The ASP.NET team recently released the ASP.NET Roadmap document on the codeplex site.  I love their goal of making ASP.NET Ajax the first-class choice for all Web 2.o developers ( Show us the love!!!).  They are planning on enhancing the DOM API's and planning to enable great mobile Ajax applications. 

Some of the other goals are to make client-centric Ajax development and UI experiences easy by providing or enhancing the following:

• Client Data and UI Templates
• Client Data Sources
• Client Data and Server Data
• Accessibility
• Animation
• Drag and Drop
• Client-side Controls and Behavior
• Interoperability

They also plan on providing great tools experiences for AJax development:

• Reduced update lag for Javascript Intellisense
• Javascript Intellisense support for a broader range of coding styles
• Recognizing XML Metadata Comments in the Active Document
• Recognizing OpenAjax-compliant Metadata Files
• JavaScript Navigation Tools
• JavaScript Build Tools
• etc...

Looking forward to these new enhancements.  You can download the document here.

Microsoft has officially released the source code for the .NET Framework libraries.  The following libraries have been released (.NET Based Libraries, ASP.NET (System.WEB and System.Web.Extensions), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), Windows Presentation Foundation (System.Windows), ADO.NET and XML (System.Data and System.Xml).  LINQ, WCF and Workflow have not been released yet.

 You can download the source from the following location (Visual Studio 2008 QFE).  For detailed instruction to set up with VS 2008, visit Shawn's blog Configuring Visual Studio to Debug .NET Framework Source Code. 

 Cheers,

Carlos

Microsoft released a preview of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions today.  This release has new ASP.NET Ajax improvements, ASP.NET Dynamic Data support, new controls for Silverlight and the new ASP.NET MVC (Model View Controller) which can be downloaded here. 

If you would like to get an overview of ASP.NET MVC you can check out Scott Gu's blog (ASP.NET MVC Framework).

Cheers,

Carlos

I recently upgraded an application that uses LINQ and had to make some modifications.  If you change the following methods, LINQ to SQL .dbml and a Web.Config file then you should be in good shape. 

(1) 

There were four methods that have been renamed ( Add(), AddAll(),   Remove() and RemoveAll() ).

(2)

Change the encoding in the .dbml file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>

to

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

(3)

Change the assembly in the web.config file

<add assembly="System.Data.DataSetExtensions,
Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=B77A5C561934E089"/>

to

<add assembly="System.Data.DataSetExtensions,
Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=B77A5C561934E089"/>

Cheers,

Carlos

I came across this cool seriel by Scott Mitchell that covers the membership, roles and profiles for ASP.NET 2.0.

Part 1 - learn about how the membership features make providing user accounts on your website a breeze. This article covers the basics of membership, including why it is needed, along with a look at the SqlMembershipProvider and the security Web controls.

Part 2 - master how to create roles and assign users to roles. This article shows how to setup roles, using role-based authorization, and displaying output on a page depending upon the visitor's roles.

Part 3 - see how to add the membership-related schemas to an existing database using the ASP.NET SQL Server Registration Tool (aspnet_regsql.exe).

Part 4 - improve the login experience by showing more informative messages for users who log on with invalid credentials; also, see how to keep a log of invalid login attempts.

Part 5 - learn how to customize the Login control. Adjust its appearance using properties and templates; customize the authentication logic to include a CAPTCHA.

Cheers,

-Carlos

I came across a great article that discusses how to investigate runtime issues with ASP.NET.  Tess is an escalation engineer at Microsoft whose team is dedicated to helping debug and solve customer problems. 

She wrote a great article about debugging unhandled exception errors using both the WebMonitor.UnhandledExceptionModule that you can download from Microsoft (see her blog for details), as well as using WinDBG (a runtime debugger).

Carlos

The “Atlas” controls don’t get added to the Visual Studio 2005 toolbox by the either the core framework or toolkit installer. Here’s what I did to add them:

1. Create an “Atlas” and “Atlas Control Toolkit” tab on the toolbox by doing a right-click on the toolbox surface and selecting “Add Tab” from the context menu and naming the tab accordingly.
2. Right-click the appropriate tab surface and select “Choose Items…” from the context menu and point to the appropriate assembly

The core “Atlas” assembly, Microsoft.Web.Atlas.dll, is in “C:\Program Piles\Microsoft ASP.NET\Atlas\v2.0.50727\Atlas” directory on my hard drive. Yours may vary based on installation choices. I would recommend IMMEDIATELY removing the WebPartManager and WebPartZone controls from the toolbox. They are not intended to be used directly. For the “Atlas” control toolkit, I added the AtlasControlToolkit.dll from “C:\program files\Microsoft ASP.NET\Atlas Control Toolkit\SampleWebSite\Bin” which is where I installed the sample app that demos all of the toolkit controls.

Once you have done this, you should now have both sets of controls in your toolbox.

Cheers,

Carlos