Entries Tagged 'Community News' ↓

MIX is a Microsoft web development conference we hold in Las Vegas each year. 

MIX tends to be a pretty fun event, both because it covers cutting edge content (we used MIX07 to announce our Silverlight plans), and also because it tends to attract a really diverse set of attendees (including both those who use Microsoft technology today, and a large % of attendees who don't).  The conference structure includes a healthy blend of sessions and interactive panels, and the layout and organization is designed to facilitate great conversations.

This year's MIX is being held March 5th-7th in Las Vegas.  Ray Ozzie and I are both giving keynotes the first day of the event, and Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki will be doing a keynote the second day of the event.

The conference (and especially my keynote) is going to cover a lot of new web technology.  Attendees will be able to attend sessions covering:

• IE 8
• IIS 7.0
• ASP.NET (including ASP.NET 3.5, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, and ASP.NET Dynamic Data) 
• VS 2008 and Expression Studio
• WPF
• Silverlight 2
• And much more....

Channel 9 recently did an interview with me where I talked about some of these new technologies.  In Part 1 of the interview I talked about IIS7, and in Part 2 of the interview I talked about ASP.NET, WPF and Silverlight 2.

Register Soon Or You'll Miss Your Chance

MIX is held at a smaller venue then some of our larger events like TechEd and PDC.  This gives the conference a more intimate feel (which is fun).  It also means that it sells out each year, and once it is sold out it is really sold out. 

Last year I received about 50 emails from people begging for tickets after it was full, and many people even flew to the event hoping to somehow be let in at the door (only to be unfortunately told they couldn't get in).  Unfortunately because of size constraints (and fire marshal restrictions) once it is sold out there really are no more tickets to be had.  Even my own team members get turned away if they haven't registered in time.

This year's registration is filling up faster than any of the previous MIX conferences.  If you want to attend I highly recommend registering really soon to ensure you can go.  You can learn more about the event and register online here.

Hope to see some of you there - it is going to be fun....

Scott

This past Friday we released the final RTW (release to web) support for VS 2008 Web Deployment projects.  You can learn more about it and download it for free here. 

Web Deployment projects can be used with either the "ASP.NET Web Site" or "ASP.NET Web Application Project" options built-into VS 2008, and provide a few additional build, packaging and deployment options for you to use.  You can read an old tutorial post of mine here to learn more about they work.

The VS 2008 Web Deployment Project version supports all of the existing features provided by the VS 2005 web deployment download.  It also adds additional support for:

• Easily migrating VS 2005 Web Deployment Projects to VS 2008 Web Deployment Projects
• Replacing output only if web deployment builds succeed
• IIS7 Support

This RTW (release to web) version fixes bugs and adds some small features that people requested in the December CTP version we released last month.  Please make sure to run setup and uninstall any older version of the VS 2008 Web Deployment Project support you have installed before installing this final version.  VS 2008 Web Deployment Projects can be installed side-by-side with VS 2005 Web Deployment Projects - so there is no need to uninstall the VS 2005 version if you are still using it with older projects.

More Deployment Features

In my last link-listing post I pointed at the new Web Deployment Tool being released by the IIS team.  This tool works with both IIS6 and IIS7 and enables automated copy deployment, file synchronization, and migrating of applications onto web servers.  If you are looking for a great way to automate the deployment of your ASP.NET applications onto remote servers then this tool is definitely one to check out. 

You can use VS 2008 Web Deployment Projects as a post-build step within your build environment to fix up last minute deployment settings - and then use the IIS Web Deployment tool to copy them remotely onto server machines.  Alternatively you can also use the IIS Web Deployment Tool to copy vanilla "ASP.NET Web Site" or "ASP.NET Web Application" projects to remote machines (no VS 2008 Web Deployment Project required).

To learn more about the new IIS Web Deployment tool, read the walkthroughs at the bottom of this page (in particular the "Introduction to MS Deploy" one).  I will also be doing a blog post in the future that talks more about how to use it to automate your web server deployments.

Hope this helps,

Scott

Last October I blogged about our plan to release the source code to the .NET Framework libraries, and enable debugging support of them with Visual Studio 2008.  Today I'm happy to announce that this is now available for everyone to use. Specifically, you can now browse and debug the source code for the following .NET Framework libraries:

• .NET Base Class Libraries (including System, System.CodeDom, System.Collections, System.ComponentModel, System.Diagnostics, System.Drawing, System.Globalization, System.IO, System.Net, System.Reflection, System.Runtime, System.Security, System.Text, System.Threading, etc).

• ASP.NET (System.Web, System.Web.Extensions)

• Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms)

• Windows Presentation Foundation (System.Windows)

• ADO.NET and XML (System.Data and System.Xml)

We are in the process of adding additional framework libraries (including LINQ, WCF and Workflow) to the above list. I'll blog details on them as they become available in the weeks and months ahead.

Enabling Reference Source Access in Visual Studio 2008

Enabling .NET Framework source access within Visual Studio 2008 only takes a few minutes to setup. Shawn Burke has a detailed blog post that covers the exact steps on how to enable this in more depth here.

If you run into problems or have questions setting it up, please post a question in the Reference Source Forum on MSDN here.

Stepping into .NET Framework Library Source

Once you follow the configuration steps in Shawn’s post above, you’ll be able to dynamically load the debug symbols for .NET Framework libraries and step into the source code. VS 2008 will download both the symbols and source files on demand from the MSDN reference servers as you debug throughout the framework code:

Developer comments are included in the source files. Above you can see an example of one in the Dispose method for the Control base class.

Sometimes you'll see comments that reference a past bug/tracking number in our bug/work-item tracking database that provides additional history about a particular code decision. For example, the comment above calls out that a particular field shouldn't be nulled to maintain backwards compatibility with an older release of the framework, and points to a backwards compatibility bug that was fixed because of this.

Reference License

The .NET Framework source is being released under a read-only reference license. When we announced that we were releasing the source back in October, some people had concerns about the potential impact of their viewing the source. To help clarify and address these concerns, we made a small change to the license to specifically call out that the license does not apply to users developing software for a non-Windows platform that has “the same or substantially the same features or functionality” as the .NET Framework. If the software you are developing is for Windows platforms, you can look at the code, even if that software has "the same or substantially the same features or functionality" as the .NET Framework.

Summary

We think that enabling source code access and debugger integration of the .NET Framework libraries is going to be really valuable for .NET developers. Being able to step through and review the source should provide much better insight into how the .NET Framework libraries are implemented, and in turn enable you to build better applications and make even better use of them.

Hope this helps,

Scott

This Friday I'm leaving for a 10 day trip to Asia.  Traveling on business doesn't usually get me excited (I was on a plane ~70 times last year), but I am really looking forward to this trip as it will be my first trip to Asia. 

I'll be visiting China (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen), South Korea (Seoul), and Japan (Tokyo), and I will be presenting at events, meeting with customers, and visiting one of the development teams in my group that is based in China.  I'm also hoping to get a chance to see immerse myself a little in the countries.

Below are some details on the presentations I'll be doing during the trip if you are interested in attending or learning more:

• China (Beijing, January 13th)
• China (Shanghai, January 14th) <= Update
• South Korea (Coex Conference Center 310 on January 17th)
• Japan (Izumi Garden Gallery in Roppongi, Tokyo on January 21st)

I've been extremely fortunate the last year to have had some great people volunteer to translate my blog posts into other languages (including Chinese and Japanese).  Below are links to a few of the feeds if English isn't your first language:

• My Blog Posts in Chinese
• My Blog Posts in Japanese
• My Blog Posts in Spanish

I'm hoping to meet Xuegen Jin (who has been translating my posts to Chinese and hosting them on HongChao Wang's site) and Chica (who has been translating my posts into Japanese) on the trip and have the chance to thank them personally. :-)

Thanks,

Scott

One of the great new features of VS 2008 is its support for framework multi-targeting.  This enables you to use VS 2008 on .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5 projects, and does not require you to upgrade your projects to the latest version of the .NET Framework in order to take advantage of new Visual Studio 2008 features (like JavaScript Intellisense, JavaScript Debugging, code editing, nested master pages, and the improved web designer and CSS features - all of which work with .NET 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 projects).

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Multi-Targeting Support

VS 2008 out of the box allows you to open and edit existing ASP.NET 2.0 applications built with the separate ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 download we shipped last year.  The VS 2008 multi-targeting support works just fine with these projects, and you can use the improved JavaScript and web designer support with them - while still targeting .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET AJAX 1.0.

New ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Project Templates for VS 2008

Out of the box VS 2008 doesn't include project templates for creating brand new ASP.NET 2.0 with ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 applications.  Right before Christmas we shipped a web free web download for VS 2008 that enables these project templates options.  You can download them here (note: you also need to make sure you have ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 installed on your machine in order to use them). 

Once these additional project templates are installed, you can use File->New Project or File->New Web Site within VS 2008 to create ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 applications that run on ASP.NET 2.0:

New ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Web Site:

New ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Web Application:

Applications built using these project templates do not require .NET 3.5 to be installed on a server in order to work - you can copy them to any existing web server that has .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 installed and they will work fine.

Hope this helps,

Scott

Earlier today we released the first CTP preview of an "ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions" release that we've been working on (click here to read my previous post about our product roadmap).  This release brings additional runtime functionality to ASP.NET and .NET 3.5.  You can download it here (if you are using the MVC features also click here to download the MVC Toolkit extras).

This first ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions preview release includes:

• ASP.NET AJAX Improvements: New ASP.NET AJAX features in the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions release include better browser history support (back/forward button integration, and server-side history management support), improved AJAX content linking support with permalinks, and additional JavaScript library improvements.

• ASP.NET MVC: This model view controller (MVC) framework for ASP.NET provides a structured model that enables a clear separation of concerns within web applications, and makes it easier to unit test your code and support a TDD workflow. It also helps provide more control over the URLs you publish in your applications, and more control over the HTML that is emitted from them.

• ASP.NET Dynamic Data Support: The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions release delivers new features that enable faster creation of data driven web sites.  It provides a rich scaffolding framework, and will enable rapid data driven site development using both ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC.

• ASP.NET Silverlight Support: With the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions release we'll deliver support for easily integrating Silverlight within your ASP.NET applications.  Included will be new controls that make it easy to integrate Silverlight video/media and interactive content within your sites.

• ADO.NET Data Services: In parallel with the ASP.NET Extensions release we will also be releasing the ADO.NET Entity Framework.  This provides a modeling framework that enables developers to define a conceptual model of a database schema that closely aligns to a real world view of the information.  We will also be shipping a new set of data services (codename "Astoria") that make it easy to expose REST based API endpoints from within your ASP.NET applications.

We will be publishing many blog posts and videos discussing the new features in the weeks and months ahead.  Click here to check out an initial set of Quickstart Samples that cover some of the new preview features. 

Below you can find links to a few tutorial posts I've done (and a cool screencast by Scott Hanselman and some great testing tutorials by Phil Haack) that cover the new ASP.NET MVC Framework option.  I'll be doing more posts on the non-MVC features in the extensions release in the weeks ahead as well:

• ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 0): What is it?
• ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 1): Building an MVC Application 
• ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 2): URL Routing
• ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 3): Passing ViewData from Controllers to Views
• ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 4): Handling Form Edit and Post Scenarios
• Scott Hanselman's ASP.NET MVC First Look Screencast
• TDD and Dependency Injection with the ASP.NET MVC Framework
• Writing Unit Tests for Controller Actions

To ask questions or get help, please visit these forums on http://forums.asp.net

• General ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview Forum
• ASP.NET AJAX UI Forum
• ASP.NET MVC Framework Forum
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data Forum
• ADO.NET Data Services Forum

Hope this helps,

Scott