New ASP.NET Web Resources Control Feature in Whidbey
Nikhil has posted two blogs on the new web resources feature in Whidbey. At a highlevel it provides a nice way for control developers to encapsulate resources for their controls within a compiled assembly (as resources), and then be able to leverage them at both runtime and design-time without having to copy files all over their dev machine and web-server (for example: for images, scripts, etc).
You can read both articles here:
http://www.nikhilk.net/Entry.aspx?id=23
http://www.nikhilk.net/Entry.aspx?id=24
Below is a full screen-shot of what the WebResources feature enables at design-time for the new TreeView control. Note how the images for the nodes show up both on the design-surface and within the auto-format dialog -- these aren't on the file-system anywhere, instead they are pulled directly from the control's assembly (caveat: this only shows up with beta builds -- it wasn't enabled yet at the time of the alpha). The same approach works at runtime (the runtime piece works in the alpha -- just the design-time part that isn't done yet).
In general, I'd highly recommend subscribing to Nikhil's blog if you are interested in server control development. RSS feed at: http://www.nikhilk.net/Rss.ashx?id=1