Yesterday, Monday, September 29th, Microsoft announced the next version of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework.  For even more information on this, September 29th - October 3rd is Visual Studio Team System 2010 week on Channel 9.

Microsoft has been busy this week announcing exciting changes, and Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 is certainly at the top.  It's always very exciting when new versions of Visual Studio come out (or maybe that is just me). 

It's too early to tell everything that will be included in the final release.  However, one would assume that final versions of things like ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 will be included.  Personally, I would like to see the ASP.NET features to come earlier, especially ASP.NET AJAX.  We haven't had a new release for the ASP.NET AJAX since the 1.0 release.  ASP.NET AJAX found in .NET 3.5 is really just the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Extensions that were bundled as part of the release.  ASP.NET developers are starting to move more and more towards using things like jQuery.  This doesn't mean that most of us ASP.NET developers are giving up on ASP.NET AJAX just yet, but it doesn't seem to be a good sign for the future of ASP.NET AJAX.  I would hope and expect that we will see something similar as the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Extensions being released so that we can start using it before 2010.  More...

Cool Stuff! Microsoft has announced that they will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward.  For more information on this announcement, you can refer to Scott Guthrie's or Bertrand Le Roy's announcement.  It will be licensed under the MIT license (as it is now) and will not be altered from the original source.  The one feature that will be added is Visual Studio IntelliSense  which is an excellent feature to have "built-in" rather than having to "hack" it.  One thing to note is that this isn't a replacement for the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Library.  This is simply an addition which will compliment the existing ASP.NET AJAX Library and as you can see, everything plays nice together. 
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Introduction

I would like to set the text value on a textbox control. It sounds easy enough. First, I would like to create a textbox web control then I would like to access one of its properties "Text" and set the text to "Hello World". Well what do you need to do to write your code in a generic way so you are can abstraction of the fact that the web control is actually a text box, it could be any web control.

We will visit different ways to be able to this.
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If you've read things of mine, such as my Wrox Blox Hands On ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, or posts on the ASP.NET Forums, you may have noticed I talk about using ASP.NET AJAX Page Methods lots of the time.  Lots of developers using ASP.NET AJAX overuse the UpdatePanel, or use it in situations where it doesn't make sense.  One example of this that I explore in my book is the comparison between using an UpdatePanel for a cascading drop-down effect vs. using the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit's CascadingDropDown Control with Page Methods.  In short, the CascadingDropDown was far more efficient.  Most of the time the reasoning for choosing the UpdatePanel is that developers don't "think" about the repercussions of the UpdatePanel, nor do they think about other approaches to the problems they're trying to solve.  One of my favorite posts on UpdatePanels that I constantly refer developers to is Dave Ward's blog post titled "Why ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanels Are Dangerous".  The post does a great job of discussing the point of UpdatePanel overuse and gives an example of using Page Methods for a task instead of the UpdatePanel.  Since I still encounter developers who fall into the UpdatePanel trap, I figured it would be a good idea to discuss Page Methods a bit further.

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I have been using what can only be described as a wonder in the quest for a paperless office.   Here was my problem, I have countless documents that I consume/produce, for example, bills, invoices, receipts, contracts, etc.  All of these documents end up in various file folders, and things are impossible to find.  For example, let's say I need to find an invoice for a book I ordered.  So starts the fun... "Let's see, I think I bought that last year," off to the 2007 Receipts folder.  "Now when did I get that, maybe Q4 or so?"  Flipping through various size receipts, I would look for the receipt.  Of course, if this flipping weren't bad enough, often times these things get out of order where perhaps a receipt from March is mixed in with the Q3 files.  Even if the files were organized perfectly, it would still be hard to find something specific in just a few seconds. 

There are just so many disadvantages to paper beyond just finding information.  What about a fire?  Now you need to store the file folders in a fireproof cabinet.  Then there is water damage, spills, rips, etc.  Storing documents on a server with backups seemed like the obvious choice to solve all of these problems.  Of course, I don't want something time consuming or super expensive.  I found my answer with the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner

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