Friday, November 07, 2003

New Features In Whidbey

This article contains pointers to the new features in Whidbey that you can research on...
Many must have thought that what further developments can be done on VS.Net, it nearly has everything that you needed... But after reading about the features below I am sure you will feel that well with them things will be even easier...

My Favorites
1. Master Pages: - Read the article in the blog below to read more about them
2. Themes & Skins: You can read about this too in the post below
3. Posting across pages: Well, this is one feature which is really going to solve many of your problems With Whidbey you can post a page to pages other than itself Imagine you have a button on click of which you want to post the current pages information to x.aspx and other button on whose click you want to post the current pages information to y.aspx, all you need to do is to set PostTargetUrl property of the button to respective pages All your state information and control data will go to the next page. Alternatively, one can be a normal submit button to self and other can be a redirection button. Kind of making the stateless stuff to a little state full?? Nice isn't it!!
4. Pre-Compiled Website: Now you have a utility tool called precompiler.axd, what this will do for you is that it shall compile the pages for you at hosting time itself. It shall also give you the compile time errors to you. Now when your page will be hit for the first time by the user he will not feel like he is waiting for ages for it come up to the screen Someone like me who has faced this problem earlier can understand the advantages of this stuff And above this you can have compilation disabled after that, any changes to the page after it is locked will throw an exception
5. Default-Focus Controls: I had written some silly kind of code on every .aspx page of mine by which on the load of the page the default textbox gets in focus. I did feel if there should have been a way by which I could do so, say by a property of the page and something like that comes in Whidbey. Interestingly, you also have default button so that if someone just wants to hit enter on your page you know where he will go
6. Client Side Scripting: Also talking about button, didnt you ever feel that your button should do something on client and then post back to the server to implement some server side functionality Whidbey has come up with a simple way to do that too Buttons will now have OnClientClick attribute and there you can have the stuff you want
7. Method Extractors: Many a times you keep writing a method and by the time you finish it you realize that it should had been more modular Now you start worrying about the pain of creating helper functions and test them again All you need to do now is simply extract your method by selecting some piece of code Whidbey will take care of even the return parameters Easy right!!
8. Web Parts: You can now have some parts of your webpage seen conditionally and some part not You could do this earlier but you had to code for it. Here you can select the location of different web parts (Web Zones will be their container) and also when to show what Guys writing large user input applications must be feeling relaxed right!!
9. Device Independent Development: MMIT is now built in within and there will be something called as Adaptive Rendering that shall happen. According to the device the markup language will change and your page will be comfortably visible on any page.

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