Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 beta released

[Rock]

Good news to .Net developers Microsoft has released [Beta now] two wonderful applications for software development.. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 & the .NET Framework 4. They are the next generation of Microsoft development tools which work together to accelerate the process of turning vision into reality for the developer. Visual Studio 2010 Professional has been engineered to support the development of applications for Windows, the Web, & Office, while ASP.NET is a stable & mature platform for building rich & powerful Web applications, so it's hard to imagine a new set of compelling features being added to it..

With the release of Service Pack 1 for ASP.NET 3.5, Microsoft refined the platform's built-in AJAX support & enhanced its productivity by shipping Dynamic Data controls, a new framework of components specifically designed to address the needs of data-driven & data-entry applications.

The latest version of this .NET Framework 4.0 has many improvements for different set of scenarios such as Webforms, Dynamic Data & AJAX based web development.. There are also a lot of enhancements to the core runtime that powers ASP.NET such as Caching, Session & Request/Response objects.

One of the most complained thing in ASP.NET Webform is the growing viewstate which becomes a concern for performance. While earlier you can set the EnableViewState property to true or false, post that, all the controls, by default inherit & even if you set it to enabled at control level, the behaviour was inconsistent.. With ASP.NET 4.0, the ViewStateMode property helps to determine for every control, whether the ViewState should be enabled, disabled or inherited accordingly. The new feature in ASP.NET 4.0 allows users to programmatically set the Page Description & Keywords uplifting the Search Engine Optimization. There are many more enhancements to Webforms such as Routing improvements, setting ClientID, etc..

ASP.NET 4.0 has lots of new features some of them as simple as Page.Title whereas so as big as caching improvements. Upto Visual Studio 2008, one can set the Title of the page declaratory or through program using Page.Title.. However, as more & more web traffic is happening through search engines, Page’s Title, Keyword & Description become more important. Although the Keyword feature was exploited & hence many search engines today ignore it, Page Description is something still major search engines such as Google, Bing use for identifying & indexing pages based on content.

To give a background, System.Web.Routing is the namespace that provides the all important RouteTable & PageRouteHandler class. Initially System.Web.Routing was an integral part of ASP.NET MVC, however, the team must have anticipated that Routing is more important even for Webforms & hence they moved this DLL outside the scope of just MVC & made it available to Webforms as well..

Importance of Routing: Getting friendlier URLs which help in better search engine optimization & indexing. Cleaner URLs that can be bookmarked than the unfriendly querystring based approach.. As more & more URLs are available, the chances of improvement in search engine ranking becomes higher. These are some of the general advantages of Routing & friendly URLs. In .NET 3.5 SP1 if you want to establish routing, you would have to manually create the WebFormRouteHandler Class & make sure all the pages inherit from this class. However, in .NET 4.0, it has been much simplied..

Further read: ASP.NET 4.0 & Visual Studio 2010

[compserv]

So when will .NET4 be an option on your Windows servers? And if I have either shared or re-seller hosting, can we use 3.5 on one site and 4.0 on another?

[Rock]

So when will .NET4 be an option on your Windows servers? And if I have either shared or re-seller hosting, can we use 3.5 on one site and 4.0 on another?

It's still in Beta [testing] phase, once the RTM or Stable version is out, we'll have it made available on our shared hosting servers. Yes, this will be an addon to the earlier [.Net 2.0] framework, hence selecting 2.0 for a particular website will make all the latter versions [2.0, 3.0, 3.5 & 4.0] available for it.

[moroandrea]

I think you may be all interested to the new upcoming event for the release of Visual Studio 2010.
The event is in London, as always, and I think it's something that every cutting-edge software developer should not miss.