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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I'm happy to announce that my second Wrox Blox is done and available for purchase as of today!  As you may remember, back in January, my first Wrox Blox on the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit was released.  Now, continuing with the ASP.NET AJAX theme, the new Wrox Blox deals with creating your own ASP.NET AJAX controls, from scratch.  As you may or may not know, control development is one of my favorite topics.  There are always times when you create something that you and others will useful in multiple applications, and these cases usually are good candidates for a server control.  This book takes the "Server Control" to the next level by enabling a rich client interface with ASP.NET AJAX.  If you are still working in VS 2005, don't let the title scare you away.  Even though the book focuses on VS 2008 and .NET 3.5, you'll still find the code and concepts apply within VS 2005 with .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET AJAX Extensions 1.0.  More...

What better thing to do on a Tuesday night (well ok, Wednesday morning) when you can't sleep than update your blogging engine.  Subtext is a great blogging engine, however; we outgrew some of its features.  In its place, we decided to go with BlogEngine.NET.  The transition was pretty easy thanks to BlogML, however, like all things, we needed to do some manipulation ourselves.  Along with the new blog engine, we also put in a new Visoft-branded blog theme, which was long overdue.  Instead of delaying the release of the new blog, we hope to launch a new Visoft, Inc. website in the next few weeks, which will be based on the blog theme we have here.  

Some of the new things to look for:

• The old Subtext links should still work - BlogEngine.NET has different paths for posts, but with a bit of custom changes, these should be seamless.
• The old RSS feed URL should work - (again thanks to some custom work), but you should switch to the new feed URL of http://blogs.visoftinc.com/syndication.axd just to make everything easier in the future
• New authors! - It was lonely being the only one adding posts, look forward to other Visoft developers adding new posts in the future. BlogEngine.NET has a nice feature of being able to filter based on the author as shown here: http://blogs.visoftinc.com/author/Damien%20White.aspx
• New content! - We have been holding off on publishing content until the new blog engine was in-place, so look for some new content coming real soon.
• New theme - We would love your feedback on the new layout. 

There are too many new things to list, so feel free to browse the site and discover BlogEngine.NET and the new Visoft, Inc. Blogs!