ZogBlog

Hi Dave,

Yep -- it is safe to install VS 2003 and VS 2005 side-by-side and do development with them. For ASP.NET web applications, there is also now a new admin UI tab in the IIS Admin tool that provides a version picker drop-down that let's you easily configure which version of ASP.NET (v1, V1.1 and V2.0) that you want to use on a particular vroot, application or site.

Hi Ocean,

Starting with Beta2 there is actually a new item template in Visual Studio that let's you create browser definition files pretty easily. Just select the "Browser File" item in the new item dialog and it will create the App_Browsers directory for you and add a file with the right XML template for defining it. You should be able to fill it in there and be good to go.

Hi Ray,

We've actually done a lot of work to make sure developers can run as normal users and not as admins on the box. This applies both to client and web development work. For web development specifically, we've even included a built-in ASP.NET web server that only accepts local requests (so secure from remote computers), shuts down with the IDE closes (so won't run in the background), and more importantly runs as a normal user -- which means you can debug and interact with it without having to be an administrator.

Yep -- you now get full WYSIWYG support for user-controls in the designer. As an added bonus, we also now allow you to register both custom controls and user controls in the web.config file (eliminating the need to register them on each page). VS also provides full WYWSIYG support for this.

Hi Steve,

I run as a non-admin on some of my machines. It is also a key focus of LH -- we are definitely pushing people towards that as the default going forward.

Hi Hylts,

You can upgrade existing ASP.NET V1 and V1.1 applications to ASP.NET V2.0 using Visual Studio (it will automatically upgrade to use the new project system for you). Not sure if this is what you meant...

Hi W3bbo,

With ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 the state of XHTML is excellent. :-)

We now emit XHTML markup by default from all ASP.NET controls. All new pages created with VS are also now XHTML by default (the new form template is XHTML compliant), and all static html added from the toolbox are XHTML complaint. We also then provide built-in markup intellisense and real-time validation for XHTML transitional and strict in source mode.

So if you are an XHTML fan, I think you will be very happy.

Hi Hylts,

Yep -- we now support layers in VS 2005. These are now easy to add by going to the Layout menu and selecting "Insert Layer"

Hi Vijay,

The databinding support for web applications is much, much richer in ASP.NET 2.0. We now support 2 way databinding against both databases and middle-tier objects. You can also sort and page over data without having to write any code (and even without having viewstate enabled).

Hi Tantiana,

We now have a built-in Treeview control that provides uplevel client-support for both IE and Firefox. We also then have about 50+ other new controls you can use as well.

Hi CodeMonkey,

Yep -- we've changed "uplevel browsers" to now include a variety of modern browsers. For example, you can now use the validators client-side on FireFox, Opera, etc. We also support client-side support on things like Treeviews, GridViews, etc for most browsers.

Hi Vijay,

We actually have built-in support for this with ASP.NET 2.0. We call this feature "client side callbacks", and it is a core part of our control model. It also works cross-browser (so specifically with non IE clients). It should make these types of scenarios very easy to write in ASP.NET 2.0 and is super powerful.

Hi Fog

You can continue to bind data to a GridView by setting the DataSource property via code and calling Databind on it. This works just like the DataGrid does today in terms of capabilities.

Hi KWarren

We continue to use the same forms-autn engine in ASP.NET 2.0 -- so from an architecture perspective it is the same (Membership then just provides a credential store you can use with it). There are several new features we've also added to forms-auth. Some specific additions: cookieless forms-auth, and new encryption formats for the auth-ticket.

"ever" is a long time! we do have a prototype of this in house, but we won't get this into Whidbey.

I am sorry to hear about your CTP install issues. As you know, we trade off a little bit of quality control for timeliness on CTPs. One area where I think we will get some help is that we will work to release more of the CTP technologies using VPC images -- this should help us out a bunch on install issues.

Yes - check here: http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/changeinfo/Backwards1.1to2.0/default.aspx

this is great to hear! I'm glad Click Once is something you're excited about.

SourceSafe is a great tool for small workgroup-based teams, but does not scale to larger, enterprise development teams. Team System is designed to scale. Additionally, source control in Team System is intimately bound to Work Item tracking -- for example, when you check in, you can directly tick off the work items you're delivering and bugs you're fixing. And there's check-in policy enforcement, a metrics warehouse, reporting engine, process, guidance, to name a few improvements.

Our modeling strategy is to provide fully faithful, tripless modeling and visualization with the .NET languages. In addition to class diagrams, which go beyond UML, we're focusing on Design for Operations, with innovative designers for both distributed apps and infrastructure.

These are an initial instance of domain specific languages, which you can read about on the workbench on MSDN. We have partners who will be using the DSL architecture to implement more UML modeling, but we won't be delivering that directly beyond what you have now.

Hi Tommy, we've added a few things to the VSTS product that we think will make doing test driven development much easier. First, we've integrated unit testing (the ability to create, run, see results from, organize/test case management, etc) into the product. Using this model, you can write the tests, then use the refactoring support to create the classes/methods you need to implement for the tests. i'm in europe right now and have demo'd this a couple of times. it works pretty well. we've also been talking w/ several TDD folks about creating a "test driven development" methodology template which would drive the way teams use the Team System to implement software projects in a TDD way.

Hi Chris, from about 3 to 1000 is what we figure. Actually, the team system was designed to handle small teams using very agile methodologies as well as large teams using very formal methodologies such as CMMI level 3 type stuff by having a configurable process model. We think that any team that needs to increase the collaboration because of size, specialization, or location, will get a lot of value from it. We will continue to ship a much improved version of VSS in Whidbey as well for the small (2-5) person teams that don't want a server based SCM system and don't need the collab features. Still, those teams may very well want to pick up the role based skus for load testing, performance tuning, or SOA design.

Hi Steve. VSTS will not require an additional Yukon license, it is included as an embedded version for use solely with the Team Foundation Server. and happily, YES beta 2 will install on a single machine both the data tier and the middle tier if that's the config you desire.

Changesets are the atomic checkin unit in the Team Foundation Server. We use those as the way to promote from different branches, we use them as the unit that can get associated with a work item, etc. they are certainly integrated with Team Build. Team Build nightly sync's the days changesets and starts a build with those changes. it produces a report of all the changesets that made it into the build, and all the work items that were related to those change sets (if any). pretty nice. BuckH on my team has a good blog with lots of info about changesets. you can find it at http://blogs.msdn.com/buckh

It's on our feature list! In the interim you can leverage one of the 3rd party tools that enable these scenarios.

In the 2.0 SDK there is a tool called clrver which can do this.