Ajaxus place on the net

This is a series of posts regarding the new language improvements in VB 9. Bill Horst has written the second on which I came across here. As we all know VB LINQ statements enable SQL-like syntax for queries in the VB language. LINQ syntax doesn’t match SQL syntax exactly, so if you are already working with SQL or familiar with SQL queries, you may find yourself wanting to convert an existing SQL query to LINQ.

And here is an example with FROM clause:

A SQL SELECT statement always begins with a SELECT Clause, followed by a FROM Clause. A VB query expression always begins with a From Clause or Aggregate Clause (Aggregate will be discussed later). A basic SQL FROM clause specifies a table over which to query, and similarly, a LINQ From Clause specifies an object over which to query (CustomerTable). This object could represent “In-Memory” data, a SQL data table, or XML information. My examples use the “In-Memory” case, since it allows the simplest code. In addition to this data object, the VB From clause always includes an identifier for the current “row” (Contact), which basically functions as an alias.

SQL

SELECT Contact.CustomerID, Contact.Phone
FROM CustomerTable Contact

LINQ

From Contact In CustomerTable
Select Contact.CustomerID, Contact.Phone

Here is the whole post by Bill Horst.

In it training, the order of courses matters a lot. Doing 70-290 after 70-270 makes more sense rather than the vice versa. This holds true for 70-291 as well. A 642-901 should be attempted after 642 series, not something as basic as 70-297.

This afternoon from Microsoft released an updated version of the Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha that works with the final release of Visual Studio 2008. You can download it for free here.

The tools alpha refresh released today has the same feature-set as the Silverlight Tools Alpha add-on which was previously available for Visual Studio 2008 Beta2 (it has simply been updated to work with the final VS 2008 release). This feature-set includes basic Silverlight 1.1 project system support, XAML markup editing and intellisense support, debugging support, Expression Blend project compatibility, and VB and C# code-behind intellisense. You can find quickstart tutorials that detail how to use these features here.

The next public preview of Silverlight will include a ton of new runtime features, as well as a significantly enhanced VS 2008 tooling support. Scott Guthrie will be blogging more details about this shortly.

Today Microsoft shipped Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. You can download the final release using one of the links below:

* If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can download your copy from the MSDN subscription site (note: some of the builds are just finishing being uploaded now - so check back later during the day if you don’t see it yet).

* If you are a non-MSDN subscriber, you can download a 90-day free trial edition of Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite here. A 90-day trial edition of Visual Studio 2008 Professional (which will be a slightly smaller download) will be available next week. A 90-day free trial edition of Team Foundation Server can also be downloaded here.

*If you want to use the free Visual Studio 2008 Express editions (which are much smaller and totally free), you can download them here.

* If you want to just install the .NET Framework 3.5 runtime, you can download it here.

List of New Features - old version

- VS 2008 Multi-Targeting Support
VS 2008 enables you to build applications that target multiple versions of the .NET Framework. This means you can use VS 2008 to open, edit and build existing .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 applications (including ASP.NET 2.0 applications using ASP.NET AJAX 1.0), and continue to deploy these application on .NET 2.0 machines.

- ASP.NET AJAX and JavaScript Support
.NET 3.5 has ASP.NET AJAX built-in (no separate download required). In addition to including all of the features in ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, ASP.NET 3.5 also now includes richer support for UpdatePanels integrating with WebParts, ASP.NET AJAX integration with controls like and , WCF support for JSON, and many other AJAX improvements.

- VS 2008 Web Designer and CSS Support
VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express includes a significantly improved HTML web designer (the same one that ships with Expression Web). This delivers support for split-view editing, nested master pages, and great CSS integration.

- Language Improvements and LINQ
The new VB and C# compilers in VS 2008 deliver significant improvements to the languages. Both add functional programming concepts that enable you to write cleaner, terser, and more expressive code. These features also enable a new programming model we call LINQ (language integrated query) that makes querying and working with data a first-class programming concept with .NET.

- Data Access Improvements with LINQ to SQL
LINQ to SQL is a built-in OR/M (object relational mapper) in .NET 3.5. It enables you to model relational databases using a .NET object model. You can then query the database using LINQ, as well as update/insert/delete data from it. LINQ to SQL fully supports transactions, views, and stored procedures. It also provides an easy way to integrate business logic and validation rules into your data model.

- Browsing the .NET Framework Library Source using Visual Studio

Lots of other improvements

The list above is only a small set of the improvements coming. For client development VS 2008 includes WPF designer and project support. ClickOnce and WPF XBAPs now work with FireFox. WinForms and WPF projects can also now use the ASP.NET Application Services (Membership, Roles, Profile) for roaming user data.

Office development is much richer - including support for integrating with the Office 2007 ribbon, and with Outlook. Visual Studio Tools for Office support is also now built-into Visual Studio (you no longer need to buy a separate product).

New WCF and Workflow projects and designers are now included in VS 2008. Unit testing support is now much faster and included in VS Professional (and no longer just VSTS). Continuous Integration support is now built-in with TFS. AJAX web testing (unit and load) is now supported in the VS Test SKU. And there is much, much more…

Installation Suggestions

People often ask me for suggestions on how best to upgrade from previous betas of Visual Studio 2008. In general I’d recommend uninstalling the Beta2 bits explicitly. As part of this you should uninstall Visual Studio 2008 Beta2, .NET Framework Beta2, as well as the Visual Studio Web Authoring Component (these are all separate installs and need to be uninstalled separately). I then usually recommend rebooting the machine after uninstalling just to make sure everything is clean before you kick off the new install. You can then install the final release of VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 on the machine.

Once installed, I usually recommend explicitly running the Tools->Import and Export Settings menu option, choosing the “Reset Settings” option, and then re-pick your preferred profile. This helps ensure that older settings from the Beta2 release are no longer around (and sometimes seems to help with performance).

Note that VS 2008 runs side-by-side with VS 2005 - so it is totally fine to have both on the same machine (you will not have any problems with them on the same box).

Silverlight Tools and VS Web Deployment Project Add-Ins

Two popular add-ins to Visual Studio are not yet available to download for the final VS 2008 release. These are the Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for Visual Studio and the Web Deployment Project add-in for Visual Studio. Our hope is to post updates to both of them to work with the final VS 2008 release in the next two weeks. If you are doing Silverlight 1.1 development using VS 2008 Beta2 you’ll want to stick with with VS 2008 Beta2 until this updated Silverlight Tools Add-In is available.

Read Scott Gu

Today I came across this blog article by Fredrik Normen in which he describes how to list and save data in new MVC Framework.

Here is his part of his post:

When building application today (X)HTML-based web interfaced is often used as the front-end choice today. Several companies used Microsoft SharePoint or other web-based portals solutions as intranet; we have several public applications which are web based. Enterprise applications continue to adopt web-based user interfaces, and this will unlikely change in the near future. A web-based user interface can today target almost any platform, and the deployment of web-based application is much easier than a desktop application that needs to be installed on every client. It’s easier to brand a web application than a desktop application like a Windows Form. A web based application will not take up to much resource on the client’s computer. But there are some challenges also.

The Request-Response paradigm can complicate interactions that would be simple in traditional UI. For example if we have a Windows application we can simply hold the state, HTTP is a stateless protocol which will complicate state management. A web applications user interface today can also be complex, often produced by tools like DreamWeaver and “probably” FrontPage The applications also often use client-side JavaScript. Some content can be hard to be edited by a .Net developer. But for a designer and of course some developers it’s easy to change the user interface, and often a web applications user interface will be changed. This requires a clean separation of presentation from business logic.
With the ASP.Net MVC Framework we will have separation of concerns. We separate the presentation from the business logic. The MVC is an abbreviation of Model View Controller, where the Controller objects accept user input and invoke business logic to create and update model objects. The Model object has the responsibility to provide the data to display; the model is a contract between controller and view. The View objects are responsible to display the Model, as provided by the controller that invokes it. By using the ASP.Net MVC Framework we will have more control over the HTML (a cleaner HTML page), we will have a controller separated from the View. By having this separation developers can create controllers and use unit-testing or TDD without knowing anything about how the model should be presented. The designer of the User Interface doesn’t need to know about the controller, only what data that should be displayed and sent back during a POST. The three parts in the MVC pattern, the View, Controller and Model can be implemented by three different developers and designer at the same. TDD can be applied when creating the Controllers and also the Model, this because of the separations and the possibility to create mock objects. The MVC Framework works against interface so we have interfaces for everything so we can easy create our mocks and test our controllers without needing to know about the View. We can also mock the Model.

read original

Today Scott Guthrie released first post from a series of post describing the new .NET model - MVC(Model View Controller).
It provides a structured model that enforces a clear separation of concerns within applications, and makes it easier to unit test your code and support a TDD workflow. It also helps provide more control over the URLs you publish in your applications, and can optionally provide more control over the HTML that is emitted from them.

In his post he shows how easily a simple E-Commerce application is build. The sample project is availabe in the new Visual Studio 2008 Project Templates.

Great plus for developers is that when created the solution includes also a unit test project!

You can use any unit testing framework (including NUnit, MBUnit, MSTest, XUnit, and others) with the ASP.NET MVC Framework. VS 2008 Professional now includes built-in testing project support for MSTest (previously in VS 2005 this required a Visual Studio Team System SKU), and our default ASP.NET MVC project template automatically creates one of these projects when you use VS 2008.

We’ll also be shipping project template downloads for NUnit, MBUnit and other unit test frameworks as well, so if you prefer to use those instead you’ll also have an easy one click way to create your application and have a test project immediately ready to use with it.

Understanding the Folder Structure of a Project

The default directory structure of an ASP.NET MVC Application has 3 top-level directories:

* /Controllers
* /Models
* /Views

As you can probably guess, we recommend putting your Controller classes underneath the /Controllers directory, your data model classes underneath your /Models directory, and your view templates underneath your /Views directory.

While the ASP.NET MVC framework doesn’t force you to always use this structure, the default project templates use this pattern and we recommend it as an easy way to structure your application. Unless you have a good reason to use an alternative file layout, I’d recommend using this default pattern.

Mapping URLs to Controller Classes

In most web frameworks (ASP, PHP, JSP, ASP.NET WebForms, etc), incoming URLs typically map to template files stored on disk. For example, a “/Products.aspx” or “/Products.php” URL typically has an underlying Products.aspx or Products.php template file on disk that handles processing it. When a http request for a web application comes into the web server, the web framework runs code specified by the template file on disk, and this code then owns handling the processing of the request. Often this code uses the HTML markup within the Products.aspx or Products.php file to help with generating the response sent back to the client.

MVC frameworks typically map URLs to server code in a different way. Instead of mapping URLs to template files on disk, they instead map URLs directly to classes. These classes are called “Controllers” and they own processing incoming requests, handling user input and interactions, and executing appropriate application and data logic based on them. A Controller class will then typically call a separate “View” component that owns generating the actual HTML output for the request.

Also here are his conclusion words:
Summary

This first blog post is a pretty long one, but hopefully helps provide a reasonably broad look at how all the different components of the new ASP.NET MVC Framework fit together, and how you can build a common real world scenario with it. The first public preview of the ASP.NET MVC bits will be available in a few weeks, and you’ll be able to use them to do all of the steps I outlined above.

While many of the concepts inherent to MVC (in particular the idea of separation of concerns) are probably new to a lot of people reading this, hopefully this blog post has also show how the ASP.NET MVC implementation we’ve been working on fits pretty cleanly into the existing ASP.NET, .NET, and Visual Studio feature-set. You can use .ASPX, .ASCX and .MASTER files and ASP.NET AJAX to create your ASP.NET MVC Views. Non-UI features in ASP.NET today like Forms Authentication, Windows Authentication, Membership, Roles, Url Authorization, Caching, Session State, Profiles, Health Monitoring, Configuration, Compilation, Localization, and HttpModules/HttpHandlers all fully support the MVC model.

If you don’t like the MVC model or don’t find it natural to your style of development, you definitely don’t have to use it. It is a totally optional offering - and does not replace the existing WebForms Page Controller model. Both WebForms and MVC will be fully supported and enhanced going forward. You can even build a single application and have parts of it written using WebForms and parts written using an MVC approach if you want.

Read the whole article

Today, during the keynote address at Microsoft TechEd Developers 2007, S. “Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft Corp., announced that Microsoft will release Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 by the end of November 2007. Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 enable developers at all levels to rapidly create connected applications that offer compelling user experiences for Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, mobile devices and the Web. Soma also unveiled plans to open new opportunities for Visual Studio partners, as well as to deliver new tools and resources for developers, including a first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Microsoft Sync Framework and new capabilities for Popfly Explorer.

“The highly social and visual nature of the Web has fundamentally changed what users expect from all applications they interact with, regardless of whether it’s on a customer-facing Web site or Windows rich client application, or a desktop business application built using Microsoft Office,” said Somasegar. “Traditionally, organizations have been hard pressed to deliver the richer, more connected applications and services they need to boost productivity, drive revenue and stay ahead of the competition. With Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5, it is easy for developers to use the skills they already have to build compelling applications that take advantage of the latest platforms.”

press release

Raise hands!

Today from Microsoft anounced that they will be including .NET Framework libraries source code with .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 release later this year.

Here is a part from ScottGu’s post. You can read the rest here.

We’ll begin by offering the source code (with source file comments included) for the .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc), ASP.NET (System.Web), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), ADO.NET (System.Data), XML (System.Xml), and WPF (System.Windows). We’ll then be adding more libraries in the months ahead (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ). The source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).

You’ll be able to download the .NET Framework source libraries via a standalone install (allowing you to use any text editor to browse it locally). We will also provide integrated debugging support of it within VS 2008.

VS 2008 will include support to automatically retrieve the appropriate .NET Framework source files on demand from Microsoft. This means that the source code for the ASP.NET GridView and BaseDataBoundControl classes above do not have to already be installed on the machine before we started the debugger. Instead, when we use F11 to step into their implementation VS can automatically download the source files from Microsoft and open it within the IDE.

By downloading the files dynamically we can also ensure that the matching source files always line-up with the particular version of the .NET Framework on your machine (for example: if you have a GDR or Service Pack Patch installed on your machine, we’ll make sure to download the source file that corresponds to it).

Summary

Having source code access and debugger integration of the .NET Framework libraries is going to be really valuable for .NET developers. Being able to step through and review the source should provide much better insight into how the .NET Framework libraries are implemented, and in turn enable developers to build better applications and make even better use of them.

As I mentioned before one of the new cool features of .Net 3.5 are the lambda expressions. Recently MSDN magazine released its September issue which features an article for the lambda expressions. Its quite extensive as it covers you need to know plus small syntax examples. Here is what you can find there:
- What are Lambda Expressions?
- Lambda Expressions as Callbacks
- Why Add Lambda Expressions?
- Type Inference
- Code Generation under the Hood
- Lambda Expressions and Variable Lifting
- Make the Most of Lambda Expressions

Here is how its starts:

Lambda expressions, new in Visual Basic® 2008, are a handy addition to any programmer’s toolbox. They are callable entities that are defined within a function, and they’re first-class citizens; you can return a lambda expression from a function and you can pass lambda expressions to other functions. Lambda expressions were added to Visual Basic 2008, formerly code-named “Orcas,” in order to support Language Integrated Queries (LINQ), which adds data programmability to Visual Basic (more on that later). As you use lambda expressions, you will begin to see the power and flexibility they promote. I invite you to sample the basic concepts of lambda expressions, explore their benefits, and witness how to use them to write more expressive programs.

Here you can read the rest

Here is latest post from ScottGu’s blog. There he describes how to build a custom RSS Feed Reader using LINQ to XML. Check it out:

One of the big programming model improvements being made in .NET 3.5 is the work being done to make querying data a first class programming concept. We call this overall querying programming model “LINQ”, which stands for .NET Language Integrated Query.

LINQ supports a rich extensibility model that facilitates the creation of efficient domain-specific providers for data sources. .NET 3.5 ships with built-in libraries that enable LINQ support against Objects, XML, and Databases.

What is LINQ to XML?

LINQ to XML is a built-in LINQ data provider that is implemented within the “System.Xml.Linq” namespace in .NET 3.5.

LINQ to XML provides a clean programming model that enables you to read, construct and write XML data. You can use LINQ to XML to perform LINQ queries over XML that you retrieve from the file-system, from a remote HTTP URL or web-service, or from any in-memory XML content.

LINQ to XML provides much richer (and easier) querying and data shaping support than the low-level XmlReader/XmlWriter API in .NET today. It also ends up being much more efficient (and uses much less memory) than the DOM API that XmlDocument provides.

Using LINQ to XML to query a local XML File

To get a sense of how LINQ to XML works, we can create a simple XML file on our local file-system like below that uses a custom schema we’ve defined to store RSS feeds:

I could then use the new XDocument class within the System.Xml.Linq namespace to open and query the XML document above. Specifically, I want to filter the elements in the XML file and return a sequence of the non-disabled RSS feeds (where a disabled feed is a element with a “status” attribute whose value is “disabled”). I could accomplish this by writing the code below:

VB:

read whole article

I have been away for 10 days and during that time the new VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta2. Here is what Scott Guthrie writes about this news:
You can download the Visual Studio 2008 product here. You can alternatively download the smaller VS 2008 Express Editions here.

VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express can be installed side-by-side with VS 2005. .NET 3.5 Beta2 also includes a go-live license which allows you to build and deploy applications into production.

Very Important: Please read my “Installation Notes” at the bottom of this blog post for a few post-installation steps you must make to ensure everything runs well. One of these steps fixes a side-by-side issue we found with ASP.NET AJAX.

Quick Tour of Some of the New Features for Web Development

Over the last few months I’ve written several blog posts that discuss some of the new improvements in this release. Below is a quick summary list of several of them that I have already published. This list is by no means exhaustive - there are a lot more things I haven’t had a chance to blog about yet (stay tuned for more posts!):

VS 2008 Multi-Targeting Support

VS 2008 enables you to build applications that target multiple versions of the .NET Framework. You can learn more about how this works from my blog post here:

• VS 2008 Multi-Targeting Support

VS 2008 Web Designer and CSS Support

VS 2008 includes a significantly improved HTML web designer. This delivers support for split-view editing, nested master pages, and great CSS integration. Below are two articles I’ve written that discuss this more:

• VS 2008 Web Designer and CSS Support
• VS 2008 Nested Master Page Support

ASP.NET also has a new control that I’ll be blogging about in the near future. It delivers very flexible support for data UI scenarios, and allows full customization of the markup emitted. It works nicely with the new CSS support in VS 2008.

ASP.NET AJAX and JavaScript Support

.NET 3.5 has ASP.NET AJAX built-in (and adds new features like UpdatePanel support with WebParts, WCF support for JSON, and a number of bug fixes and performance improvements). VS 2008 also has great support for integrating JavaScript and AJAX into your applications:

• VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense
• VS 2008 JavaScript Debugging

I will be doing a blog post in the next few days that talks more about some of the ASP.NET AJAX specific improvements, as well as how to upgrade existing ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 applications to use them.

Language Improvements and LINQ

The new VB and C# compilers in VS 2008 deliver significant improvements to the languages. Both add functional programming concepts that enable you to write cleaner, terser, and more expressive code. These features also enable a new programming model we call LINQ (language integrated query) that makes querying and working with data a first-class programming concept with .NET.

Below are some of the articles I’ve written that explore these new language features using C#:

• Automatic Properties, Object Initializer and Collection Initializers
• Extension Methods
• Lambda Expressions
• Query Syntax
• Anonymous Types

Data Access Improvements with LINQ to SQL

LINQ to SQL is a built-in OR/M (object relational mapper) in .NET 3.5. It enables you to model relational databases using a .NET object model. You can then query the database using LINQ, as well as update/insert/delete data from it. LINQ to SQL fully supports transactions, views, and stored procedures. It also provides an easy way to integrate business logic and validation rules into your data model. Below are some of the articles I’ve written that explore how to use it:

• Part 1: Introduction to LINQ to SQL
• Part 2: Defining our Data Model Classes
• Part 3: Querying our Database
• Part 4: Updating our Database
• Part 5: Binding UI using the ASP:LinqDataSource Control

I’ll be adding several more articles to my series above in the weeks ahead. I think you’ll find that LINQ to SQL makes it dramatically easier to build much cleaner data models, and write much cleaner data code.

Lots of other improvements

The list above is only a small set of the improvements coming. For client development VS 2008 includes WPF designer and project support. ClickOnce and WPF XBAPs now work with FireFox. WinForms and WPF projects can also now use the ASP.NET Application Services (Membership, Roles, Profile) for roaming user data. Office development is much richer - including support for integrating with the Office 2007 ribbon. WCF and Workflow projects and designers are included in VS 2008. Unit testing support is now much faster and included in VS Professional (and no longer just VSTS). Continuous Integration support is now built-in with TFS. AJAX web testing (unit and load) is now supported in the VS Test SKU. And there is much, much more…

Important Installation Notes - PLEASE READ!

There are two important things you should do immediately after installing VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta2:

1) You should download and run this batch file. This takes only a few seconds to run, and fixes an issue we found earlier this week with the version policy of System.Web.Extensions.dll - which is the assembly that contains ASP.NET AJAX. If you don’t run this batch file, then existing ASP.NET 2.0 projects built with ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 and VS 2005 will end up automatically picking up the new version of ASP.NET AJAX that ships in .NET 3.5 Beta2. This will work and run fine - but cause you to inadvertently introduce a .NET 3.5 dependency in the applications you build with VS 2005. Running the batch file will change the version binding policy of the new System.Web.Extensions.dll assembly and ensure that you only use the new .NET 3.5 ASP.NET AJAX version with projects that you are explicitly building for .NET 3.5.

2) If you have ever installed a previous version of “Orcas” or VS 2008 on your machine (either Beta1 or one of the CTP versions), you need to reset your VS 2008 settings after installing Beta2. If you don’t do this, you’ll have an odd set of settings configured (some windows will be in the wrong place), and you’ll potentially see some IDE performance slowness. You can reset your settings by typing “DevEnv /resetsettings” on the command-line against the VS 2008 version of the IDE:

Summary

There are a lot of new improvements and enhancements that I hope you’ll find really useful with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5. Stay tuned to my blog over the next few weeks as I’ll be posting more about some of the new features and how to get the most out of them.

Here is the original