Interview with Microsoft ASP.net product project leader

asp.net| Microsoft | Project Brian Goldfarb: When we first planned the development of ASP.net 2.0, we went into the market and studied the needs of our consumers and the developers of ordinary Web sites. What the hell did we find? Many commonly used task functions that need to be repeated are reconfigured again and again. Our goal is to simplify these processes and help developers reduce around 70% of the code that needs to be written in a common application environment.



This is a wonderful goal, but it leads directly to the development of a series of asp.net application services, such as membership, role Management, navigation, Web Parts, Management and more are simple programming patterns that can provide a large amount of code reduction. At the same time, we have compiled more than 50 new control methods that will be used to coordinate asp.net application services and further simplify the development process. Developers tell us that they want to focus on adding value to the application rather than writing code snippets. We believe that this goal can be achieved through ASP.net 2.0,web developers.

Developers and IT pros also tell us that ASP.net requires simpler management and maintenance. We've added a set of related features to make it easier for developers to configure their applications, and IT pros can easily manage their ASP.net 2.0 applications through IIS.

Asp. How did the net development team refine the developer's recommendations and develop new functionality features as a standard?
First of all, it is never easy to deal with a large number of proposals. It requires us to collect feedback from the developer community, communicate with key customers, and think about the direction of our web platform and development tools. After considering these issues in its overall context, we have come to the point where we need to make a difficult decision. We have to look back at the data we've got, the customer needs, the technical conditions, the industry trends, and more, and determine what's going to be a priority.

What functions reflect the widest range of customer needs? Do those functions show the strongest sense of innovation? Which features will be used to simplify the process of dealing with complex situations? How do we improve the management performance of the platform?

You know, we're dealing with a lot of things like that. As you would expect, the whole development process is very difficult because we try to meet all the needs of our customers, but not all of them are what we want, and we have to look at our priorities.

Do you see the "ah-ha" of those features for developers? For example, does not appear in the previous version of the features, or for the ASP.net 1.x developers have a strong appeal for features?
For our next generation of Web platforms and development tools, there are two major "ah-ha" factors. First, we redesigned the tool framework for creating Web sites and applications. We have released a new development tool for general enthusiasts, students, and programming fanatics--visual Web Developer the Edition Express. This tool has been developed from the outset to focus on the needs of Web developers and is based on the IDE for Visual Studio. As a result, visual Studio 2005 includes not only the new Web development features of all the Visual Web Developer versions, but also more specialized features such as source control integration Integration), precompilation (pre-compilation), localized processing (localisation), and access checks (Accessibility checker), and so on.

Developers who use Visual Studio. NET 2003 and ASP.net Web matrix tell us a lot about their expectations for the web development tools they are using, and this time the redevelopment is about this feedback. It includes some modifications to the project system that are based on the directory, a significant improvement in interface design with better CSS support, and integrated support for master pages and themes. We have also improved the source editor to provide a powerful code editing capability for Web developers.

Second, as mentioned earlier, ASP. NET application Services provides a powerful model for configuring all advanced functionality. In addition, our new master page model will allow developers to more easily maintain the visual consistency of the site. This model can inherit visual effects from the development tool end and the system platform side.
Those features might be able to draw developers from PHP or JSP camp to asp.net 2.0?

asp.net 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 can bring some column benefits to all developers. Software provides a powerful development tool that enables developers to design and write code for Web sites and powerful platforms while reducing the amount of code they need to write. asp.net 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 also allow scenario patterns, and it is almost unimaginable to implement such a feature before that. One example being compiled is the web Parts.



ASP.net 2.0 provides a rich Web Parts infrastructure that makes it possible for developers to create custom personalized Web pages without having to write too many custom code. We are excited that our platform has provided developers with a wide range of tools and has encouraged developers of these different backgrounds to download and evaluate the visual Web Developer-D Express Beta.

Some people talk about the improvement of application performance through the new buffer feature, can you cite an example of a specific application environment?
In asp.net 2.0, there is a new type of output cache named SQL Output Caching. In the past, output caching can be a huge performance boost, but there is also the problem of determining the best caching time to avoid outputting outdated data. SQL Output Caching,asp.net 2.0 allows you to cache a page in an indeterminate way, and refresh the cache only when the page data changes. This feature can be compatible with SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000. So imagine, if a data update is not a frequent directory site, such as a quarterly update price information of the site, in such cases, you can cache more than a month of directory pages, and you can see the system's huge performance improvement and database load to reduce.

Asp. NET developers are often miserable at maintaining the consistency of the entire site's visuals and usage, how do you solve the problem in asp.net 2.0?
We have made it clear that this problem is strongly reflected by developers and provides many new features in ASP.net 2.0 to help developers maintain the visual and usage consistency of the entire site. The first is Master Pages, which is a visual effect inheritance mechanism. Developers can do most of the site's visual planning here, and use ContentPlaceHolder control to define the overridable area. Then in the subpage, you can create a content page that differs from the ContentPlaceHolder type in the main page--this feature is used only for content on content pages, and Master page completes the rest of the work. This allows me to change the visual effects of the entire site just by modifying the master page.

The ASP.net 2.0 runtime combines the master page, which includes the content page, and sends the output in a uniform format to the browser. We also added the themes/skins structure, which allows developers to easily replace specific appearance elements in asp.net 2.0 server control. To improve development efficiency, we also provide full instant technical support for the themes/skins of master Pages in Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Web Developer-edition.
Most Web sites offer some type of personalization functionality, which is typically accomplished by hand-coded code. Are there any features in ASP.net 2.0 that can help developers create personalized Web sites?


The current Web site often needs to bring a rich personalized experience to the user. In asp.net 2.0, we provide a Web Parts infrastructure and a personalized development engine. First, developers can easily define strongly-typed user profiles, and the data will be automatically maintained. Second, with Web Parts, users can easily customize the appearance and components of a site by adding, removing, or moving the relevant web Parts. You can look at mymsn.com, in fact, the implementation of its related effects almost no code.

Using ASP.net 1.x to create a data-based Web site is cumbersome, what new features do you have in this area?
Part of the effort to achieve the goal of increasing developer productivity is to reduce the number of data access code. We have introduced some new control functions, including the GridView, to improve the problem. New code-free data binding makes it easier to connect databound objects to background data. In asp.net 2.0, I can also use the GridView, using ObjectDataSource, with the help of an intermediate object without writing any code. Is that all? I can also page, sort, select, edit, delete, and do not need any code. You will find the simplicity of this new data access model.

In the project from ASP.net 1.x to 2.0, what aspects of the architecture, upgrades, and ports should developers consider?
We do make sure that the ASP.net 1.0 and 1.1 sites do a lot of work on the ASP.net 2.0 normal operation. Visual Web Developer the edition and Visual Studio 2005 provide an Upgrade wizard that can easily convert existing code into ASP.NET 2.0 format. This way you can add any new functionality you need to the original code. The process is simple and seamless.

Will the ASP.net Web matrix be upgraded with the release of ASP.net 2.0?
The ASP.net web matrix is an unsupported tool (unsupported tool) that is published to help ASP.net evaluators, ordinary enthusiasts, and programmers create WEB applications. The ASP.net Web matrix project has been a great success for us, and it has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. We get a lot of big feedback from this and analyze what web developers want to see in their development tools.

Visual Web Developer, on the other hand, is a member of the 2005 family of Visual Studio, the edition Express. The vast majority of the lessons, feedback, and commendable features gained in the ASP.net web matrix have been used for reference in the development of the Visual Web Developer Edition Express. Users can seamlessly transfer from the ASP.net Web matrix to the Visual Web Developer the edition Express.