The general consensus is that at some point this week, we're going to get fantastic new bits, a CTP containing extensions for ASP.NET 3.5 and some other goodies as well. I can honestly say that, after having spend years writing ASP.NET code from 1.0 to 2.0 and some 3.5, I was just about done with ASP.NET. Other competing frameworks like Rails had the agility I wanted, but ASP.NET had all of the enterprise features that I really needed. Now it looks like we're going to be able to have our cake and eat it too: agility, testability, MVC framework, and a fantastic new EAI story.
Here's a rundown of what it looks like we're getting:
ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview CTP. This looks to be huge, and the big push appears to include a lot of new stuff for Silverlight like new controls that will make injecting Silverlight content onto your ASP.NET 3.5 page a trivial task. MVC!!!! - While I think this will technically be part of the extensions preview CTP, this is huge. I cannot explain how long I've been waiting for a decent MVC framework to come out for ASP.NET and, from ScottGu's posts, things are looking really, really promising."Astoria". This is an underrated tool and I believe is being mismarketed. Technically, it allows you to expose an underlying data store over a RESTful URL using a standard serialization format (such as ATOM, APP, JSON, etc). The real value here is not in the idea that you'll be able to flip a switch and magically expose your data to customers. The real value is that Astoria provides you with the ability to do some incredibly powerful Enterprise Application Integration stuff with insanely fast time-to-production. Definitely suggest you check this out if you haven't been toying with it already.Silverlight 2.0. This is looking to release in Q1 2008 and might be included as a beta/CTP in the new bits we should be expecting this week. Silverlight 2.0 is the newly renamed Silverlight 1.1. Silverlight 2.0 adds .NET programmability and a host of otherwise useful features to the Silverlight 1.0 rich content delivery mechanism. In short, Silverlight 1.0 was a dumb animation tool, and Silverlight 2.0 is a true and powerful RIA development environment.Silverlight development tools. I don't know if we're looking at some kind of tweak to Expression Blend, or some other tool, but the rumor has it that we'll be getting a much better design environment within Visual Studio 2008 for Silverlight applications.In short, if you're developing standard ASP.NET applications (by standard, I mean mostly ASP.NET + Ajax) or if you're developing RIAs in Silverlight 1.1, then the upcoming stuff from Microsoft is going to seem like a gift from Santy Claus himself.
Now if only I could get all my other Christmas presents through MSDN, it would save a truckload on shipping costs!
tags: microsoft aspnet ria astoria silverlight mvc
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