The LiveMeeting Q&A session with ScottGu was, as usual, very exciting. As promised, here are some of the highlights from his answers.
Microsoft’s Development Process
In terms of the development process at Microsoft, Scott said that more projects will be developed with openness, transparency, more frequent releases, relying on customers’ feedback and with OSI open source licenses as in the case of ASP.NET MVC.
Silverlight
In regards to Silverlight 3 release date, it might be around the July 10th. time frame. Scott said that they are not sure yet about the final exact date of the release as they are still working on it. Silverlight 3 will have another option for an HTTP stack, alternative to the browser’s HTTP stack, to work around some difficulties like the ability to use HTTP verbs other than POST and GET and cross-domain networking. Printing support will not be available in version 3 but rather on the next version.
In regards to Silverlight for mobile, supported for Windows Mobile and Symbian OS, Microsoft is currently working with carriers and handset manufacturers to get Silverlight pre-installed and integrated with the mobile OS.
ASP.NET Ajax 4
Currently available in preview 4, has a nice feature called Client Templates to support data binding on the client. This is done by creating HTML markup templates and having HTML-compliant markers within those templates and then binding JSON-based objects to them with one-way and two-way data binding. The cool thing is that this is designed to work with the ASP.NET Ajax client library as well as other libraries like jQuery.
ASP.NET MVC 2.0
The preview release will probably be available within the next month or two. It will possibly be shipped as part of Visual Studio 2010. Here are some of the features expected:
- Strongly typed helpers for UI and URLs.
- Support to segment ASP.NET MVC apps across multiple projects with built-in support for grouping Controllers and Views together in a nice organizational way.
- It Will be supported on both .NET 4.0/VS 2010 and also .NET 3.5/VS 2008 so you don’t need to wait for VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 to use it.
- In terms of tooling support for ASP.NET MVC 2.0 in Visual Studio 2010:
- Much better code-editing support.
- The ability to write your unit tests and then create your controller classes, methods and implementation based on your tests’ contracts and signatures.
Visual Studio 2010
Visual Studio 2010 will have fully interactive WYSIWEG designers for WPF and Silverlight. It will have much richer extensibility for the editor and shell to enable more robust 3rd. party Visual Studio plug-ins. It will also have native support for Sharepoint projects with intellisense, debugging and deployment etc…
Support for multiple versions of the IDE in the same project is something that is particularly important to large teams; because usually everyone on the team can’t upgrade to the latest version of VS at the same time. Scott said that they tried hard to have that feature in VS 2010 but it was not possible. Scott also said that there are some technical reasons why this is harder than it might look and that this feature is on the agenda for Visual Studio 11.