ASP.NET Futures May CTP & Dynamic Data Controls
This month is so far shaping up to be the slowest blogging month ever, a combination of paying and oss work, and this last week a nasty lower back injury (from lifting a bag of sand). Cronic back pain is no fun (you can't sit, stand, walk or lie down) but its only muscle and not my spine (10x worst level of pain) and I am slowly getting back to normal.
Onto my post, the ASP.NET team announced the ASP.NET futures May CTP today. This CTP builds on the DLR work announced at Mix (and the support for IronPython and M-JScript in ASP.NET) as well as the all new Dynamic Data Controls. The DDC was talked about at Mix, see Maheshp and Polita's talk. So what is the DDC?
The DDC is very much like Rails scaffolding, lets get that out of the way right now :) DDC controls allow you to take a given db table schema and create a web GUI directly from that data. So for example we create a DDC page called Tasks.aspx which is matched to a DB table called Tasks, we then drop in say a DDC list control and the DDC will render a gridview of the data that is fully sorted and paged. What's more a DDC page behaves like any other ASP.NET page (so you can drop in a MasterPage styling etc). In this CTP several DDC controls are exposed for rendering your data, some of which you can chain together (say the list and insert controls) or if you wish you can use the DynamicDataControl to render a complete display, filter, navigation and insert interface for you. Under the the covers the DDC is using the DLR to work its magic, however you can work with the DDC with any ASP.NET supported language (C# to IronPython etc). What might have taken you 20/30 mins to write, now takes you a few mins!
This is the first CTP of the DDC and there is plenty yet to do, if you do have any questions leave them in the comments and I'll try where possible to seek out the answers (for what it is worth my own questions include custom styling\css mods of the DDC and can the DDC be connected to a Sproc or a LINQ query?).
Want to learn more? Check out the the Mix talk I mentioned as well the DDC section of the ASP.NET quick start examples.