Yesterday, I watched Scott Hunter's PDC Video on ASP.NET 4.0, which was a combination of Webforms, MVC Framework, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, and ASP.NET AJAX 4.0:
Today I had a chance to watch his screencast on ASP.NET Dynamic Data, which showed a lot of compelling reasons for ASP.NET Dynamic Data for the future. Some of it you can download today in the ASP.NET Dynamic Data 4.0 Preview 1.
For those of you unfamiliar with ASP.NET Dynamic Data, the goals are as follows:
- Easy and powerful way to build data-driven websites
- Easy to get started using scaffolding
- UI is completely customizable through templates and pages
- Validation and business rules specified on data model flow through to UI
- Flexible UI routing
- Dynamic controls make sorting, paging, editing, and filtering easier
My takeaways from the Dynamic Data PDC session are as follows:
- Better support for other data access layers. Currently Dynamic Data has support for LINQ To SQL and Entity Framework. New release will have support for ADO.NET Data Services and a Custom Business Logic Layer.
- Additional field templates to make UI display even easier with URL, Email, and Enumeration Field Templates.
- Better and more flexible querying scenarios with Query Blocks that will be supported in custom LinqDataSource, EntityDataSource, and other data source controls.
- Richer filtering through attributes and templates for GridView in ListPages and other PageTemplates.
- ASP.NET MVC Integration.
As I mentioned before, Microsoft appears to be making a serious investment in Dynamic Data both for ASP.NET Webforms and the ASP.NET MVC Framework. There will be a lot more flexibility, UI customization options, and support for other data sources that will make ASP.NET Dynamic Data 4.0 even better for database-driven web applications.
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David Hayden