Today Visual Studio 11 Beta is released and available for download. Don't want to read a big blog post? Phooey on you then! ;) Visual Studio 11 Beta & .NET 4.5 Beta Announcement by Jason Zander + Downloads Windows 8 Consumer Preview Announcement by Steven Sinofsky + Download Made it this far? OK, cool. I wanted to do a post that would not only point you to a bunch of other resources, but more generally answer the obvious questions. The questions that I asked before I went to work for Microsoft four years ago. I always ask: What's changed, and why should I care? "One ASP.NET" One of the things that the fellows and I are working on that will be more obvious  after the beta and even a little after the final release is...

Visual Studio 11 Beta is now available to download. Please visit Jason Zander's Blog for the download links and overview of the new features. We have many enhanced many features in the Beta. We'll discuss some of them in future blog posts. Here are a few web development tools features included in the Visual Studio 11 Beta compared to VS2010. Many of them have already been mentioned in our Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview blogs. Visual Studio 11 Express Beta for Web is now available. It includes support for TFS and unit testing tools. It’s downloadable via Web PI. ASP.NET MVC4 Beta are included in the Visual Studio 11 Beta New MVC4 templates and Web Forms templates are provided with features such as HTML5 support and ASP.NET 4...

We shipped MVC4 Beta recently, and found it may cause VS2010 sp1 cshtml/vbhtml editor to pause for a long time after typing snippet, JavaScript inside cshtml or vbhtml files, if the MVC4 application has just been created and has not been compiled. The workaround is to compile the project to get the assemblies in the bin folder.  Note, if you clean the project which removes the assemblies from the bin folder, the editor problem will come back. We are actively working on a resolution for this issue for next release.  Thanks. Best regards. Xinyang Qiu Web Platform and Tools Team Read More...

I just couldn't stay away from the Windows Azure community! I've accepted the position of Chief Windows Azure Architect for Aditi . (Yup, that's my picture on our homepage.) If you haven't heard of Aditi yet, you probably will. Not only is Aditi a top Microsoft partner already, but the company is making a big bet on Windows Azure specifically, hitting the ground running with the acquisition of Cumulux . My new job at Aditi has two parts: I'll continue to be a voice in the Windows Azure community, now from a more hands-on perspective reflecting the experience my colleagues and I have at Aditi. I'll be working with Aditi's other architects and directly with our customers to build great solutions on Windows Azure. Here's...

At the South Florida Code Camp I gave a newer version of the REST Silverlight talk using the just released MVC 4 Beta and ASP.NET Web API. This talk shows how to share code between different versions of the framework, how to use the ASP.NET Web API from Silverlight, and how to integrate a Silverlight application into an MVC 4 site. Powerpoint Slides Attached to this post Demos and Examples Download the full source and my demo snippit text file here . My Book I cover this in my Silverlight 5 book. At the time of this writing, the MEAP has the MVC3 version. I'll update it for the print and ebook shortly. Silverlight 5 in Action Related Links ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta Released! - Jon Galloway Web API: The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site Creating a...

This post is in continuation with my earlier post, so you may want to read that first before coming here. Read More...

Single Page Application Frameworks are gaining popularity in the ever evolving web community with lot of libraries such as JavaScriptMVC, Backbonejs and many other libraries. ASP.NET MVC 4 introduces experimental support for building single page application (SPA) through a template. Much of the plumbing work of wiring up the client side scripts, javascript modelviews and the controllers is automated, making it a quick start to develop SPAs relatively easier. Lets examine a scenario where we are building a Northwind Store using SPA. I installed the ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta for Visual Studio 2010 and the Northwind Sample Database for SQL Server Post that I did a “File – New Project – ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application” In MVC 3 we are used to see a screen...

ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta came out last week. It's got lots of new features as well as some surprises that move us closer to the "One ASP.NET" idea. I talked about this a little in this week's MSDN Flash email newsletter (you can subscribe to MSDN Flash here ; it's reasonably high signal, low noise). Here's part of what I said : Don't think of ASP.NET as an island. It's a citizen of the larger community. More and more of ASP.NET is open source, and we push hard every day to stay open and be open. We want to make ASP.NET more pluggable, more open, more fun. We've got big things planned - some that will surprise you. I hope you'll join the conversation and the community. Here's some of the stuff that's...

ASP.NET Web API supports asynchronous actions using the new Task-based programming model introduced in .NET 4. In .NET 4.5 the model has improved further and in addition is supported directly from C# using the new async and await keywords (see “ Visual Studio Asynchronous Programming ” for background). What this means is that you can have actions that look like this: 1: public Task< string []> GetContent( string topic) 2: { 3: ... 4: } as well as 1: public Task<HttpResponseMessage> GetContent( string topic) 2: { 3: ... 4: } and even this 1: public Task GetContent( string topic) 2: { 3: ... 4: } The benefit of writing Task-based actions is that you don’t block a thread on the server even if things take a long time to complete and...

Drivers in Orchard are responsible for taking content parts and using them to generate shapes for the rendering engine to transform into HTML. A little known fact is that there can be more than one driver for any given part. You might be wondering what this can be used for: one shape per part seems like a reasonable assumption. I’ll show one case where this ability to add a driver to the one that already exists came in really handy. One of the sites I’m working on is making heavy use of taxonomies. The customer wanted to add management screens for the order of terms in any given taxonomy, that had some interesting specific features. We wanted a couple of links to that additional screen right inside the existing UI for a taxonomy field. I could...