VS Live 2008 - Las Vegas - Day 1

Here are some notes from a few of the sessions today.

Silverlight for Business Applications
UI from our applications are pretty stale currently. We are not taking advantage of some of the features of WPF and also Silverlight. Some of the cool things that we can do in our UI that would enhance the user experience:
1. Ability to leave a page ( similar to modal ) and when we get back to that screen, the screen remains the same so that the user can finish what they are doing.
2. color coding our screens.
3. Indicating that something has changed.
4. Tooltips does not have to be strings.

Using Silverlight, we will be able to accomplish a lot of these. Silverlight is also cross-platform and cross-browser. You can develop using VS 2008 and Expression Blend. Silverlight also enables some additional browser scenarios like safe isolate storage, and client based file upload controls. It is highly compatible. We have to be careful when we make the decision to rewrite existing applications into Silverlight. We must decide whether we have captive users, how large is the user base, how rich is the data users work with, and does the new system needs a long shelf life? Don't be too ambitious on our first effort.

Another thing to keep in mind is that we do not need to rewrite the entire application. We can rewrite certain pages or new features.
http://www.dotnetmasters.com/

MVC
Model view controller is an alternative, not a replacement for ASP.NET Web Forms. You can find more information at http://www.asp.net/mvc. Once thing to keep in mind, controller always look for the View with the same name.

ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel
UpdatePanel is a control that provides many of the benefits of AJAX without the pain of developing a fully client side environment. It performs asynchronous postback or partila page updates. Server events are fired. .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 provides fixes and also some new features such as History. It provides the ability to enable forward, backward and bookmarks. It must be a simple state. Basically information will be held in the URL. So, don't hold too much information.

Look at ScripReferenceProfiler or google it. Also check out YSlow. You can also find more information at http://ajax.asp.net/, http://www.aspnetpodcast.com/, and http://www.twitter.com/wbm.

$get is a shortcut method to get to a control. $_GET[''];

ASP.NET Improvements in VS 2008
Multi-targeting Support: allows you to choose which Framework version to target when opening or creating an application. New HTML Designer and CSS Support. massively improved HTML designer, split view designer, and rich CSS editing support. Find FREE CSS templates at http://www.oswd.org/ and http://www.opensourcetemplates.org/.

Nested Master Pages.

New Data Controls such as ListView, LinqDataSource, and DataPager.

Javascript Intellisense and Debugging Support. Make sure to uncheck the Disable Script Debugging in IE Advance Options.