Brennan’s Blog

It won't be long before we can get our hands on the final release of Visual Studio "Orcas" and .NET 3.5. For those of us who did not attend MIX '07 you can still get a sneak peak. I watched Web Development Using Visual Studio "Orcas" by Omar Khan and I am quite impressed with the changes they are going to include.

The extensive changes and improvements include:

• Extensive support for CSS with refactoring for CSS selectors
• Rich Javascript support with Intellisense and debugging support
• New ListView control which gives you full control over the HTML of a databound control
• New pager control which can be attached to any databound control
• New LinqDataSource with declarative quering of LINQ objects

It is clear there has been a real effort to make fully leverage CSS. I remember the ASP.NET team lead mentioned that he did not expect CSS to become so important for web development shortly after ASP.NET 2.0 came out. Just a few short years ago many web designers and developers had largely given up on CSS and Javascript and they are now back in full force in this coming release. I attribute the return on CSS and Javascript to the popularity of AJAX which is heavily influenced by the renewed competition between the IE, Firefox and Safari web browsers. They all features top of the line support for CSS and Javascript with more improvements with each new release. The CSS tools allow you to add selectors to the page and then "refactor" the selectors out to an external file easily.

In one example he assigned a Javascript variable to an document element on the page and showed the available properties on the object using Intellisense. One line below that he set the same variable to an integer value and showed the Intellisense support again and it showed only the properties available to an integer. The amazing part was when he moved the cursor back up the the previous line where the variable should still be a reference to an element and the Intellisense was able to accurately display the available properties.

I also saw how they are increasing the ease of use for Javascript libraries by enhancing what it can do with Intellisense. Inline comments are placed in the Javascript functions with XML tags to denote the summary and parameters with attributes like type and description. There is an effort to get all Javascript developers to adopt this commenting style as it can easily help ease work with Javascript for any platform once tools start leveraging it. Apparently the comments are specifically placed within the Javascript function because you can already expose these comments through reflection in Javascript. I could easily see a browser extension display all of the Javascript functionality available to the page along with this detailed documentation.

It will be so much easier to do AJAX development with these new features.