Bountiful Betas!

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Bountiful Betas!

By Jonathan Goodyear

It was a busy month for new Beta releases from Microsoft.Rather than concentrate on one in particular, I ll give you a rundown of what snew on the Web development front.

First up is Beta 1 of the Web Deployment Tool, which alsohas a Go Live license (http://blogs.iis.net/msdeploy/archive/2008/05/13/web-deployment-tool-beta-1-go-live-just-released.aspx).The Web Deployment Tool has several functions. It provides a way to configure(using XML files) automated remote deployments of Web sites from desktops toservers or between servers. It can be used to perform backups and restores of Websites, as well as to migrate Web sites from IIS6 to IIS7. Not only is contentmigrated, but so also are any configuration settings, SSL certificates, GACassemblies, registry keys, etc. I especially like the what if flag, whichenables you to inspect what is going to happen with a deployment BEFORE youactually do it. This is an excellent tool that is very much needed especiallyin multiple Web server environments.

Microsoft this month also released Beta 1 of Visual Studio2008 Service Pack 1 (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc533447.aspx).It contains several new features that can be leveraged by Web developers. Oneof these is Dynamic Data, which is primarily a scaffolding engine to automatethe creation of admin-style data entry pages for a specified database schema.It has a lot of promising features, like the ability to intelligently handleforeign key relationships (by adding dropdowns with descriptions), UItemplating, and some validation options. As with other programming environmentsthat have scaffolding frameworks (e.g., Ruby on Rails), these pages willtypically not be used in a production environment. However, they give you agood starting point to help you do data entry while you are building out a new Webapplication.

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (Beta 1) also includesthe new Routing engine used in the upcoming MVC Framework. It was required tobe released early because the aforementioned Dynamic Data leverages it, aswell. There are some AJAXimprovements (most notably, the Back/Forward button history support), but onething I found very interesting is the re-introduction of the templates, IntelliSense,and debugging support for Classic ASP. These features had not been releasedwith Visual Studio 2005 or 2008, but there apparently were quite a few requeststo bring it back. It just goes to show you that it s not so easy to turn thepage on older technologies (VB6, anyone?).

A great sign for the hobbyist development crowd is theintroduction of class library and Web application project support in Visual WebDeveloper 2008 Express Edition. This enhancement will enable a wider audienceto be able to share class libraries and adhere to modern best practices for Webdevelopment. It also will enable them to build applications using Microsoft sModel View Controller (MVC) Framework (http://www.aspnetpro.com/opinion/2008/01/asp200801jg_o/asp200801jg_o.asp).

All told, it s been a great month for Microsofttechnology. It s good to see that Microsoft is not only introducing some greatnew technology, but also making some much needed improvements and enhancements toVisual Studio. I look forward to their formal RTM in a few months.

Jonathan Goodyearis president of ASPSOFT (http:// www.aspsoft.com), an Internetconsulting firm based in Orlando, FL. Jonathan is Microsoft Regional Directorfor Florida, an ASP.NETMVP, a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD), and co-author of ASP.NET 2.0 MVPHacks (Wrox). Jonathan also is a contributing editor for asp.netPRO. E-mail him at mailto: [email protected]or through his angryCoder eZine at http:// www.angryCoder.com.