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Friends of Web Development Newsletter – June 2006

2006-06-30T22:55:00Z

Friends of Web Development Newsletter – June 2006

TechEd '06

TechEd '06 is now officially over and it was so great to see so many developers, ASPInsiders, MVPs and ASP.NET customers at the ASP.NET booth on the Expo/Learning Center floor. For those of you who couldn't attend, don't worry! There's a 'Virtual TechEd' site at http://virtualteched.com/default.aspx where you can view many of the breakout sessions that were recorded and view some other great videos and blogs that will get you as close to the TechEd experience as you can get.

So what were some of the Web Development highlights of the conference? Here are just a few:

The Microsoft.com operations team gave some very popular talks on how they manage IIS and ASP.NET in a large production environment. Microsoft.com was one of the first large deployments of ASP.NET 2.0, with the Download Center going live shortly after Visual Studio 2005 ("Whidbey") Beta 2.
Scott Guthrie gave a great end-to-end talk on ASP.NET 2.0, Atlas and IIS 7 in a packed ballroom. He created an app from the ground up, showing how how it benefited from each of the new features in the web platform.
Thomas Deml did a talk on the IIS 7 Integrated HTTP pipeline, including demos of the magic you can do with the pipeline - including how to spice up the common file listing in IIS to include photos and other useful file information.

We'll be doing more TechEd conferences around the world through the end of the year. In particular, the team will be presenting at the TechEd Southeast Asia and Europe conferences. See http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2006/worldwide.mspx for information about a TechEd worldwide conference near you.

New Releases

"Atlas" June CTP

We just released the "Atlas" June CTP at the end of this month, which includes several bug fixes and some new functionality, including Dynamic Update Panels which allow you to add UpdatePanels from your code throughout the page lifecycle. UpdatePanels can also now be added inside templates and work inside WebParts. WebParts can also be included inside UpdatePanels.

Blinq Preview

Don't Blinq or you'll miss it! There's a new tool in the Sandbox (http://sandbox.asp.net/) called Blinq. Blinq allows you to create a web application instantly out of any data schema. It uses the LINQ prototype for dynamically generating SQL queries inline with VB and VC# code. Give it a try!

New Content

French Atlas Website

French-speaking developers will welcome the new French ASP.NET website at http://www.asp.net/fr. We'll keep updating this page with great content as we find it!

Contact: richarde@microsoft.com

Disclaimer: This information is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. Copyright^© 2006, Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Use of these contents is subject to the terms specified at http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.htm.

Friends of Web Development Newsletter - May 2006

2006-06-01T04:47:00Z

Friends of Web Development Newsletter – May 2006

Conference News

It’s conference season so here’s a summary of what we’re doing at several upcoming conferences.

ReMix

If you’re in the Southeast Asia area Matt Gibbs will be presenting a talk on “Atlas” at REMIX in Singapore on June 29.

Web Design World

Brad Abrams, a Group Program Manager in the UI Frameworks team, will be giving the keynote address at Web Design World in Seattle, on July 10-12^th.

TechEd 2006 – Boston

Do you ‘Love that Dirty Water?’ If you do, then make Boston your home June 11-16. The ASP.NET team and a few well-known experts will be presenting 14 sessions covering all of the major new features in ASP.NET 2.0 plus best practices and integration with other popular .NET services.

Here’s a complete list of the ASP.NET related talks at TechEd:

Code	Title	Timeslot	Room	Speaker/s
WEB311	ASP.NET: Introduction to Integrating Membership, Role Management and Profiles into ASP.NET 2.0 Applications	6/14/2006 10:15AM-11:30AM	153 ABC	Jeff Prosise
WEB314	ASP.NET: Building Real-World Web Application UI with Master Pages, Themes and Site Navigation	6/15/2006 8:00AM-9:15AM	258 ABC	Jeff King
WEB321	ASP.NET: Integrating ASP.NET into Your Existing Architecture Using the Provider Model	6/16/2006 2:45PM-4:00PM	258 ABC	Jeff Prosise
WEB315	ASP.NET: End-to-End - Building a Complete Web Application Using ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and IIS 7 (Part 1)	6/15/2006 9:45AM-11:00AM	Grand Ballroom A	Scott Guthrie
WEB319	ASP.NET: Under the Covers - Creating High-Availability, Scalable Web Applications	6/16/2006 10:45AM-12:00PM	210 ABC	Stefan Schackow
WEB306	ASP.NET: Best Practices for Building Secure Web Applications Using ASP.NET and IIS 6.0	6/13/2006 10:15AM-11:30AM	205 ABC	Tarlochan Cheema
WEB307R	ASP.NET: Best Practices in Creating Scalable, Data-Driven Web Sites (Repeat Session)	6/14/2006 5:30PM-6:45PM	102 AB	Rob Howard
WEB304	ASP.NET: An Overview of ASP.NET and Windows Workflow Foundation Integration	6/12/2006 5:00PM-6:00PM	253 ABC	Kashif Alam
WEB313	ASP.NET: Building and Deploying Web Applications with Visual Studio 2005	6/14/2006 3:45PM-5:00PM	258 ABC	Omar Khan
WEB301	ASP.NET: Accelerating Web Application Development with the Microsoft Enterprise Library	6/12/2006 9:00AM-10:00AM	205 ABC	J. Ambrose Little
WEB318	ASP.NET: Creating High-Performance, Enterprise-Scale Web Applications Using Visual Studio 2005 Team System	6/16/2006 9:00AM-10:15AM	52 AB	Jeff King
WEB316	ASP.NET: End-to-End - Building a Complete Web Application Using ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and IIS 7 (Part 2)	6/15/2006 1:00PM-2:15PM	Grand Ballroom B	Scott Guthrie
WEB307	ASP.NET: Best Practices in Creating Scalable, Data-Driven Web Sites	6/13/2006 1:00PM-2:15PM	210 ABC	Rob Howard
WEB212	ASP.NET: Best Practices and Techniques for Migrating ASP.NET 1.x Applications to ASP.NET 2.0	6/14/2006 2:00PM-3:15PM	253 ABC	Omar Khan

New Content

“Atlas” Video
In case you missed Mix ’06 or the Ajax Experience conference, you can still check out a copy of the “Atlas” talk that Brad Abrams recorded here.

Upcoming Events

6/11-16 – TechEd, Boston, MA (www.microsoft.com/TechEd). - Tech·Ed is Microsoft’s largest annual conference for providing IT professionals and developers with technical training, information and resources to build, deploy and manage solutions with currently shipping and near-term Microsoft technologies.

Contact: richarde@microsoft.com

Friends of Web Development Newsletter – April 2006

2006-05-01T01:34:00Z

Friends of Web Development Newsletter – April 2006

New Releases

We ‘showered’ the web with new tool and preview releases in April so let’s highlight some of them:

“Atlas” April CTP

This month, we released an update to the “Atlas” March CTP that was highlighted at the Mix conference. The “Atlas” April CTP fixes known bugs in the March CTP, including those reported by users on the “Atlas” forums and the MSDN Product Feedback Center. Like the March CTP, the “Atlas” April CTP also features a “Go-Live” license, allowing you to develop applications using Atlas and host them live. Also, don’t forget to enter your app into the “Mash it Up with ‘Atlas’” contest – you can use either the March or April CTP release for your entries.

Learn more about ASP.NET “Atlas” at http://atlas.asp.net!

Atlas Controls Toolkit

For the ‘control freaks’ among you, we delivered our first beta of the “Atlas” Control Toolkit, containing several samples of “Atlas” controls and extenders that you can modify or use as a guideline for writing your own rich client-side controls. We hope to release an update over the next few weeks, so keep checking http://atlas.asp.net for news and we’ll also give an update in the next newsletter.

Also, stay tuned to Shawn Burke’s blog for more info and details to come. In Shawn’s words, he plans to: “band together with our users (you!) and turn this tookit into the biggest, baddest set of web client UI extensions around!”

Mobile Device Profiling Tool

Finally, we’re now offering our Mobile Device Profiling tool source code under a shared source license. You’ll find it featured here on our Sandbox website, where we offer technology previews, useful tools and code samples developed by our product group members. This tool is also available for use online at http://www.asp.net/mobile/profile/default.aspx. The shared source release makes it much easier for developers to customize for specific devices and applications. You can learn much more about developing ASP.NET apps for mobile devices at http://www.asp.net/mobile.

Upcoming Events

6/11-16 – TechEd, Boston, MA (www.microsoft.com/TechEd). - Tech·Ed is Microsoft’s largest annual conference for providing IT professionals and developers with technical training, information and resources to build, deploy and manage solutions with currently shipping and near-term Microsoft technologies.

Contact: richarde@microsoft.com

Introducing the "Friends of Web Development Newsletter" (March 2006)

2006-03-23T20:47:00Z

Friends of Web Development Newsletter – March 2006

Introducing our Team

Hello developers! We’re the product team that creates ASP.NET, Visual Web Developer (the web project designer in Visual Studio) and most recently, “Atlas”.

We’re launching this newsletter as an insider's view of what we’re working on - the first in a series of monthly newsletters that gives you the latest on our progress in developing new products, our vision for the future, and anything we think you'll find interesting and exciting. We would love to hear from you - send your feedback and suggestions to Rich Ersek (richarde@microsoft.com).

Current Projects

So what have we been up to in the past several months? We’ve just finished up a quality-focused milestone which gave us an opportunity to further improve on our engineering practices. For example, one of our accomplishments in this milestone was to reactivate and reevaluate any bugs that didn't meet the bar to fix in the “Whidbey” (Visual Studio 2005) release so we could prioritize those fixes appropriately and start the next major release (codenamed “Orcas”) with a clean slate. We also put new processes in place such as “feature crews” and have adapted agile development practices that will help us to increase product quality and to deliver great features and great products.

We’ll put the spotlight on a different project each month. Throughout the course of the year we’ll update you on new developments along with a few new projects. Since we just finished the Mix ’06 conference, let’s talk about "Atlas" and what’s new:

“Atlas”

Many of the most exciting next-generation web applications are taking advantage of AJAX techniques to offer a richer and more responsive user experience, enabled by client-side Javascript coupled with web services on the backend. “Atlas” offers AJAX capabilities to applications and much more because it greatly simplifies development in the tradition of the declarative ASP.NET programming model and it integrates with the Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Web Developer Express design platforms. “Atlas” is currently a technology preview for ASP.NET 2.0 and we’re planning to release a fully-supported version in “Orcas”.

Our development model for “Atlas” incorporates some of the agile development practices described above, and we’ve been releasing a new version roughly every 6-8 weeks. Just in time for Mix ’06, we released the “Atlas” March CTP, which introduces several new features. For example, you can now use Atlas to build your own gadgets that work with Live.com. Also, the WebParts drag and drop feature now works with both IE and Firefox.

Atlas now features a “go-live” license too, so now you can write Atlas apps and host them live. And if that’s not incentive enough, check out the “Mash it up with Atlas” contest – your cool app might just win you an XBox 360!

We’ve added a ton of new documentation and reference material, plus videos and screencasts to the official Atlas website. Check it all out today at http://atlas.asp.net!

Resources

We always hear from customers that they want to get more hands-on experience with new ASP.NET features in an easy way. We’ve created a new “How do I?” video series on www.asp.net that explains and shows how to use each of several new features in ASP.NET and VWD in just 10-15 minutes. The videos are a great way to quickly come up to speed with the new features in ASP.NET 2.0. Try them out today and let us know what you think!

Here’s a complete listing:

Data Access - Create a new database from scratch, define a table, populate it with data, create a strongly typed DAL TableAdapter to work against it, and then build a filtered master/detail set of ASP.NET pages with data sorting, paging and editing support against it.

Master Pages and Site Navigation – Create a consistent master page layout for a site using the new ASP.NET Master Pages Feature. Then create a site navigation menu using site navigation and the new TreeView control.

Membership and Roles – Add an authentication and authorization system to a site from scratch, and implement login, create user, change password, password reset, and role based security in a secure way.

Profiles and Themes – Enable per-user profile personalization on a site. Then use this together with the new Themes/Skins feature to allow a visiting user to customize and personalize the look and feel of a site.

Web Parts and Personalization – Enable customizable drag/drop portal UI within web-pages, and allow visiting users to customize the information experience they see.

Output Caching and SQL Cache Invalidation – Learn how to use the output caching feature in ASP.NET, as well as the new SQL Cache Invalidation support to build super efficient output cached pages that stay in sync with the data within your database.

Partial Page Caching – Learn how to use the Partial Page output caching with ASP.NET to enable regions of a page to be cached, while also allowing other portions of the page to stay dynamic.

Localization – Learn how to build culture-aware and locale specific applications using ASP.NET 2.0.

Wizard and Validation Controls – Build a canonical form data registration page using the new ASP.NET 2.0 Wizard control and validation control features.

Tips and Tricks – This video highlights a number of cool new features in ASP.NET 2.0, including: cross-page postback support, file uploading, the MultiView control, encrypting web.config settings, and more.

Upcoming Events

4/2-5 – ASP.NET Connections, Orlando, FL (http://www.devconnections.com/). DevConnections/ASP.NET Connections is one of the premier developer events and will feature ASP.NET team members along with several of the leading experts in the ASP.NET community. .NET Developer Platform General Manager, Scott Guthrie, will give the keynote.

Contact: richarde@microsoft.com