ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008

ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008
New Features in ASP.NET 3.5
New Web Features in Visual Studio 2008
Other Resources
ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 bring great new functionality around Web development and design that makes building standards based, next generation Web sites easier than ever. From the inclusion of ASP.NET AJAX into the runtime, to new controls, the new LINQ data capabilities, to improved support for CSS, JavaScript and others, Web development has taken a significant step forward.
New Features in ASP.NET 3.5
ASP.NET AJAX
With ASP.NET AJAX, developers can quickly create pages with sophisticated, responsive user interfaces and more efficient client-server communication by simply adding a few server controls to their pages. Previously an extension to the ASP.NET runtime, ASP.NET AJAX is now built into the platform and makes the complicated task of building cross-platform, standards based AJAX applications easy.
More Information
The ASP.NET AJAX Site
ASP.NET AJAX Overview
New ListView and DataPager Controls
The new ListView control gives you unprecedented flexibility in how you display your data, by allowing you to have complete control over the HTML markup generated. ListView‘s template approach to representing data is designed to easily work with CSS styles, which comes in handy with the new Visual Studio 2008 designer view. In addition, you can use the DataPager control to handle all the work of allowing your users to page through large numbers of records.
More Information
Using the ASP.NET 3.5 ListView Control
ListView Web Server Control
LINQ and other .NET Framework 3.5 Improvements
With the addition of Language Integrated Query (LINQ) in .NET Framework 3.5, the process of building SQL queries using error-prone string manipulation is a thing of the past. LINQ makes your relational data queries a first-class language construct in C# and Visual Basic, complete with compiler and Intellisense support. For Web applications, the ASP.NET LinqDataSource control allows you to easily use LINQ to filter, order and group data that can then be bound to any of the data visualization controls like the ListView and GridView controls. In addition, all the other improvements to .NET Framework 3.5, including the new HashSet collection, DateTime offset support, diagnostics, garbage collection, better thread lock support, and more, are all available to you in your ASP.NET applications.
More Information
LinqDataSource Technology Overview
WCF Support for RSS, JSON, POX and Partial Trust
With .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) now supports building Web services that can be exposed using any number of the Internet standard protocols, such as SOAP, RSS, JSON, POX and more. Whether you are building an AJAX application that uses JSON, providing syndication of your data via RSS, or building a standard SOAP Web service, WCF makes it easy to create your endpoints, and now, with .NET Framework 3.5, supports building Web services in partial-trust situations like a typical shared-hosting environment.
More Information
Using ASP.NET Web Services Roadmap
New Web Features in Visual Studio 2008
New Web Design Interface
Visual Studio 2008 has incorporated a new Web designer that uses the design engine from Expression Web. Moving between design and source view is faster than ever and the new split view capability means you can edit the HTML source and simultaneously see the results on the page. Support for style sheets in separate files has been added as well as a CSS properties pane which clarifies the sometimes-complex hierarchy of cascading styles, so that it is easy to understand why an element looks the way it does. In addition Visual Studio 2008 has full WYSIWYG support for building and using ASP.NET Nested Master Pages which greatly improves the ability to build a Web site with a consistent look and feel.
More Information
VS 2008 Web Designer and CSS Support
VS 2008 Nested Master Page Support
Working with CSS Overview
JavaScript Debugging and Intellisense
In Visual Studio 2008, client-side JavaScript has now become a first-class citizen in regards to its debugging and Intellisense support. Not only does the Intellisense give standard JavaScript keyword support, but it will automatically infer variable types and provide method, property and event support from any number of included script files. Similarly, the JavaScript debugging support now allows for the deep Watch and Locals support in JavaScript that you are accustomed to having in other languages in Visual Studio. And despite the dynamic nature of a lot of JavaScript, you will always be able to visualize and step into the JavaScript code, no matter where it is generated from. This is especially convenient when building ASP.NET AJAX applications.
More Information
Visual Studio 2008 JavaScript Debugging
Visual Studio 2008 JavaScript Intellisense
Multi-targeting Support
In previous versions of Visual Studio, you could only build projects that targeted a single version of the .NET Framework. With Visual Studio 2008, we have introduced the concept of Multi-targeting. Through a simple drop-down, you can decide if you want a project to target .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5. The builds, the Intellisense, the toolbox, etc. will all adjust to the feature set of the specific version of the .NET Framework which you choose. This allows you to take advantage of the new features in Visual Studio 2008, like the Web design interface, and the improved JavaScript support, and still build your projects for their current runtime version.
More Information
Visual Studio 2008 Multi-Targeting Support
.NET Framework Multi-targeting Overview
Other Resources
What‘s New in ASP.NET and Web Development
Learn More about Visual Studio 2008
Forums
ASP.NET AJAX Forums
Visual Studio 2008 Forum
Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Forum

Microsoft Silverlight

not for designers only but for developers too
Microsoft Silverlight
Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plugin for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports JavaScript, .NET, and other languages.

As a first step, check out the Getting Started with Silverlight Video.

http://silverlight.net/learn/slVideo.aspx?video=http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/9/8/5985f834-b3ea-459b-98ba-0aede5bc653a/ScuttGu_Silverlight_Demo.wmv

Learn Links

http://silverlight.net/learn/learnvideos.aspx

VS 2008 JavaScript Debugging

VS 2008 JavaScript Debugging
A few weeks ago I blogged about the new JavaScript Intellisense support in VS 2008.
One of the other JavaScript features that I'm sure will be popular in VS 2008 is the much-improved support for JavaScript debugging. This is enabled in both the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express edition as well as in Visual Studio, and makes using JavaScript and building AJAX applications significantly easier.
Setting JavaScript breakpoints in ASP.NET pages
One of the annoying things with VS 2005 is that you have to first run your ASP.NET pages before you can set JavaScript breakpoints in them in the debugger.
VS 2008 makes this much better by adding new support that allows you to set client-side JavaScript breakpoints directly within your server-side .aspx and .master source files:
When you set a breakpoint in your .aspx page like above, VS 2008 will automatically map the breakpoint location to the dynamically generated client HTML that runs in the browser when the page is later executed:

If you add/remove/update the breakpoint locations in the running HTML document, VS 2008 is also now smart enough to perform the reverse mapping and update the breakpoint in the original .aspx or .master source file on the server. This makes it much easier to get into a nice edit/debug/edit/debug flow as you are iterating on your applications.
Best of all, you can now set both client-side JavaScript breakpoints and VB/C# server-side breakpoints at the same time (even in the same page) and use a single debugger to step through both the server-side and client-side code in a single debug session (which is extremely useful for any AJAX heavy application).
Any JavaScript breakpoints you set will also now by default be saved by VS 2008 when you close the project/solution. When you open up the project again, the previous locations you set the breakpoints on will still have them enabled.
Script Document Navigation within the Solution Explorer
Often the JavaScript that is sent down to a browser client is dynamically generated on the server (for example: with scripts that are stored as resources within compiled server controls - like ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanels and control extenders). In scenarios such as these, you want to be able to easily see all JavaScript URLs being loaded from a page, as well as step into the within the debugger.
VS 2008 makes it much easier to-do this by integrating the running Script Document feature (that in VS 2005 was a separate tool-pane window) into the VS 2008 solution explorer view when you are debugging a web application.
Specifically, when you are using VS to run and debug a page, VS 2008 will now list all of the script URLs that the page you are debugging has loaded in the browser at the top of your VS solution explorer pane:

You can then double click on any of the URLs under the "Script Documents" node at the top to see the JavaScript file that was loaded in the page:

You can obviously then set breakpoints in the loaded JavaScript and debug everything.
Much Richer Debug Watch/Locals and Visualizer Support
Easily opening and navigating JavaScript files in the debugger is nice - but the real meat of the improvements made with VS 2008 JavaScript debugging is in the much improved object execution and inspection support. When you inspect a variable within the debugger using VS 2008, you'll find much more detailed object information is now available:

You can now browse runtime object methods:

You can now browse runtime object events:

And you now get much, much more detailed property and property type information of running objects. Note below how I am traversing the div element's "parentElement" property to dynamically look up details about the element's parent HTML element and overall position within the HTML DOM:

You can obviously use the debugger property grid above to both lookup as well as set values. You can also run code in the immediate window to retrieve and change JavaScript at runtime:

VS 2008 also provides support for pluggable debug visualizers that you can use with JavaScript debugging. This enables developers to add extensions to the debugger that can work against running objects and provide richer visualization views of them. For example, we could use the built-in "Text", "XML", or "HTML" visualizer to load a dialog to better inspect a value:


I suspect we might see a cool CodePlex project providing nice JSON and REST JavaScript visualizers soon.
Summary
The above walkthrough hopefully provided a good overview of some of the new JavaScript debugging features coming soon. There are many more JavaScript and AJAX features coming in VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 that I'll be covering in future blog posts.
Note that because of the new VS 2008 multi-targeting support, you can use the JavaScript debugging features above with both ASP.NET applications built using .NET 3.5 (which also now has ASP.NET AJAX built-in), as well as with existing ASP.NET 2.0 applications (including ones that use the separate ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 download). This, combined with the new VS 2008 JavaScript intellisense support, provides a very compelling reason to start using VS 2008 - even if you are using it to only target .NET 2.0 applications.
Hope this helps,
Scott
P.S. To learn more about VS 2005 JavaScript Debugging, please read this blog post. Dan Wahlin also recently posted a nice set of AJAX testing and debugging tools that I recommend checking out here.

Article from : http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/07/19/vs-2008-javascript-debugging.aspx

'Cutting Edge: Perspectives on ASP.NET AJAX,'bloggerForm','scrollbars=no,width=475,height=300,top=175,left=75,status=yes,resizable=yes

'Cutting Edge: Perspectives on ASP.NET AJAX,'bloggerForm','scrollbars=no,width=475,height=300,top=175,left=75,status=yes,resizable=yes: "AJAX allows you to build rich browser applications using powerful combinations of existing client-side Web technologies. This month Dino delves into AJAX "