Latest Microsoft Blogs

I’ve been relatively quiet on my blog lately in part because of all the work on ASP.NET MVC . However, the ASP.NET team is a relatively small team so we often are required to work on multiple features at the same time. So part of the reason I’ve been so busy is that while we were wrapping up ASP.NET MVC, I was also busy working on a core .NET Framework feature we plan to get into the next version ( it was a feature that originated with our team, but we realized it belongs in the BCL ). The goal of the feature is to help deal with the very common task of handling string input. In many cases, the point is to convert the input into another type, such as an int or float . However, how do you deal with the fact that the string might not be convertible...

Patrick Smacchia , of NDepend fame, has done a detailed, low level look at exactly what changed in .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.   Some data he lists: # Assemblies    112 # Namespaces    919 to 935       (+16   +1.7%) # Types    39 988 to 40 513       (+525   +1.3%) # Methods    387 421 to 386 790       (-631   -0.2%) # Fields    241 567 to 246 795       (+5 228   +2.2%) # IL instructions    8 598 933 to 8 620 940       (+22 007   +0.3%) Overall, for the amount of new functionality...

VS2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 offer a ton of customer value from Linq to Ajax and much more.  The service pack we have been working on to round out this release adds even more new value in addition to fixing a 100s of customer reported bugs!  All of it is driven by customer asks and I am excited about how we have begun to embrace a model of providing great customer value on a very regular cadence.  Omar Khan and I recently recorded a DotNetRocks episode where we talked about all these great things.  I thought it would be fun to list just a few of my personal favorite new features in this SP...   What is your favorite one?    For Web Developers: - ASP.NET Dynamic Data makes building data driven web applications...

Wow, it feels like old times ...  I am happy that we are posting a new proposal for additions to the framework design guidelines.  Mitch has worked hard on these, and we have reviewed them internally and now it is time for your comments.   Please do chime in! LINQ Framework Design Guidelines   Thanks! Read More...

This is part 2 in an ongoing series in which I talk about various design and versioning issues as they relate to Abstract Base Classes (ABC), Interfaces, and Framework design. In part 1 I discussed some ways in which ABCs are more resilient to versioning than interfaces. I haven’t covered the full story yet and will address some great points raised in the comments. In this part, I want to point out some cases in which Abstract Base Classes fail in versioning. In my last post, I mentioned you could simply add new methods to an Abstract Base Class and not break clients. Well that’s true, it’s possible, but I didn’t emphasize that this is not true for all cases and can be risky. I was saving that for another post (aka this one). I had been thinking...

Eilon Lipton recently wrote a bit about context objects in ASP.NET MVC and in an “Oh by the way” moment, tossed out the fact that we changed the IHttpContext interface to the HttpContextBase abstract base class (ABS for short). Not long after, this spurred debate among the Twitterati. Why did you choose an Abstract Base Class in this case? The full detailed answer would probably break my keyboard in length, so I thought I would try to address it in a series of posts. In the end, I hope to convince the critiques that the real point of contention is about maintaining backwards compatibility, not about choosing an abstract base class in this one instance. Our Constraints All engineering problems are about optimizing for constraints. As I’ve written...

Krzysztof spilled the beans ... We just started working on Volume 2 of the Framework Design Guidelines ... Krys gives some hints on the kinds of things we will be covering .NET Framework 3.0 and .NET Framework 3.5 including LINQ and other cool new framework features. I would not expect the book until LATE '08, so if you were planning to by the first edition, please go ahead ;-) I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback.. what should we cover? What changes should we make? What new annotations should we get? Read More...

It was my great fortune to meet Tom Raftery at Mix .. I am very excited to be a guest on his PodLeaders podcast . He is taking questions now ... Send in a few easy ones as well as hard questions ;-) thanks! Read More...

I had a great time in my Mix session today... there was great buzz in the room. Silverlight download ASP.NET Futures download Live demo site Here are a few highlights... I started off talking about the importance of having your site "Look Great and Feel Great". In the demo for this section, I showed off I Expression Media Encoder . What is really cool is that Expression also outputs the brand new asp:Media control . This is so cool because it handles all the issues of using Silverlight in the different browsers with NO client side javascript and fully use the power of the server (databinding, etc). Check out the new ASP.NET Futures release to get these bits. The next principle I talked about was "Uninterrupted Flow". The goal here is to make...

I love helping developers understand our developer platform... one of the fun ways I get to do that is be at least a little bit involved in making some fun poster... We have done them for the BCL , .NET Framework 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.0 ... Today we started giving out this Silverlight poster. If you are at Mix, please come to one of the sessions with "Silverlight" in the title and pick your up! If you are not there, you have have to settle for the highres download. Enjoy Read More...