Tech-Ed Europe 2005: The Zen of ASP.Net 2.0
Today I was lucky to attend the Tech-Ed pre-conference in Amsterdam about ASP.Net 2.0 by Jeff Prosise from KnoxVille, Tennessee (USA). Jeff is the cofounder of Wintellect and seems to know almost everything there is to know about ASP.Net. The seminar was pretty long, from 10 to 18 o'clock. In those hours Jeff told us about the many new features of ASP.Net 2.0 compared to the 1.1 version. ASP.Net 2.0 is as different from 1.1 as ASP.Net is from classical ASP, although it is not a shift in paradigm. These changes should result in less code (so less mistakes) and higher productivity. In fact, Jeff adviced us to start working with ASP.Net 2.0 now instead of 1.1, even so there's no final release of 2.0 yet.
Most notable talked about new features were:
- Master pages, so you can inherit content from different pages;
- New compilation (auto-compile, compilation of partial classes, precompilation without source);
- Data source controls with declarative (no-code) data-binding, like the SqlDataSource and ObjectDataSource and new data controls as the new GridView (DataGrid replacement) and DetailsView;
- Membership and Role Management service for managing users and credentials;
- Profile service for storing per-user data persistently;
- Localization or culture handling;
- New controls for navigation handling, like the TreeView and Menu with the use of a SiteMapDataSource and SiteMapPath.
- Configuration management with the help of new administrative tools. The possibility to read and write application settings. Also the not very well known possibility of encrypting parts of the config file was mentioned.
- Monitoring of web events, so you could for example write failed login attempts to the events log with almost no performance loss.
- Web parts for a richer UI. You can drag-and-drop parts of a page while editing.
- Asynchronous pages and Client callback management with XML-HTTP Callbacks. These concepts seemed pretty complicated to me.
With asynchronous pages a request (to for example a webservice) is done in a thread from the thread pool and the thread is returned to the pool immediately. When the request is answered a new thread is started, so in the mean time (between the request and the answer) the number of threads is kept to a minimum which improves scalability.
Client Callbacks can update data without postbacks to the server. This improves the user experience as no “ flashing“ of the screen occurs.
For me it was the first time at a Tech-Ed conference. The seminar was entertaining and interesting and I found the whole atmosphere of the big conference - with it's thousands of developers - quite impressive.
The presentation sheets of Jeff and almost all of his source code examples will be available from the Wintellect website within two weeks.