Mark Fox's Weblog

Microsoft released XNA Game Studio 3.0 today in conjunction with its Xbox Live Community Games Channel.

The XNA Game Studio 3.0 is a .NET game framework that works with Visual Studio 2008 and is designed to allow the creation of cross-platform games.

Developers can create games for the PC and Zune platforms for free and with a paid XNA Creators Club membership develop for the Xbox 360 and submit their Xbox 360 games to peer review. Approved games are listed for sale online in the Xbox Live Community Games Channel with the proceeds split between Microsoft and the developer. Microsoft has approved three pricing points, 200, 400, or 800 Microsoft points (US$2.50, $5, and $10).

Wired has a look at the first few games approved.

Microsoft has released .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1. Key features of VS 2008 SP1 include:

• ADO.Net Entity Framework v1


• ADO.Net Data Services v1


• ASP.Net Dynamic Data


• Support for working with the recently released SQL Server 2008.

Still under development is ASP.NET MVC, with Preview Release #3 tested to work (as much as preview code works) with VS 2008 SP1.

Importantly Visual Studio 2008 SP1 should be installed before installing SQL Server 2008. Installing SQL Server 2008 on a machine running Visual Studio 2008 without the SP1 update will fail.

See Guy Burstein's Blog for download links.

Roger Jennings of OakLeaf Systems describes his installation experiences.

Scott Guthrie has announced that Microsoft has just released the Preview 3 build of the ASP.NET MVC framework. He stated that it includes some additional features over April’s interim build, enhancements/refinements, and Visual Studio tool integration and documentation See this post for download links.

In terms of future direction, Guthrie states:

We are starting to feel good about the URL routing and Controller/Action programming model of MVC, and feel that those areas are starting to bake really well. In future preview releases you'll start to see more improvements higher-up the programming model stack in areas like Views (html helpers, validation helpers, etc), AJAX, sub-controllers and site composition, deeper Login, Authentication, Authorization and Caching integration, as well as data scaffolding support.

He also promises a very long tutorial/ into to ASP.NET MVC shortly.

Following Mike Ormond’s blog entry "Using ASP.NET Routing Independent of MVC" produced a bit of consternation for me when I followed his example and after installing the 0423 Preview of the MS Dynamic Data Runtime and Templates Library to obtain the System.Web.Routing dll discovered that creating any webpage in Visual Studio 2008 would give me the following error and warning in regards to the page directive:

• Error: Length cannot be less than zero. Parameter name: length
• Warning ASP.NET runtime error: Length cannot be less than zero.

The solution for now was to uninstall the preview and reference the System.Web.Routing dll directly.

A MSDN Forum Posting shows other people have been affected by installing the MS Dynamic Data Runtime and Templates Library.

The actual demo works great, a URL like http://localhost:57648/StandaloneRouting/Page2 points to http://localhost:57648/StandaloneRouting/Page2.aspx, making it look more “Web 2.0 like”.

Microsoft has released the May 2008 version 4 of the Microsoft Patterns & Practices Enterprise Library. Microsoft describes the Enterprise Library as:

Enterprise Library consists of a collection of application blocks and a set of core features such as object generation and configuration mechanisms. All of these are reusable software components designed to assist developers with common enterprise development challenges. Application blocks help address the common problems that developers face from one project to the next. Their design encapsulates the Microsoft recommended best practices for .NET applications; developers can add them to .NET applications quickly and easily.

The new release is described as:

This release of Enterprise Library includes a new application block (see The Unity Application Block). Unity is a lightweight, extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection. You can use the Unity Application Block as a stand-alone dependency injection mechanism without requiring installation of Enterprise Library. However, this release of Enterprise Library incorporates integration with Unity that provides new opportunities for generating instances of Enterprise Library objects. There are also additions in functionality to several of the existing application blocks. The following sections discuss these and other changes in the current release. In addition, this release has been adapted to work with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) version 2.0, and the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.

Microsoft has announced the release of a public beta of the upcoming .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 releases. Both include a roll-up of bug fixes since November’s release and new features for ASP.NET, client development, the return of classic ASP debugging (sadly this could be very useful for me!), improved peformance and better Visual Studio javascript formating and intellisense. Among the new features ASP.NET Dynamic Data which Scott Guthrie described as:

a rich ASP.NET data "scaffolding" framework that enables you to quickly build functional data-driven web application. With the ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature you can automatically build web UI (with full CRUD - create, read, update, delete - support) against a variety of data object models (including LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities, REST Services, and any other ORM or object model with a dynamic data provider). SP1 adds this new functionality to the existing GridView, ListView, DetailsView and FormView controls in ASP.NET, and enables smart validation and flexible data templating options. It also delivers new smart filtering server controls, as well as adds support for automatically traversing primary-key/foreign-key relationships and displaying friendly foreign key names - all of which saves you from having to write a ton of code.

A second item added is the ASP.NET Routing Engine (System.Web.Routing) which is:

a flexible new URL routing engine that allows you to map incoming URLs to route handlers. It includes support for both parsing parameters from clean URLs (for example: /Products/Browse/Beverages), as well as support to dynamically calculate and generate new URLs from route registrations. This new routing engine is used by both ASP.NET Dynamic Data as well as the new ASP.NET MVC framework. It will support both WebForms and MVC based requests.

An update for the ASP.Net MVC is not part of the SP1, it’s last update was a CodePlex source refresh preview in April 16.

Microsoft unveiled Internet Explorer 8 during the MIX08 keynote today in Las Vegas and then made a developer beta publically available for download. The key features of IE8 are full CSS 2.1 support in the final IE8 product, improved scripting performance, start of support for HTML 5, and “Actives” and “Webslices.” Microsoft describes Activies as contextual services that provide quick access to external services from any webpage and WebSlices as portions of web pages that users can subscribe to and bring that content with them on their links bar wherever they are on the web. Users receive update notifications when the content changes. Microsoft has a weather webslice example and blogging, search, mapping and other Activities defined.

Microsoft notes that this release is targeted at developers and suggests users should wait until the next beta for a better experience. As with other versions of IE you cannot run the beta side-by-side with IE7 but a proconfigured Virtual PC image containing the beta is available.

Scott Guthrie has announced that the source code for many .NET Framework libraries is now available and can be used for debugging support within Visual Studio 2008. Initial classes for which source code is available include .NET Base Class Libraries, ASP.NET, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, ADO.NET and XML with others such as LINQ to follow.
Once you set up VS2008 debugging symbols and source code can dynamically downloaded from Microsoft servers.

Note that the license is for read-only usage and for use when developing on the Windows platform or software for a non-Windows platform that does not has “the same or substantially the same features or functionality” as the .NET Framework. Hence Mono developers should stay away.

The next time ASP.NET’s DataGridView starts acting strange I’ll be able to see what’s going on!

Microsoft has released the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) preview of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions which adds additional runtime functionality to ASP.NET and .NET 3.5. A number of new features are part of the release:

• ASP.NET AJAX Improvements: New ASP.NET AJAX features in the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions release include better browser history support (back/forward button integration, and server-side history management support), improved AJAX content linking support with permalinks, and additional JavaScript library improvements.
• ASP.NET MVC: This model view controller (MVC) framework for ASP.NET provides a structured model that enables a clear separation of concerns within web applications, and makes it easier to unit test your code and support a TDD workflow. It also helps provide more control over the URLs you publish in your applications, and more control over the HTML that is emitted from them.
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data Support: The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions release delivers new features that enable faster creation of data driven web sites. It provides a rich scaffolding framework, and will enable rapid data driven site development using both ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC.
• ASP.NET Silverlight Support: With the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions release we'll deliver support for easily integrating Silverlight within your ASP.NET applications. Included will be new controls that make it easy to integrate Silverlight video/media and interactive content within your sites.
• ADO.NET Data Services: In parallel with the ASP.NET Extensions release we will also be releasing the ADO.NET Entity Framework. This provides a modeling framework that enables developers to define a conceptual model of a database schema that closely aligns to a real world view of the information. We will also be shipping a new set of data services (codename "Astoria") that make it easy to expose REST based API endpoints from within your ASP.NET applications.

See Scott Guthrie’s posting for more details and links.

My take is that ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Dynamic Data Suppport seem to aiming directly at people using technologies such as Ruby on Rails. Hopefully supporting MVC will not split the ASP.NET community into advanced developers using MVC and lesser others using WebForms.

Microsoft has announced the release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5.

MSDN subscribers can download VS2008 from the MSDN subscription site; a 90-day free trial of Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite is available now with a 90-day trial edition of Visual Studio 2008 Professional being available next week. Free copies of Visual Studio 2008 Express editions are also available as is the standalone .NET 3.5 runtime.

Scott Guthrie recommends uninstalling all Beta 2 components before installing VS2008. He also notes that VS2008 and VS2005 will run side-by-side on the same machine. However with ability to build applications that target multiple versions of the .NET Framework including .NET 2.0, maybe you won’t need VS2005 anymore.

At the TechEd Developer conference in Barcelona, Spain, Microsoft developer division corporate vice president S. Somasegar stated that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 are on track for a release by the end of November. The marketing launch for these products along with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 will be at the end of February.

Also announced where Microsoft Sync Framework and Popfly Explorer which described as:

• Popfly Explorer which is an add-in to Visual Studio. This enables you to easily add a Silverlight gadget that you built using Popfly to your Web page and to easily publish your Web page to Popfly. In essence this makes it very easy for you to make your Web site look that much cooler.
• CTP for the Microsoft Sync Framework that enables you to build on the offline synchronization capability in Visual Studio 2008 and deliver great peer-to-peer and offline synchronization capabilities that let you sync-enable your application. This in turns enables data (irrespective of the protocol or the data type or the data store) to follow your customer no matter where they are and no matter what device they use.

Earlier in the month Scott Guthrie announced that Microsoft is working on a Model-View-Controller Framework for ASP.NET which will ship as a fully supported ASP.NET feature in the first half of next year.

Update:

Scott Guthrie has posted the first of a series of posts on developing a simple e-commerce storefront application using the ASP.NET MVC framework and the Northwind database. Part 2 - URL Routing, Part 3 - Passing Data From Controllers to Views and Part 4 - Handling Form Edit and Post Scenarios are also not online.