I must admit, I had not used ASP.NET for a long time (lately I’m a Silverlight fan), so most of the things were new to me. What I liked about this session is that it was indeed about “Futures” because some of the things shown were still in development.

The topics discussed:

1. Helpers
   1. RAD development using ActiveRecord over Entity Framework for Asp.Net MVC
   2. Introducing TaskScheduler to perform background tasks (no need to code with System.Threading no more)
   3. Sending Emails with verification
   4. New control for file upload with progress bar
   5. Simple mechanism for using routing with web forms (aspx).
      Instead of using “\App\Welcome.aspx” use “App\Welcome”.
      This is being done with the new SmartyRoute class (I have a feeling that this name will change when the RTM is released).
2. HTML5
   1. The menu control is now implemented under HTML5 as a <menu> element.
   2. The team is checking how to incorporate new HTML5 standards such as <video> and <audio> elements
   3. Web Storage can be accessed with AJAX using the IntermediateDataContext (Again, I have a feeling that the name will change) which works together with the existing AdoNetDataContext class
3. Caching
   1. Velocity implementation for Session state provider  - but that we already know (if not, take a look at a lecture I did).
   2. Velocity implementation for OutputCache. For this the OutputCache was changed to support provider mechanism, so you can actually write your own provider for the output cache.
4. CSS sprites: CSS sprites are used to optimize download of images, instead of making the browser run multiple requests to get numerous images, the browser sends one request to get a large image, constructed of all the images and CSS styles are used to specify which section of the large image should be displayed in each element.
   1. CSS sprite support is added to ASP.NET (just change the “Images” folder to “Sprites”) – You can control whether you want sprites or not using the SpriteGroups class.
   2. You can use a sprite image class to specify when you want to get an image as a sprite:
      <%= Html.SpriteImage(elementName, altText)%>
   3. The generated code is a DIV element that uses the background-position CSS attribute
5. ActiveRecord
   1. Used to wrap Entity Framework and to provide easier usage of the technology
   2. Implemented to be used in Asp.Net MVC
   3. Allows automatic creation of SQL Compact edition databases (MDF file)
   4. Supports automatic DB table changing when the entity class is changing (for example – adding a property to an entity results in a new column in the table).
      Nice feature – not sure how it will work in production environments

To conclude, I enjoyed this lecture, looking forward to the release of Asp.Net 4 with VS 2010.

As for HTML5 – funny that all the demos were in FireFox and not IE8.X. When will IE support HTML5? If the Asp.Net team accepts that HTML5 is coming, shouldn’t the IE team also start working on the matter?

We will discuss Asp.Net 4 on the SDP which will be on December, so don’t forget to register.