Non-interactive Interaction

Session 13
ASP.NET: Why, What, How and When?

Maybe it was down to the fact that this was the first morning session following the free bar at the Country drinks event the previous night, but this less-than-capacity crowd were probably more eager for 'hair of the dog' rather than audience participation. This left our host, Matt Gibbs with no opportunity but to deliver a rather one-sided lecture.

He started with a look at where are we now, specifically:

• ASP.NET AJAX 1.0.
• New 'Orcas' features are currently work in progress.
• Astoria.
• New AJAX features on the horizon.
• The new Silverlight controls.
• MVC framework.
• The new data access controls available.

An important message that Matt wanted to drive home was that the views of the developer community are very important for the future development of the Microsoft technologies. So basically, keep your questions, issues, feedback, concerns, scenarios, feelings, impressions coming!

There is a perception among the developer community that the trend to implementing new features mean that javascript is being leveraged too much and this in turn makes debug harder to carry out. Matt described that there will be a shift to silverlight as the main vehicle to develop client-side code. "We don't see people making a wholsesale shift to silverlight, but rather evolve to this technology over time, levering silverlight when developers see a particular benefit."

To Silverlight controls are currently being worked on:

• control makes it simpler to implement your Silverlight functionality without using JavaScript.
• control simplifies the addition of music and video to your site by handling the complexity. You just need to select the skin and supply the path name to your media file.

Microsoft are working on a release date of December for the controls.

We then moved onto a definition of Astoria. The goal of Microsoft Codename Astoria is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within corporate networks and across the internet.

The data service is reachable over regular HTTP requests. The use of web-friendly technologies make it ideal as a data back-end for AJAX-style applications.

For those of us that did'nt over-indulge on the free bar the night before, this was quite a useful session.