Upcoming Releases of Useful ASP.NET 2.0 Things

A few people have asked me about what else is coming down the road in terms of downloads and other releases for ASP.NET 2.0.  Here is a non-exhaustive brain-dump of a few things coming out in the near future that we've been working on:

- Major Update to the Atlas Project: A pretty significant update to Atlas will be coming out soon.  It adds a number of pretty cool features -- including a lot of additional support to make common Ajax-style scenarios dead-simple with ASP.NET (previous refreshes of Atlas provided a lot of power features -- this refresh drop is also making common scenarios super easy).  It also provides the beginning of really nice integration of Atlas functionality into the server-control model.

- Updated VS 2003 Web Project->VS 2005 Web Site Migration Utility: This adds more support for migrating existing VS 2003 web projects to use the built-in VS 2005 Web-Site project model (specifically it better handles a number of cases we've seen with customers apps since VS 2005 shiped).  Our goal is to ship it this week (maybe as early as Tuesday).

- VS 2005 Web Application Project Refresh: A refresh of the new VS 2005 Web Application Project download will be coming out early next year.  The big feature we are looking to add with the next refresh is support for automatic control field declarations (along with a few other things).

- VS 2005 Web Deployment Project Update: A refresh of Web Deployment Projects will be coming out in January that fixes a few bugs, as well as enables support for the new VS 2005 Web Application Project model.

- Profile Provider for Database Tables: A cool project we are looking to release is a custom Profile provider that allows you to directly map the new ASP.NET 2.0 Profile object to a database table or view.  This will make it really easy to take existing database schemas of information and surface them through the profile system.

- Hosting Upsize Tool for SQL Express: I blogged about this in October, and it is now in limited beta.  We will be looking to make it even more broadly available soon.

- CSS Adapters for Controls: The ASP.NET 2.0 control model allows you to replace the rendering of controls as part of the new control architecture (we call these hooks "adapters").  This particular project is a a cool one that Shanku has been working on that uses this feature to allow you to plug-in new CSS based adapters for the built-in ASP.NET controls that allow you to build fully CSS based sites (for example: using divs and css for styles in controls, etc).  Note: We don't have an ETA on this project yet as it is more of a side-project.  But hopefully we'll have an initial drop ready next spring for people to play with.

Hope this helps,

Scott

P.S. I'm sure I've forgotten a few.  Apologies to those on my team who have cool things I forgot to mention.

25 Comments

  • Scott,



    Does this "adapter" control architecture mean I can override the table-based rendering of the menu control for example to use unordered lists instead? I've been playing with creating my own controls more or less from scratch but if I can just override the default rendering that would make things much simpler. Is there somewhere I can contact Shanku to get more details on his project goals?



    -Chris

  • Will there be any more official starter kits?



    I look forward to seeing that custom profile provider!

  • Scott,



    Take a look at your blog. Your menu on the left of links etc is cutting off about an inch of text in the body of your page. Orignially was going to write you about the link for the "Upsize Tool for SQL Express" posting, but it is even doing it on this comment page. I normally read your blog via newsgator so it may have been doing this for a long time. Thanks for all the good info.

  • Hi Chris,



    Yep -- you can use the adapter architecture to override things like layout so that the menu control no longer uses tables, etc. If you want to send me an email directly (scottgu@microsoft.com), I can put you in touch with Shanku.



    Hope this helps,



    Scott

  • Hi Andrew,



    Are you hitting the site with a IE7 browser or something else? I just tried hitting it with both IE6 and FireFox and am not seeing any issues -- but someone else also mentioned some rendering issues with IE7 (which I don't have installed just yet but obviously need to if there are rendering issues).



    I think the cause is the template I'm using.



    Thanks,



    Scott

  • I tried Atlas to call a web service from IE.

    With each call, IE memory is up - mem usage, VM, handles,...

    I used the default.aspx template that comes with Atlas, which is not consistent with the documentation...

    A total mess.

  • Scott,



    The site looks ok now so don't know if anything changed. I am on a different machine now, but both are Win XP with IE6. I haven't had IE7 on either machine. I will take another look tonight from the original machine and send you an email with an update.



    -Andrew

  • How will these be deployed? Will the people who don't regularly read your blog or check the various tabs on the asp.net site get to know about it?

  • Scott, the menu on the left is cutting off the text on the main page when you've upped your text size in IE. Change it to Large or Larger and the menu overlaps your text.

  • Scott,



    Just read what Adam wrote above about font size. At home where I have the issue with the Nav area overlapping the blog entries, I have a high dpi laptop and have the DPI setting at either 120 dpi or 150 dpi. So, not really limited to a font size issue. Guessing you need to specify your css in pt instead of px.



    -Andrew

  • Hi Adam,



    The best place to learn about new things ASP.NET related is to to check out the www.asp.net website from time to time (or my blog <g>). We'll also be broadcasting new stuff on MSDN and through other channels as well.



    Hope this helps,



    Scott

  • Andrew/Adam -- thanks for helping me track down what the issue is with the CSS. I'll try and get it updated later this week (the CSS I'm using it just a template I got with this blog site -- so the trick now is to figure out where I edit it).



    Thanks,



    Scott

  • What I would like to see in action in Atlas code examples are some of the DHTML behaviors: drag and drop, etc.



    Thank you

  • Scott,



    Something I've noticed over the past few years with these types of downloads and updates (which have been few and far between prior to this) is that for people who aren't incredibly active in the notion of "community" (I know MANY MANY developers who are like this) have no clue that some things have come out.



    Contrast this to the near-forced update style of Windows Update and I see a huge gap here in delivering some incredibly useful (and in my opinion, things that should have been in the original release) functionality to customers who could really benefit from this stuff.



    I know the MSDN site has this stuff linked on it, but the MSDN site requires a lot of work to navigate, especially if you haven't been there in a while as the useful links have fallen off of the home page.



    I just think it would be incredibly useful to be able to have this kind of content streamed automatically to customers. The new Start Page in VS2005 is a good step, but you have to wait for it and not have your IDE configured to skip loading it.



    Just my $.02

  • Scott, I have a suggestion for the asp.net team. Why not host all these mini tools in a central download location on the asp.net site so its easier for us to keep track of their development and updates?



    Thanks,

    Adham

  • Hello,



    Let me remind you of a little missing thing, as you had mentioned in the current blog. In response to one of my thread on forums, you had mentioned, you will be providing a utility for WAT ( Web Admin Tool) also, which makes things simpler for working online with this tool, rather than currently working offline.



    Thanks

  • Hi David,



    Good suggestion on the user-control idea. We'll keep it in mind for the next release.



    thx!



    - Scott

  • Hi Adam,



    One of the things we are going to try and do with these types of releases is broadcast their availability in many different places/ways (magazines, web-sites, MSDN email bulletins, user-groups, etc). Hopefully this will help get the word out -- although having active folks like you and others who are in the community tell their friends and co-workers would also be super valuable.



    Hope this helps,



    Scott

  • Hi Steve,



    We just posted links to a number of them on the Breaking News section of www.asp.net (we were actually planning to-do that already -- but good suggestion!).



    Thanks,



    Scott

  • Hi Adham,



    We've actually started listing things on the "download" tab on www.asp.net. That is a good place to keep an eye on.



    Hope this helps,



    Scott

  • Hi Parag,



    Yep -- that was something I forgot to mention. We are building some admin pages that you can easily add to your site to enable user and role management.



    Hope this helps,



    Scott

  • Hi Amitai,



    If you can send me information offline (scottgu@microsoft.com), I'd be happy to have someone investigate what is going on with your scenario.



    Hope this helps,



    Scott

  • Hi Yaip,



    We don't have a firm ETA on the next Atlas CTP just yet. I'll blog about it once we do.



    Thanks,



    Scott

  • So TechEd 2006 has come and gone but no sight of CSS Adapters for Controls is there anymore info or examples?


    Thanks for all that you do for the community.

  • Hi Josh,

    Yep -- the CSS Adapters were released a few months ago. Here is a walkthrough that shows how to use them: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/05/02/CSS-Control-Adapter-Toolkit-for-ASP.NET-2.0-.aspx

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

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