ASP.NET 4.0 – Some info from PDC

I am in my bed and watching a session from PDC called “ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap”. So .. what is the good stuff?

One of the coolest things is that Microsoft has totally been transformed into a release early, release often kind of company. It’s a huge difference between how it worked in the .net 1.0 – 2.0 days. And I guess we should thank Mr. Guthrie for that.

So most of the things that they talk about that will come bundled in ASP.NET 4.0 is actually already available on CodePlex for you to use today. Maybe not as finals but as betas and tech previews. I love the new Microsoft.

Webforms

• You will have control of the ID’s of webcontrols. That was about time.
• Remove the need of using CSS Adapters to get “kind of” good control over the rendering. Also will controls render more appropiate code. Hopefully a menu will render a list and not some nested table crap and so on.
• URL routing also for Webforms. Not only for MVC. Yippie ..
• Viewstate on/off mode will be more like. Disable on the whole page but enable for this specific control. One more Yippieee.

Ajax/Javascript

• As mentioned before. Native support for jQuery with intellisense. Actually you can download a javascript file from Google code (hehe) today to get complete intellisense.
• Support for “Server side looking” client controls. Was not that impressed of thoose. But i have never been a big fan of Datasource controls and stuff like that. But it may be better that to just wrap a large grid control into a updatepanel. Well .. it must be better then that 😉

MVC

• People who do not know what MVC is after all the buzz that has been around it the last 8-12 month will probably not care so much about it. Atleast not existing asp.net developers who has not head about it.
• Basiclly it is amied against developers used to Rails, Django, PHP and developers who use those frameworks and languages. And ofcourse we webforms developers who just want to try everything and see how it works.