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Who loves you? Not only is Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 now available for everyone to download (not just subscribers) but I've got 11 short video interviews with the ASP.NET 4 team up on Channel 9. I was up in Redmond just last week and made sure to stop by the offices of as many ASP.NET developers and program managers as I could. I chatted with a few faces you may recognize and a few you may not. All of them are working hard to make ASP.NET 4 cool. I'm still working on my video techniques, and I used two different HD cameras to film these videos. Your feedback (negative AND positive) is always appreciated. This series of videos is called Hanselminutes on 9 and you can get to all of these (and many more) using the Channel 9 Tag " hanselminuteson9...

Lots of big stuff happening this week. Today Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is available to MSDN Subscribers and it'll be available for everyone on Wednesday. I'm running Beta 2 on all my machines now and really digging it. It's much faster than Beta 1 and I'm doing all my work in it now. It's come a long way and I'm really impressed at the polish. .NET 4 This is a big deal. This isn't ".NET 3.6" - there are a lot of improvements of .NET 4, and it's not just "pile on a bunch of features so you get overwhelmed." I've been working with and talking to many of the teams involved and even though it's a cheesy thing to say, this is a really customer-focused release. Shouldn't every release...

My one-hundred-and-eighty-forth podcast is up . Scott's in Seattle this week and catches Microsoft Program Manager (and one of 1000 Scott's) Scott Hunter who shares insights in the history and future of ASP.NET 4. What's coming in VS2010? Subscribe: Download: MP3 Full Show Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts , a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show. Telerik is our sponsor for this show. Check out their UI Suite of controls for ASP.NET . It's very hardcore stuff. One of the things I appreciate about Telerik is their commitment to completeness. For example, they have a page about their Right-to-Left support while some vendors have zero support, or don't...

Hey, we released Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. JasonZ has a great post with piles of details and a metric crapload of screenshots . Definitely take a moment (or eight) and check out his very detailed post. You can get it NOW if you're an MSDN Subscriber , or after the general announcement on Weds if you're not. Should You Freak Out? I don't think so. There's a lot of stuff that's new and added in .NET 4, but not in that "overwhelming-I-need-to-relearn-everything" way. More in that, "oh, this is way easier/simpler now" way. Like, moving data around with ADO.NET DataServices is easy, binding with client templates is easy, there's F# if you need it, the "dynamic" keyword if you need it, Silverlight's...

Hey, we released Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. JasonZ has a great post with piles of details and a metric crapload of screenshots . Definitely take a moment (or eight) and check out his very detailed post. You can get it NOW if you're an MSDN Subscriber , or after the general announcement on Weds if you're not. UPDATE: My bad, of course it's called ASP.NET 4 and not ASP 4. Sorry, typo. Should You Freak Out? I don't think so. There's a lot of stuff that's new and added in .NET 4, but not in that "overwhelming-I-need-to-relearn-everything" way. More in that, "oh, this is way easier/simpler now" way. Like, moving data around with ADO.NET DataServices is easy, binding with client templates is easy, there's...

A buddy of mine and I had a nice slap in the face yesterday. I was helping him deploy an ADO.NET Data Service to a large company's staging server  and we were seeing REALLY odd behavior. We'd request something like /myservice.svc and get a 404. But we could request /myservice.svc/Stuff or /myservice.svc/?metadata. We settled in to debug this. We thought we were "getting down to basics." You know, you've done this. The conversation goes something like: "Ok, people, what's the definition of insanity? Trying the same thing and expecting a different result." "Right...let's challenge all our assumptions. Let's start from scratch. Can get Hello World working?" "What's the ACLs on...

There's lots of interesting stuff going on in the ASP.NET team, and you can usually learn/glean/figure out most of it (if you're interested) by poking around the Codeplex ASP.NET site. They update it all the time, and you can watch their thinking. They put all sorts of stuff up there, ideas they are floating, directions they are considering and (really early) previews of those ideas and directions in the form of code. It's not production ready, more brainstorming - that's why it's on CodePlex, and why they don't exactly advertise the heck out of it. There's a release of ASP.NET Dynamic Data 4.0 Preview 2 that was quietly put up just a month ago with this scary disclaimer: NOTE: These previews contains features that...

It looks like many of you have already noticed that there's an official Visual Studio autocomplete file for jQuery posted up at the jQuery site . It's significant that it's hosted by the jQuery team in that it's a contribution by the Visual Studio team but it's not up at CodePlex, because it really belongs to jQuery so there's where you'll find it. This isn't a new jQuery file and nothing's been "forked" so don't freak out. It's just a documentation file, as you can see if you go to the Download jQuery page . 1.2.6 (Release Notes) Minified , Packed , Uncompressed Documentation: Visual Studio Now, the Visual Studio-specific aspect of this is a temporary thing, as it's planned for Visual...

Here's the results, as promised, of the .NET Survey I took last week . Also, here's the disclaimer. I did this on a whim, it's not scientific, so the margin of error is +/-101%. That said, the results feel intuitively right to me, personally. It was a single question with 14 checkboxes. You were asked to "check al the .NET Framework features that you use in your projects." The results are here after 4899 responses: There were lots of good responses on Twitter and comments on the original blog post . Folks wanted choices like "Other," "None" and "I don't use .NET." Of course, not answering the survey is a good way of reporting that. ;) In fact, 29 people looked at the survey, checked nothing...

My one-hundred-and-thirty-second podcast is up . Well, actually a few weeks ago, but I totally forgot to update my website with the details. You'd think somewhere around 100 shows I'd had automated this somehow. Hm. If I only I know a programmer and the data was available in some kind of universal structure syndication format…;) What is Subsonic and should you use it? Scott and Rob Conery chat about his baby and comparisons to other Open Source frameworks. Also, Scott tries to get free consulting for his new pet project. Subscribe: Download: MP3 Full Show #132 Play in your browser . ACTION: Please vote for us on Podcast Alley ! Digg us at Digg Podcasts ! Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts...