I managed to roll out of bed this morning at 6:30am after enjoying the sights and sounds of Vegas from the night before. Perhaps a little too much so. Given the circumstances, I feel pretty awake and pumped here as Scott Guthrie takes the stage for his keynote at DevConnections Fall 2008, "Web Development Today and Tomorrow."
Scott mentions early that we will be getting some exciting sneak peeks at ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010. I realized that I picked the absolute worst spot to sit in a room filled with several hundred, as the acoustics are causing this crazy reverberation that makes Scott sound like he's the Wizard of Oz.
Things kick into high gear as Scott rolls through a demo of ASP.NET Dynamic Data. He's created a new web project in VS, and is doing the whole drag and drop thing with LINQ to SQL. So far, this is pretty familiar territory. I've been impressed as I watched how LINQ to SQL worked from beta now into release, but I still haven't found a good reason to use it in an actual application. Hopefully I'll get some architecture tips in a later session.
Scott blew through the dynamic data example. At a glance, it looks like a templating system, but I failed to see an advantage with it. I'll have to do some more research.
ASP.NET now has free charting controls that ship today with VS2008 SP1. I'm sure ChartFX and Dundas are loving that. The charting control looks a ot like some of the existing products, where data can be set programatically, or on the actual front-end server control. The charts look pretty nice. They have three-dimensional views and there's a ton of options.
I'm guessing the charts render using the .NET Image Libraries. Some free Silverlight charts would be nice.
The dude behind me thinks they bought Dundas. They do look an awful lot like the Dundas charts. Scott is demoing how you can capture trigger events on chart elements. People are clapping for free charts! Again, this ships today and is free.
Scott is moving on to ASP.NET MVC, and is using the familiar car vs motorcycle example, saying that it may be a good fit for people who are unhappy with webforms, and are heavily focused on test-driven development. MVC is still in beta, so good for sandbox tinkering. No demo of MVC for Scott.
ASP.NET AJAX improvements comes next, the big topics here are that they found a way to no longer break the back button. That's pretty awesome! The best new feature is the jQuery integration into intellisense, but that's old news. Scott makes a humorous gesture about how Microsoft originally wanted to imitate jQuery functinoality but instead decided to incorporate it. I must be the only person here that finds that funny for some reason.
Scott is jumping in to a jQuery demo with intellisense. Integration is as easy as downloading a documentation file that slides right in to Visual Studio. I need to get on that. Scott is showing off a Flickr search he made with jQuery. This turns out to be pretty funny as he let someone in the audience pick the search term. Searching for, "Vegas," brings back humorous and risque results.
He's showing off his code now. Scott is a big fan of string.Format, I've noticed. He's using an animation paramter for jQuery called "explode." I'm guessing it's from a plugin library.
I have to try it now. It looks like it's in the effects/UI library. http://docs.jquery.com/UI/Effects/Explode
Scott is switching gears now to talk about the future.
ASP.NET 4 is going to fix the ClientID problem on server controls. They are also going to put the VIEWSTATE on a diet. I want to start cheering, but nobody else is so I'll just keep quiet. ASP.NET 4 is going to have integrated URL Rewriting. This isn't really that tough anyway, but maybe they'll have more flexibility.
Controls will now have the option to output their own inline CSS. Not sure how I feel about this idea, and how it is an advantage. Scott is glossing over Dynamic Data again. I'm still lost on that topic.
Distributed Caching feature is coming so that load-balanced server environments will have better flexibility for caching data. This is cool, but I don't think I'll ever use it. Famous last words.
Scott is talking about Visual Studio 2010 features now. The only thing that really jumps out is better design view improvements supportings CSS2. He said it would be better for VS2008, though, so I'll believe it when I see it.
Scott showed a screenshot of having dev/stage/prd environment web.config changes so that we don't have to comment out database connection strings anymore. The audience is incredibly enthusiastic about this.
Visual Studio 2010 is going to have full integrated support for Sharepoint. People are liking this as well.
Jeff from Scott's team is now taking the stage to walk us through a demo of Visual Studio 2010. He's showing that it will now incorporate snippets for front-end ASP.NET development. He created a textbox control with about two characters. I'm wondering how long it will take me to memorize the snippets for my favorite controls.
He's now giving himself one minute to build an entire page. A timer is ticking down, and he's actually not really that fast. After one minute he's got half a page built with 232 keystrokes. Now he's coding with the new snippets as "Eye of the Tiger" blares through. He got the entire page done with 24 seconds to spare, and in only 132 keystrokes. It's pretty impressive.
Jeff is now showing off ASP.NET MVC. He's using a new feature called "Smart Tags." It works kind of like "Go To Definition" for a method that doesn't exist, except it instead auto-generates a method signature for you in that class. He's using assertions to verify the methods of his class.
MVC reminds me a lot of Sitecore's approach to content management. It makes good use of multiple Master Pages for the View layer. The Controller layer looks like it might take some time to get used to. Jeff is showing off a new "Quick Search" feature that will help you get to methods you're looking for in your project more quickly. I'll be using that one a lot.
Jeff is now giving the stage back to Scott.
Scott VERY briefly mentions a Silverlight interactive designer for Visual Studio 2010. I wish he would elaborate, but we're almost out of time.
Visual Studio 2010 will be built entirely on .NET and use WPF for the front-end UI. Scott is showing off a screenshot, but its still pretty early. It looks better, but you can tell it needs work. Scott mentions how they are going to make it easier to manage having multiple files open. You will also be able to drag and drop dlls into a "Components" folder. I'm guessing we won't have to add references to libraries anymore?
Scott is talking abouit the long-term vision of .NET, being an intersections of Web, RIA, and Desktop. He mentions mobile as apart of this. Scott is talking about Silverlight 2 now. NBCOlympics.com had over 1.7 million visitors during the olympics. This should help with adoption rates, but we still have a long way to go.
Future PC's will have Silverlight 2 installed on them, so this will help also. More controls came with the full release of Silverlight 2, more are coming. Scott mentions that at PDC they announced Silverlight charting controls. I'm not sure if these are available yet. Hooray, more free charting!
Scott's homepage is yahoo.com.
He's showing the deep zoom demo of the Hard Rock website. His example shows how they did some clever things with the deep zoom, but this is stuff we've seen before. Scott is showing a very rich health-care application built in Silverlight that looks fantastic. Whoever built it did some amazing work with menuing and transitions from page to page. They are using deep zoom to drill down into less or more details on various information, it has a very iPhone-like feel to it.
Scott is wrapping it up, and so am I. Lot's of exciting new stuff on the way!