Last night I watched a couple of videos from PDC 2008. One of them was ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap, where Scott Hunter discussed the future of web development with Microsoft Technologies:
- ASP.NET 4.0 Webforms
- ASP.NET MVC Framework
- ASP.NET Dynamic Data
- ASP.NET AJAX
I wish there was some talk on how all of this relates to Silverlight 2.0, but Scott didn't get into the positioning of the above technologies with Silverlight.
My main takeaways with regards to the presentation were:
- ASP.NET Webforms 4.0 will fix a lot of issues with the current release - Better control of the client id, CSS, and viewstate options to give us more control over the markup of the ASP.NET Web Pages. Better support for javascript developers and continued empowerment of the page developer. Improved url routing with the new UrlRoutingModule ( we have this now ). More integration with Dynamic Data and AJAX, providing good solutions for database-driven web applications.
- ASP.NET MVC Framework will offer additional functionality like asynchronous controllers, sub-controllers, more declarative functionality around things like validation, and again, better integration with Dynamic Data and AJAX.
- ASP.NET Dynamic Data will continue to grow and get better integration with the ASP.NET MVC Framework. It will also support more of an abstract data access layer so you are not dependent just on LINQ To SQL and Entity Framework. Scott showed off better query support through query markup tags in the page source code, better data filtering options, use of dynamic data with Astoria ( ADO.NET Data Services ) as a datasource, and other cool features.
I am seeing a real investment here in ASP.NET Dynamic Data, so anyone who was thinking Dynamic Data was short-lived may want to adjust his/her thinking. A lot of work is being done to improve Dynamic Data and further the integrations between ASP.NET Webforms, ASP.NET MVC Framework, and other datasources like ADO.NET Data Services.
Given some of the improvements in routing, control over the HTML markup, viewstate, and javascript support in ASP.NET Webforms, those developers considering the ASP.NET MVC Framework for those types of benefits won't necessarily need to make the switch. ASP.NET 4.0 will apparently fix a lot of the current issues in Webforms that are attracting developers to the ASP.NET MVC Framework.
Scott also mentions the continued involvement of jQuery in their products as well as continued development on their own ASP.NET AJAX to make it more functional, better performing, etc.
Watch the video yourself on Channel 9.