We just published our roadmap for ASP.NET Ajax . In this document we describe some of the proposed features that we are considering investing in future releases of ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Web Developer, and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. We really appreciate your feedback, so this document is intended as much for you to provide an input to our direction as well as to give some indication of what the teams are investing in. http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=14924 Read More...

Thoughts on search for RIAs, along with pointers to my latest slides as well as MIX session on ensuring indexability (esp. for Silverlight and Ajax apps)... Read More...

I just got back from South Africa and I am happy to report that the .NET Developer community is very strong there.    User's Group Meetings in in Johannesburg and Cape Town User group meeting in Johannesburg  - thanks for setting this up Craig Nicholson ..  I had a great time showing off Silverlight 2.  We had lot of fun talking about Silverlight wit these slides and demo that I did.  I also showed HardRock DeepZoom , the video wall and HSN.TV User group meeting in Cape Town - Thanks to Hilton Giesenow for setting this up.  This time I did a drill down into the ASP.NET MVC framework.  The response was excellent!   Thanks folks for your questions and interest!  Here is the slides...

For my Mix Essentials talk in South Africa I updated my Mix08 talk Building Great AJAX Applications from Scratch Using ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 to have a little more Africa feel... I used some photos from my safari at Mala Mala here this week.    Download the working sample and a set of starter demo files.  Hope you enjoy it! Read More...

More fun with the ViewModel or M-V-VM pattern - using the Dynamic Language Runtime in Silverlight to create a better glue between the View and its ViewModel. Read More...

I wrote a short column in Dino Esposito 's latest MSDN Magazine article to introduce two new features that we will ship with the next version of ASP.NET Ajax . The features will enable you to declaratively instantiate client-side components and to build data-driven HTML from simple templates. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc546561.aspx Read More...

Miljan from ComponentArt announces the 2008 release of their charting engine . It's a really interesting engine for Ajax developers because it has a full client-side object model . Check it out. http://www.componentart.com/charting/gallery/ Read More...

This post describes the ViewModel aka M-V-VM pattern, and presents a prototype Silverlight 2 framework for implementing this pattern using Action Behaviors (which provide the equivalent of commands) Read More...

ASP.NET Ajax 3.5 SP1 contains a new feature that enables the application developer to combine scripts in order to reduce the number of downloaded files . But in order to do that, the developer must have a way of discovering what scripts are being used in a page or application. To make that easier, I've developed a small control that you can drop onto a page and that will render out the list of script references that are being used by the page. It is then easy to copy and paste that list into the CombinedScripts property of the script manager and combine all those references into one. The control also renders two links that enable the developer to download the debug and release versions of the combined scripts. Those scripts can be downloaded...

I recorded a 5 minute screencast that shows how to use the new script combining feature in ASP.NET Ajax 3.5 SP1: http://asp.net/learn/3.5-SP1/video-296.aspx Read More...