Noam King's Blog

PDC09 - ASP.NET Futures

The new things that the ASP.NET team are considering :

• Smartyroute – easier to configure routes (if you are familiar with routing from MVC and ASP.NET forms 4.0)
  • one Time setup of routes and you’ll be able to ask the smartyroute methods to give you the next page, route, etc…
• Performance of web pages. like combining few images into one image, making the number of round trips smaller
• Some common operations that could be simplified :
  • email verification, openID, Active record
  • ASP.NET Helpers :
    • Image manipulation – make it easier since it’s common task
      • Image.AddWatermark (…) etc…
    • email verification
      • (Login.Register(username….) etc…
    • Background tasks – help in the scenario of calling long processes whithin an asp.net page
      • TaskScheduler.Add(Mailtask, 500);…
    • File upload real progress update – not the “so called” progress that everyone is trying to put on their sites.
      • <%= AsyncFileupload.Render(“….”,….);%>
• HTML5
  • Enhanced Drag and drop
  • Web storage from offline storage.
  • Supporting things like <video>, <audio>, <menu>
  • like taking the menu control of asp. net it was :
    • rendered in ASP.NET 2.0 as nested table
    • rendered in ASP.NET 4.0 as <ul> and <li>
    • in HTML5 it will take advantage of <menu> element
• Performance
  • output caching that works with Velocity (provider of VelocityCache as part of AppFabric that I mentioned earlier) all you need to do is just writing a few lines in Web.config
  • if you are familiar with CSS sprites term, it is going to be in ASP.NET MVC (and later ASP.NET Web Forms), very easily like toggling a switch for generating few images to one images, and changing the name of the “images” folder to “sprites”, and of course using a helper of HTML.SpriteImage(…)
• Active Records
  • Works with ASP.NET MVC :
    • Alter both classes and DB for changes, and make it really simple even from code only.

More on PDC later on…