Exciting New Products from Microsoft Development Teams on the Way
It is important to keep an eye on what is "coming down the pipe" from Microsoft and their competitors. There are several great resources that don't require a lot of time to keep atuned to these developments. Here are some of these resources:
Scott Guthrie runs the teams that build IIS, ASP.NET, Atlas, CLR, Compact Framework, Windows Forms, Commerce Server, Visual Web Developer 2005 and Visual Studio Tools for WPF)
Scott Guthrie is the co-creator of ASP.NET. He is the General Manager for the .NET Framework, IIS, ASP.NET, Commerce Server, Windows Presentation Foundation, and more. He will be giving a presentation at MIX07 with MS Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie. He always posts great things on his blog that are very helpful and he responds to his emails and comments with helpful information.
Interview with Scott Guthrie about '07 Microsoft Web Technologies, including WPFE, a new combination of ASP.NET and AJAX aimed at rivaling Mozilla's XUL framework. It is cross-browser and cross-platform, unlike Mozilla's XUL which is only cross-platform, but specific to Firefox.
CodePlex is the Microsoft answer to SourceForge. As MS realizes the power of community-based and assisted project, they are capitalizing on it. They now post a lot of projects and guidance on CodePlex, including the newly released Web Client Software Factory toolkit, which looks to provide guidance for developers in creating modular ASP.NET 2.0 solutions at http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=websf
The overall goal of this toolkit is to provide guidance for developing "Composite Web Clients",
This project aims to address guidance for a variety of topics, depicted by this documentation download:
http://www.codeplex.com/websf/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=1563
Microsoft's home for ASP.NET Technologies: http://www.asp.net/
ASP.NET Forums: http://www.asp.net/forums
Contains interviews and videos about new Microsoft technologies.
http://channel9.msdn.com
- The Microsoft Patterns and Practices Group: http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/ Contains Best Practices and guidance from Microsoft for developers.
- The Architecture Podcast, ARCast: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=34 Contains many interviews with industry professionals about new technologies.
Things to keep in mind for front end, customer-facing interface code:
- AJAX.NET Framework for streamlining workflows and creating better user experience: AJAX.NET: http://ajax.asp.net/default.aspx?tabid=47
- ASP.NET 2.0: http://www.asp.net/ contains news, links and videos and many tutorials.
- http://www.LearnVisualStudio.NET contains great videos and tutorials
There are a lot of developments in this space right now, including many by Microsoft.
Review of Available Object-Relational-Mapping Technologies in .NET: http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/CodeGenResource.asp Contains a run down of many third party and open source packages for addressing the middle tier of an application. There are no clear winners however.
Rockford Lhotka has developed a framework for Business Objects that is very popular, CSLA.NET, http://www.lhotka.net/ It has wide-spread adoption across a number of high profile users: http://www.lhotka.net/Article.aspx?area=4&id=a26b2727-f99d-485b-aa3e-a5466e534a2b
Microsoft is going to release LINQ soon, Language Integrated Query, as part of C# 3.0. A Preview of ADO.NET vNext is available here showcasing the features that will be available in forthcoming product releases:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=b68f6f53-ec87-4122-b1c8-ee24a043bf72&displaylang=en
Here is a 12 minute screen cast that showcases ADO.NET vNext. Well worth the twelve minutes:
http://datajunkies.net/screencasts/ado.net_vnext_ctp_screencast1/ado.net_vnext_ctp_screencast1.html
The ADO.NET Team's Blog is Here: http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2006/08/15/701479.aspxv
The features of ADO.NET vNext are as follows. Should this product become available soon, these features make it well worth considering before attempting to build any custom solution for entity management.
- The ADO.NET Entity Framework, which includes:
- The Entity Data Model (EDM), which allows developers to model data at a higher level of abstraction
- A powerful client-views/mapping engine to map to and from store schemas
- Full query support over EDM schemas using Entity SQL and LINQ
- An object services layer that allows you to choose to present query results as rows and columns or as objects. When using .NET objects, the system will transparently do identity resolution, change tracking and update processing for you.
- An open provider model that allows other stores to plug into the ADO.NET Entity Framework
- Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) integration in ADO.NET for this CTP includes:
- LINQ to Entities: formulate queries using LINQ against your EDM schemas
- LINQ to DataSet: the DataSet finally gets full query capabilities! You can formulate LINQ queries that go against one or more DataTable objects. The LINQ to DataSet implementation will even optimize certain query patterns for better execution performance.
- Tools
- We're working hard to include a rich set of tools that integrate naturally with the runtime components to provide a great end-to-end experience. Some early tools are included in this CTP, and more will come soon!
In VS 2005, the Strongly Typed DataAdapter and other associated classes provides a nice way to get intellisense plus ease of maintenance and compile-time safety. See Scott's blog for information about this:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/01/15/435498.aspx This shows how to build a strongly-typed DataAdapter against an existing Database table.