Ok, maybe not the death of ASP.NET, just wanted a shocking title, yet Silverlight is climbing into the same space. They will always be ASP.NET, no everybody wants or needs a plug in on your browser, let’s face it, HTML is not going anywhere at least for a very long time.

These are my notes from the MIX announcements. All this information came out at the MIX to the public. So nothing is new here. Everything is public knowledge shared by Microsoft.

What’s coming new on the next product versions:

Expression Blend 3

• Sketch flow will allow inside Expression Blend to design a prototype fast and flexible. Sketch flow can run on the client as a WPF application.
• Expression Blend can create demo data and bind it to the Sketch Flow by drag and drop.
• Behaviors are in Expression Blend triggers.
• Photo shop integrated into Expression Blend, so you can import psd files keeping the layers and attributes.
• XAML intellisense.

 

.NET 4

• Windows 7 will include .NET 3.5 with Service Pack 1 build in.
• .NET 4 will be 22MB client runtime. This new .NET 4 will be a side by side released. Much simple setup and much simpler deployment.
• .NET 4 WPF will include the multi-touch support and events to work with Windows 7 and a visual state manager.
• .NET 4 can work with COM easier by creating an instance of a COM object without interoperability.
• Will include Dynamic language support.

 

Visual Studio 2010

• VS2010 all UI is build using WPF providing a new bluish look and feel.
• VS2010 will be able to search the Visual Studio gallery and install applications hosted there.
• You can zoom in and out the new editor.
• You can remove any page from the editor and use it in another monitor or part of the screen to have a side by side code. The way to undock everything from the editor. Eclipse?
• New Extension Manager to make extending and creating plug ins better and simpler.  You can present different UI per source code and regions.
• Social Networking in VS2010 by interacting with other programmers that worked in the same source code. Visual Studio Communicator.
• SongSmith integrated in VS2010!! as an Extension as a find example to sing the comments.
• Themes build into VS2010 to jazz up your developing experience. You can create more themes using XAML.
• Visual Studio and Expression blend will be together in VS2010, that means no more black backgrounds and the way to see the results on your Visual Studio.
• TFS will be build in VS2010.

 

Silverlight 3

• Supports H.264, AAC and MPEG-4 and Raw A/V pipeline for Silverlight 3.0
• New IIS Media Server that you can installed and host from your server to stream videos, will come for free.
• 3D Graphics finally in Silverlight 3
• GPU Acceleration and hardware compositing. So iPhone smoothness.
• New class WritableBitmap.
• Silverlight 3 will come out with 100 controls like AutocompleteBox
• Improved skinning.
• Bookmark and navigate to state in your application via URL, so the state of the application will have unique URL.
• Forward and back button and browser history integration.
• Reducing the size of application by caching the framework on the client, common controls will stay on clients computer.
• Added local Silverlight communication for different silverlight applications can talk to each other.
• Merged resource dictionaries for styling in Silverlight.
• No printing for Silverlight 3 yet will be into Silverlight 4.
• Communication between the Silverlight in the browser and the WPF application on the desktop.

 

ASP.NET and Silverlight 3

• New DomainDataSource in Silverlight to communicate with data from ASP.NET with paging, sorting and filtering on the server.
• Is Silverlight going to replace ASP.NET UI? Silverlight 3 will bring all the controls already available in ASP.NET.
• Summary control in Silverlight for errors like ASP.NET just flashier. Validating in the client in C# instead of javascript is a big bonus.

 

WPF 4.0

• Improving the packaging of the framework for deployment.
• The Client Profile SKU is only 22MB for WPF 4.
• Want to install it? go to http://photosuru.com/ and do just that.
• WPF will improved the experience on VS2010 and improved text rendering using TextRight.
• Layout Rounding
• Touch in WPF
  • UIElement changes to manipulate events.
  • Raw touch input events
  • Multi-Touch gesture events.
• Compatible with Surface SDK 2.0
• Theme package for controls.
• Composition API to cache controls into the video memory.
• WPF 4 is designed for the Windows 7 to create applications for that new platform.

 

Azure Services Platform

• .NET Full trust platform
• Pre-Beta was available at the MIX.

 

Cheers

Al