Scott Guthrie gave a presentation about the upcoming version of Microsoft Visual Studio codenamed ORCAS. Some cool upcoming features awate us.
There are alot of them, but 4 major features stand out from the rest.
First there is what they call multi targeting. No longer do you need 1 Visual Studio for each version of .NET. Visual Studio "Orcas" will support all versions of .NET up to 3.5. When creating a new project, one can choose what version of the framework you want to use, automatically disabling any features not supported.
Secondly a neat feature for web designers in Visual Studio has been the master pages. "Orcas" will support nested master pages.
What does this mean ?
Well, you could have 1 master page with a header and a footer and 1 column of contents. Then create another master page that is built upon the first one (thus having a header and a footer and 1 big column) and maybe split up the 1 column into 2. You can then have pages built upon either the first or second master page.
The third block is what excited me the most. Complete AJAX.NET integration.
It starts off with the already released ASP.NET 1.0 version, which can be downloaded and used already in Visual Studio 2005. But it goes beyond that. First of all there will be a newer version with more options and features out of the box. Then there is the javascript intellisense, which is really neat. It goes as far as predicting what type of variable you have in javascript (string, integer, ...) and showing intellisense according to it (javascript does not have strong types, so that's something pretty neat). It also supports encapsulation into classes for javascript, which is another thing not supported by default. And last but not least, javascript debugging!
Microsoft also started the AJAX.NET Control Toolkit, with developers from both Microsoft and others. it contains AJAX enabled controls to use in your projects. This toolkit is already live and kicking, supporting the AJAX.NET 1.0 framework.
The last cornerstone of the new release is LINQ support.
Wheter you use relational databases, XML files or regular objects, you can use LINQ do do queries on all of tem. You can even combine them and do joins over multiple types of data.
After a LINQ query, you will have data returned as an object, with fully supported intellisense on the object.
With these new features, it's a very interesting release, coming up later this year. Betas will start coming out in the spring.
One advantage of the multi targeting of all .NET versions is you can start using the release immediatly, even on older projects.
