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. 
More...

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.
More...

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.

More...

This isn't a new topic by far, but I still encounter the question of how to implement a read-only auto-implemented property, so here it goes. 

As I'm sure you are aware, C# 3.0 has a wonderful feature known as auto-implemented properties (sometimes referred to as Automatic Properties).  These clean up our code quite a bit when we have properties that are simply backed by a private member, and all we do it get and set that value. More...

If you are working with a WCF service, an MSMQ binding, and hosting in IIS, there are three wonderful articles by Tom Hollander that you should check out.  The series is entitled "MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting them to play nice", here are the three links:

• MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting them to play nice (Part 1)
• MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting them to play nice (Part 2)
• MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting them to play nice (Part 3)

They sure have helped me get one of my projects working, and I'm sure they will help you as well.

It's been entirely too long since my last post, and with the olympics in full swing, we'll go with a volleyball theme for this post.

BUMP

So here's the scenario. After really digging your teeth into ASP.NET 2.0 and playing around wiih all the cool data access features, you decide to apply a liberal use of the ObjectDataSource for its ability to take care of the paging and sorting calls for you. Now, you begin to convert your site to a service oriented back end and you wonder how you're going to make calls against your web service. You have a few options in front of you. You can create a thin facade layer that will act as a liaison between your presentation code and your service layer calls, and hook your ObjectDataSource to that. This works especially well when you have a complex object model that makes use of the web service calls behind the scenes. It's also beneficial when you are generating your proxy classes from metadata or contacting a foreign web service. In the scenario I'm going to demonstrate here, I'm referencing a shared contract and service library, so I'll be using using the ObjectDataSource to make direct calls to ChannelFactory<T> for this example.

More...