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ASP.NET "Whidbey" Overview |
The ASP.NET Team
Microsoft Coporation
October 2003
Microsoft ASP.NET is
the fastest growing Web development platform in the world today. It powers some
of the world's largest Web sites and most demanding applications for customers,
such as DELL Computer, Merrill Lynch, London Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, JetBlue Airlines, USAToday, Home
Shopping Network, WeightWatchers, BankOne,
and Century 21.
Every day thousands of
new developers begin learning ASP.NET for the first time, supported by an
incredible developer community of books (over 170 different ASP.NET books have
been printed), user groups (more than 250 worldwide), forums (over 300,000
registered users on the www.asp.net public
forums), e-mailbased listservs,
and Weblogs.
Our next release of
ASP.NET, codenamed ASP.NET "Whidbey" will be a major release that
includes significant new features that will define a new level of functionality
against which all Web development is measured. It will also be 100%
backwards compatible with the current version of ASP.NET, providing smooth migration when it is released.
We have focused our
work on ASP.NET Whidbey around three core themes:
1. Developer
Productivity. Our goal with ASP.NET "Whidbey" is to
enable developers to build full featured Web applications faster than ever
before. We've spent countless hours working with developers, and looking at
existing applications to identify the common features, patterns and code that
developers build over and over today. We've then worked to componentize
and include these features as built-in functionality of ASP.NET.
For example, ASP.NET Whidbey now includes built-in
support for membership (user name/password credential storage) and role
management services out of the box. The new personalization service enables
quick storage/retrieval of user settings and preferences, facilitating rich
customization with minimal code. Master Pages now enable flexible page UI
inheritance across sites. The new Site Navigation system enables developers to
quickly build link structures consistently across a site. Site Counters
enable rich logging and instrumentation of client browser access
patterns. Themes enable flexible UI skinning of controls and pages. And
the new ASP.NET Web Part framework enables rich portal style layout and end
user customization features that would require tens of thousands of lines of
code to write today.
Augmenting all these great infrastructure features
are more than 45 new server controls in Whidbey that enable powerful
declarative support for data access, login security, wizard navigation, image
generation, menus, treeviews, portals, and
more. Building a page with a DataGrid
in ASP.NET V1.0 that was filtered using a dropdownlist,
while also supporting paging, sorting, and editing, would have required
approximately 100 lines of code (and probably a few trips to the help documentation).
In ASP.NET Whidbey, this scenario can be done without a single line of
procedural code (the new data controls do all the work) and can literally be
built in seconds using the upcoming edition of Visual Studio .NET, also code
named "Whidbey." Developers can also automatically bind all data
access controls against a business object or a data-access layer, facilitating
rich 3-tier enterprise application scenarios.
All standard ASP.NET Whidbey controls are now built
with a rich UI adapter extensibility architecture that enables rich
customization of output for different browsers and devices. All built-in
ASP.NET controls with the <asp:> prefix are now mobile enabled in
Whidbey, which allows developers to automatically target more than 300+ unique
devices that support a variety of different markup standards (WAP/WML, XHTML
Mobile, cHTML, etc). The standard ASP.NET
controls will automatically send down the appropriate markup for a browsing
client device – enabling web developers to more easily target new mobile and
client markets.
The collective arsenal of new features now
available to developers in ASP.NET Whidbey is awesome. Projects that used to
take days or weeks can now be done in as little as a few hours. ASP.NET Whidbey
will allow you to spend your time building richer, more fully featured
applications by leveraging the new controls and infrastructure services built
into the core platform.
2. Administration
and Management. Our goal with ASP.NET Whidbey is to ensure that
administrators love ASP.NET as much as developers do today. This means building
features that further enhance the deployment, management, and operations of
ASP.NET servers.
In ASP.NET Whidbey, we've built new configuration
management APIs, enabling users to programmatically build programs or scripts
that create, read, and update Web.config and machine.config configuration files. And we've provided a
new comprehensive admin tool that plugs into the existing IIS Administration
MMC, enabling an administrator to graphically read or change any setting within
our XML configuration files.
ASP.NET Whidbey will ship with a new application
deployment utility that will enable both developers and administrators to precompile a dynamic ASP.NET application prior to
deployment. This precompilation automatically
identifies any compilation issues anywhere within the site, as well as enables
ASP.NET applications to be deployed without any source being stored on the
server (even the content of .aspx files is removed as
part of the compile phase), further protecting your intellectual property.
We are also providing new health-monitoring support
to enable administrators to be automatically notified when an application on a
server starts to experience problems. New tracing features will enable administrators
to capture run-time and request data from a production server to better
diagnose issues. ASP.NET Whidbey is delivering features that will enable
developers and administrators to simplify the day-to-day management and
maintenance of their Web applications.
3. Speed
and Performance. Today, ASP.NET is the World's fastest Web
application server. Our goal with ASP.NET Whidbey is to make it even faster.
ASP.NET Whidbey is now 64-bit enabled, meaning it
can take advantage of the full memory address space of new 64-bit processors
and servers. Developers can simply copy existing 32-bit ASP.NET applications
onto a 64-bit ASP.NET Whidbey server and have them automatically be JIT
compiled and executed as native 64-bit applications (no source code changes or
manual re-compile are required).
ASP.NET Whidbey also now includes automatic
database server cache invalidation. This powerful and easy-to-use feature
allows developers to aggressively output cache database-driven page and partial
page content within a site and have ASP.NET automatically invalidate these
cache entries and refresh the content whenever the back-end database changes.
At
the same time that we've focused efforts on making ASP.NET even better, we have
also made major improvements to the Web development support within Visual
Studio. More details about the new Visual Studio release can be found
here: Visual
Studio .NET "Whidbey" Overview . The combination of ASP.NET
Whidbey and the new Visual Studio development tool features compliment each
other perfectly, enabling developers to quickly and easily build applications
like never before.
http://www.asp.net/whidbey will be your
gateway to learning about ASP.NET Whidbey, as well as the new web development
features inside Visual Studio Whidbey. On this site we’ll publish drill-down
whitepapers that explain and show many of the new features that you can expect
in both. We will also provide links to all Web development-related
presentations and demo content from the Microsoft Professional Developer
Conference (PDC). As more ASP.NET Whidbey and Whidbey content becomes available, we will add it here for you.
Note
that the information currently shared is from our Alpha release (which –
despite over a thousand new features – still only has about two-thirds of our
overall functionality enabled!). In late spring, we will release a
feature-complete beta that contains even more. This feature-complete beta
will be publicly available for anyone to download.
These
guides will serve to prepare you as we march down the path toward our public
beta. We hope that this information will prove to be a valuable resource to
gain insight into the exciting new features coming.
Microsoft ASP.NET "Whidbey" and Visual Studio .NET
"Whidbey" Team