Its been a long time since I blogged, and various people I meet ask me if I've stopped, or when I plan to resume posting... including my wife, Seema!
I've been busy with multiple things at work (standard excuse) - whidbey, and now some completely new things for the orcas (post-whidbey) time frame as well, that I hope to blog about further down the road. In the meantime, it seems we've got a couple of new bloggers from the ASP.NET team:
Shanku and
Clay.
Last week we had a control vendor devlab, where we presented whats new in the Web Forms control framework. It is extremely satisfying to see all the features that I've been a part of during the whidbey product cycle over the past years come together in various demos, and hope that those of you who have had a chance to play with the bits also find the additions make the platform even more compelling. Some of whats new include (in no particular order):
- New page lifecycle events - truly needed to write more functional controls
- Incorporating lots of v1.x lessons into more functional base classes - yep, no more 4 steps to templated control designers, or 3 steps to data-bound controls that I've always had in my slide deck
- Better support for client-side behavior via callbacks, and more postback options
- Control state - counterpart to view state to allow controls to store essential working state more intelligentily
- Adapter model for supporting multiple browsers and devices
- Pseudo-two-way data-binding via IBindableTemplate
- Data source and data-bound controls simplified, and declarative model for binding, parametrizing etc.
- Better deployment model with web resources
- Interactive control designers (In-place editable regions, click events, painting on design surface etc.)
- Ability to promote and present design-time tasks (UI that goes by several names: action panel, chrome, or smart tags)
- Lots of new design-time services, including ability to read/write config, retrieving data schema, and items in the project hierarchy
- The Web Part framework and personalization - this area is simply huge!
- Image generation for dynamic images (as well as the new .asix file type)
- Support for performing async tasks
- Declarative expressions
- New infrastructure services such as sitemap and membership to build controls around
I am sure this isn't an exhaustive list. Any feedback on what you like, what you don't like? Any other feedback? I'd love to hear.
This week I am at San Diego, attending the TechEd. I'll be present in the Cabana track lounges, and hope to talk to some of you.
Posted on Sunday, 5/23/2004 @ 7:27 PM
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