After using the latest version of Visual Studio for a while, I’ve grown to both like and dislike some of its features. The first Visual Studio incarnation I used was Visual Studio 6.0 (Aspen) back in 1998. In 2001 I had my first look at Visual Studio .NET (Rainier), which was the first environment for using the “brand new .NET thing”.
Do you remember a decade-old site called 4 Guys From Rolla? I used to visit it a lot in the early days of my ASP.NET career. Around 2002, it was still fairly common to visit a site and look for information, instead of just searching for it.
It’s been known for a while that the new version of ASP.NET will take care of an old problem, the id mangling of server controls. In short, your carefully selected id could be rewritten into something like “ctl00_MainContent_” before rendered to the client. Since this is one of the most annoying issues for several reasons, the change is very welcome by us markup-aware developers. All three of us.
I’ve used Visual Studio in its various incarnations since 1998 and despite all short-comings I still think it’s one of the most powerful IDEs out there. There are many people who are introduced to Visual Studio today, so here are some small beginner’s tips I want to share to new ASP.NET developers.
There is a new guy in the White House and he’s got a brand new website as well. The official whitehouse.gov had a major overhaul and the result is quite nice. They use ASP.NET 2.0 but the markup almost validates.
JavaScript has gone from hottie to dinosaur to hottie again. The revival of latter days is mostly due to the Ajax technique, but another important factor is the emergence of competent, lightweight framework libraries. One of the most popular is jQuery and even my brilliant colleagues seems to think well of it, so if you’ve lived in a cave for a few years it’s time to face the sunshine.
A major CMS company recently had a large restructure of their site. Unfortunately the link management seems to be have had a low priority. For example, some of the links look like this:
You may be familiar with the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern. For instance, Ruby on Rails development use a MVC-based architecture. Scott Guthrie recently held a presentation at the ALT.NET Conference in Austin. The talk was filmed by Scott Hanselman) and it’s the first public demonstration of an upcoming technology: The ASP.NET MVC Framework.
ASP.NET has been taking a lot of hard words since its inception. Most of the complaints are well deserved, but there are some ways to make things slightly better.
Today it was revealed that Microsoft will release the sourcecode to parts of the .NET Framework. It will likely occur during the shipment of VS2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. This means you won’t have to peek through disassemblers such as Reflector any longer to understand what’s going on under the hood (yes, the .NET Framework libraries are unobfuscated and the IL can be reverse-engineered).
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Reine is a web developer, urban traveler and ice cream devourer.
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