up, business oriented data controls etc.,
• ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 – complete client side development with JavaScript – support for UI Templates etc.,
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data – moving away from just scaffolding to integration with existing applications, richer validation and support for entity framework.
• WPF 4.0 – best experience for client application development
• Developer focussed improvements in code editor (rapid code generation)
• One Click Deployment for Web Applications
• Lots of enhancements for native developers

And much much more….

While, I have had the privilege to play with some of the early builds, I look forward eagerly to install this build as much as you would be and also would love to hear from you folks on your experiences.

If you are an MSDN Subscriber, visit the MSDN Subscription Center

Cheers !!!

I am back from delivering Tech.Ed India 2009, particularly the web platform track where I delivered three sessions across 2 days.  In addition, we also had Stephen Walther from the ASP.NET Team deliver sessions on ASP.NET 4.0, ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET AJAX.

Over the next few posts, I would like to get all the content that we discussed during Tech.Ed India and possible videos so that even if you missed the action over there, you could benefit right here.  To begin with, the sessions focussing on ASP.NET were

• ASP.NET 4.0 by Stephen Walther
• ASP.NET MVC by Stephen Walther
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data by Harish Ranganathan (that’s me)
• IIS 7.5, Server Core with ASP.NET – Windows Server 2008 R2 by Praveen Srivatsa
• ASP.NET AJAX by Stephen Walther
• VS 2010 Web Deployment features by Harish Ranganathan
• ASP.NET – A day in the life of an ASP.NET Request by Harish Ranganathan

While bulk of the above require VS 2010 bits, to begin with, lets pick up the sessions which don’t require ex.-  The session on ASP.NET Dynamic Data.  In this post, I would specify the things to get started and cover up the actual content in the next post.

Pre-requisites for this sample

1. Visual Studio 2008 SP1 & .NET 3.5 SP1

2. Dynamic Data Preview (CodePlex)

3. .NET RIA Services

4. SQL Server 2008/2005 or Express Editions

5. Northwind Sample Database

Also, you need a bunch of DLLs that you get from the above download (Dynamic Data Preview)

In the following posts, we will examine, how you can take the Dynamic Data Preview, .NET RIA Service Domain Data Source controls to build your 3 tier architecture website which uses/doesn't use Dynamic Data features.

To sum it up, Dynamic Data and Domain Data Source controls are mutually exclusive and can be used selectively according to your requirement.

Cheers !!!