October 2008 Archives

Today I attended Microsoft's TechDays in Northern Virginia, an event designed to promote awareness and adoption of some of Microsoft's newer technologies.  I sat through the developer track which consisted of three sessions.

Part 1 - Introduction to ASP.NET AJAX

While I was most excited for this session it was, as the name implies, very introductory.  The fact that AJAX.NET has been out for so long and they're still doing "What is AJAX?" presentations perhaps speaks to the lack of adoption in the Microsoft community. 

They did talk briefly about some of the new features such as AJAX History which can allow for bookmarking and/or use of the back button in the middle of AJAX processes and script combining which can compile your .js files together on the server to decrease download time.

The most exciting topic of discussion however, revolved around Microsoft's recent decision to ship jQuery with Visual Studio.  While this is somewhat old news, I did learn that there is an intellisense plugin for jQuery in Visual Studio that was released just yesterday.

Just download jquery-1.2.6-vsdoc.js and then add a reference to it by placing the following line at the top of your jQuery JavaScript file:

Part 2 - Introduction to Silverlight 2

I've never been sold on Silverlight and today's presentation really didn't do much to change that opinion.  If you're not familiar with Silverlight, it's a plugin from Microsoft, somewhat similar to Adobe's Flash plugin, except that it's built on the .NET framework.  In theory this seems like  a great idea but in practical application I'm not sure it's a viable solution just yet.  For starters, many people still don't have the plugin.  Secondly, the learning curve for designers and developers is much higher than Microsoft would like us to believe.  Lastly, most of what Silverlight does can be accomplished through other means like AJAX or Flash.

Overall it's an interesting concept and it's definitely come a long way since it's release last year but I'm still on the fence as to whether I'd acutally use it for a project.

To find out more and to keep tabs on this new technology, visit Silverlight.net

Part 3 - Servers and Services

This talk was largely about the enhancements made in IIS7.   This looks to be a complete overhaul of the server environment with ASP.NET baked in directly this time, making it a "first class citizen" as the Microsoft team put it.  This will lead to better performance and easier customization.  (Never fear, there is a "Classic Mode" to the pipeline for backwards compatibility)

All of the configuration is now XML-driven as well so it's not only easy to update but also easy to move or share configuration options between servers.

Lastly, the new integrated approach to ASP.NET means that all modules can now provide services for all content types since everything runs through the .NET process.  So for example, if you enable forms authentication, all of your images, videos, and other non-aspx files will also now be protected.

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Overall it was a decent event.  The Thursday session has talks about REST services and the new MVC framework so I'm looking forward to that as well.