If you're trying to migrate from previous Microsoft Atlas releases to the new ASP.NET AJAX Core Beta 1 you'll quickly find out that several things have changed.  I was playing around with the AutoCompleteExtender this evening and noticed that it isn't in the "core" installation but has been moved into the CTP installation.  It's been changed a bit too.  In previous releases you would define it using syntax similar to the following:

One of the talks I'm giving at the upcoming DevConnections conference in Las Vegas the week of November 6th covers moving from Web Services to Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs).  Part of the talk will discuss how well Windows Communication Framework (WCF) satisfies SOA principles so I thought I'd put together a step by step tutorial on building a simple WCF service and client.  To run the examples you'll need the .NET 3.0 components from Microsoft as well as the VS.NET 2005 "Orcas" additions (optional).  At the time this blog was written .NET 3.0 wasn't available in a production release but that will change very soon.

I'm going to be speaking at Desert Code Camp this Saturday (Oct. 28th)  in Phoenix, AZ on Asynchronous Web Services in .NET 2.0.  The talk was just added to the schedule (thanks to Lorin Thwaits for squeezing me in last minute) so there's still plenty of room if you're interested in attending.  The talk starts at 2:35 PM. 

I'm teaching a C# 2.0 class at Interface Technical Training this week and thought I'd blog about two features I really like in C# 2.0 that save some typing (although they may arguably lead to more cryptic code) and are really useful.  Sure, there's all the goodness associated with generics, anonymous methods, partial types, etc. in C# 2.0 but two nice language enhancements are nullable types (which relate to generics) and the ?? operator.  If you've ever retrieved a null value from a database and then tried to assign it to an int or DateTime variable then you'll definitely appreciate nullable types if you haven't already used them.

I've updated the original blog roller code posted awhile back since a few minor changes were made.  On the homepage of Interface Technical Training we only show the first 250 characters of employee blogs.  However, people were using tools that injected so much HTML/CSS into their blog that no real text from the blog could be found in the first 250 characters (just HTML tags).  To remedy this problem, all HTML is now stripped out of the summary text and a small routine was added to cut-off summary text on a space rather than splitting a word in the middle. 

Microsoft released the intial beta of ASP.NET AJAX today with many, many new enhancements. One of the biggest changes is that the JavaScript files that ASP.NET AJAX controls rely upon to perform their magic have been refactored and significantly reduced in size. For example, the file used to support UpdatePanel operations is now only 6.4k in size which is a huge improvement and should result in pages loading much more quickly the first time they are hit. This release also fully supports the Safari browser which means the UpdatePanel will now work properly with Safari. Opera support is also in the works but not supported at this point. One of my favorites new additions in this release is the ability to dynamically create UpdatePanel controls and inject them into a page's control hierarchy. That feature will prove useful in cases where control developers want to easily AJAX-enable their controls or when an ASP.NET page needs to have AJAX capabilities dynamically added into it.

I had the opportunity to give a talk on Asynchronous Web Services in .NET V2 last night to the Orange County, California VB.NET and C# Users Group.  Thanks to everyone that attended and to Mike Vincent for inviting me.  I had a lot of fun and met a lot of great people.

In addition to this blog, I'm also going to be adding how-to and tips and tricks articles to the following weblog.  If you'd like to subscribe to that one as well here's the link: