ASP.NET 4.5, Visual Studio 2011, MVC4 announcements
Some interesting announcements were made last week during BUILD2011, and here's some of the things I'm most excited about.
Changes in the way products are released
Scott Hanselman comments on his blog:
"It's also worth noting that while there is a bunch of stuff in the next version of Visual Studio, there's an equally compelling amount of stuff being released from the Azure/Web Team on NuGet."
It's great that's now so easy to add new packages to an existing project so easily. The days of searching for dll's, copy and pasting config sections around is over. This accommodates more granular releases for smaller pieces of functionality, and as Scott mentions, levels the playing field with other open source packages. Also Nuget is awesome, and I'll be blogging later on creating your own read-only Nuget repository (useful for Enterprise level distribution of "Common" assemblies and dependencies.
Support for Mobile Views (something Scott Hanselman had been working on) are part of MVC4, along with new HTML5 templates and new mobile JQuery templates. Web Pages 2 seems quite interesting - a new lightweight framework for data-driven websites where the View and the Controller live in the same file. This seems to be pushed as part of WebMatrix (Microsoft's lighter version of VS for developing with a number of open source frameworks).
Backwards Compatibility for Projects and Solutions (finally!)
I've always tried the latest version of Visual Studio soon after the developer preview is released, and it's always seemed pretty limiting that you can't just open an older project without having to convert it first. Whilst this limitation can be accepted during the previews and betas (as many organisations would frown upon using these for production code), once the RTM release is out it's often months before everyone on your team has upgraded and the projects and solutions can be converted and checked in.
Finally Microsoft has listened! VS11 will have the ability to open and save projects and solutions without the need to convert. :-)
Asyncronous Tasks and the "Await" Keyword
I'd been given a sneak preview of this at the Guathon earlier in the year, as demonstrated by Steve Sanderson. The new await keyword allows .NET to do all the hard work when using long running pieces of code, without having to code event handlers etc. See what I mean with the code below...
private async
Task ScrapeHtmlPage(object caller, EventArgs e)
{
WebClient wc = new WebClient();
var result = await wc.DownloadStringTaskAsync("http://www.microsoft.com");
// Do something with the result
}
Easy huh? The framework will finish calling the rest of your code without blocking the thread, meaning you can handle more requests, quicker.
I've often looked at google's PageSpeed tools and tried to improve the speed of my sites. One trick I've used is an http handler to bundle and minify the css and javascript into 2 compostite files (as this cuts down on HTTP requests).
.NET 4.5 gives you this functionality built right into the Routing Engine. For example, to include all of the js files in the scripts directory into one minified file, simply add the following to your HTML source...
<script src="scripts/js"></script>
Similarly, to include all of the css files in the Styles directory...
<link href="styles/css" rel="stylesheet" />
Other features are being drip fed on Scott Guthrie's blog, including HTML Editor Support for Smart Tasks and Event Handler Generation, Strongly Typed Data Controls, Model Binding Part 1: Selecting Data and Model Binding Part 2: Filtering Data.
The Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview can be found here.
There's some fantastic developments coming from Microsoft at the moment to make a developer's life easier and more thorough and I'm excited to see what's coming next.
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