I'm at Microsoft in Redmond for the ASPInsiders Summit, three days of training by various members of the ASP.NET Team as well as experts in other relavant fields. Most of what we're looking at is what's coming down the pipes in the near future and in the longer term. Yesterday was the first day and it was an amazing amount of content.
It started with a great overview by Scott Guthrie. First on Scott's agenda was explaining the release cycle and servicing. I know this is something that people fret over quite alot. One of the things that they are trying to achieve is to almost evolve Visual Studio. Since VS2005 has been released, MS has been releasing bits and pieces (and in their varying states from CTPs to Betas to releases) that add on to VS2005. Examples of this are the Web Application Projects, the RSS Toolkits, Microsoft AJAX, etc. The Sandbox area of the asp.net site and CodePlex are great resources for this. Eventuallhy these things will be rolled into the next major release (Orcas), but we developers don't have to wait for that release to get our hands on them.
There has been a lot of discussion/whining/griping about Service Packs in the community. The order of fixing problems starts with Hot Fixes (which address very specific problems and are available through the support channels), GDRs ("General something Releases" more general fixes that are deployed as patches. Did you know that there have been four GDRs for .NET 2.0 that have been part of Windows Update? Finally there are Service Packs. The SP1 version of VS2005 is currently in beta and it addresses over 2200 bugs/issues.
Scott was also very adamant about making sure people take advantage of PSS (Product Support Services). I remember when I wrote about my first experience with PSS, Scott pointed to that from his blog, so I knew that this was important to him. Anyone with an MSDN subscription automatically has a few PSS instances that they can use. Otherwise, one incident costs $200 and if you are spending hours and hours trying to solve a problem, that $200 becomes quickly cost effective. The people doing PSS are experts - often knowing a particular technology more deeply than the people who created it (which of course comes from constant troubleshooting). And, as I experienced, they will not give up on solving your problem until it is solved, elevating you to higher and higher levels of support if necessary. I was surprised at how long Scott talked about this when there was so much technical ground to cover, but that only drives home to me how important it is to him (and therefore to us) that we take advantage of this.
Hmm, I seem to have fallen into the same pattern. Now on to the rest of his overview. I saw a lot of things that I had only heard about, but not looked at, but I also learned about things that I had been clueless about that are coming up, which is what I will list here.
Database Publishing Wizard In a nutshell, this will allow you to package up a database (schema, data, users/roles/permissions) and copy it to a web host. It can be done by UIs within SQL Server Mgmnt Studio or a command line tool. If you are in a shared hosting environment, there is a web service module that your hoster can install and you can use that to get the job done. It's in CTP stage now.
VSTE for Data Professionals (aka Data Dude). I was familiar with this but confused about the fact that it was a separate SKU for Visual Studio 2005 and thought this meant that one would use this rather than, e.g. VS 2005 Pro. But it is additional piece (only about a 10Meg download). It does have a "small"requirement - Team System. Which I only translate as great news for RedGate If you use Express, Basic or Pro, definitely check them out.
Expression Suite: I never quite had my head around the suite so here are it's contents which I decided to nickname:
X-Web (already released and I think this is the "frontpage replacement")
X-Blend (code name sparkle) For doing all the shiny things for WPF and WPF/E
X-Design: Image Editing, Vector Graphics, exports to XAML
X-Media: For doing all kinds of stuff with video/sound/streaming/encoding, etc.
IIS7: Bye bye IIS5! To paraphrase Rick Strahl, you no longer have to develop on a server O/S to get a robust web server. IIS7 on Vista is as robust as the server version. If I understood correctly yesterday, the client and server versions will eventually use the same APIs. when One of the things that was an eye-opener for me was that the GUI tools that we'll have in IIS7 Vista to admin the web server on our dev machine can also be used (dependent on permissions) to admin sites on remote machines as well. That means that in my shared hosting environment, if the host will give me permission, I can do some of my own site administration, from my own computer, in the same tool I use for my local server. Yay.
Orcas (Visual Studio VNext) I've certainly heard all about Linq and ADO.NET, mods to VB & C#, tools for .NET 3 etc. But there's a lot I wasn't aware of - smaller things that were drowned out by these larger things.
Client side scripting is going to get some really helpful crutches (that's not a criticism, it's just the scripting is just plain old hard and that won't go away. But anything that anyone can do to make it easier is a blessing. And javascript is going to be REALLY smart in Orcas with intellisense, syntax checking, code completion, debugger visualizers and xml documentation. A later demonstration of this really impressed everyone!
There's a lot of CSS support being built in which is going to be huge. Plenty more, but this post is getting long!
WPF/E (WPF Everywhere). This allows WPF to be embedded into Web Pages to make them super shiny too. It will download tot he client machine just like any activex control and requires WPF support on the client side which is provided as a cross-platform runtime. A CTP was just released and Channel 9 has lots of demos. Currently you need to explicily install the run time. Eventually it will be more automated. I did download the runtime yesterday so that I could see this stuff on my laptop and, what can I say, it's shiny, it's cool, it's beautiful and it's impressive. I love it - so shoot me.