Jim Wang's Blog

A brand new year is upon us and it’s time to get cracking with WebMatrix again…and go back to school :).  Last year we ran a successful product walkthrough for WebMatrix Beta 2 with our students from around the world, gathering awesome feedback for the final version of WebMatrix which is coming soon!  I’d like to take this chance to thank all the students who participated in this effort…you have really helped make the final product much better than it would have been otherwise.

James Senior and I are at it again, this time in my office :).  Check out the newest video on WebMatrix Beta 2 where we discuss Themes, Package Manager, Helpers, and the new HTML 5 templates here.

For those of you who follow Channel9, I recently did an interview with James Senior (@jsenior) about the new ASP.NET Web Pages Helpers. Check it out here and let me know if you have any questions :)

Hello everybody!  It’s been a looong while since my last post and a lot has happened since then.  I switched from working on ASP.NET Ajax to ASP.NET WebPages (using the “Razor” syntax), and until recently, WebMatrix and ASP.NET WebPages haven’t been public, so I couldn’t blog about the awesome feature set that we’ve been building out.  There are numerous posts on the release, the most prominent of which is on ScottGu’s Blog.  Another good overview for WebMatrix can be found on the Coding QA Blog.

Thanks to everybody who showed up at the talk that Simon Calvert and I gave on an overview of ASP.NET 4 Webforms!  Your participation and feedback were much appreciated, and as promised, I’ve attached the demo that Simon and I built live, as well as the slide deck, to this post.  For those of you who missed it, the talk gives an overview of the SEO/Routing improvements, XHTML 1.1 compliance, ClientID control, ViewState reduction, CSS improvements, Microsoft Ajax Preview 6 updates, Dynamic Data in 4.0, QueryExtender, and the Chart Control.  There was a lot to cover in an hour :).  For those who went to the Ajax talk I did with James Senior, here’s a link to the Preview 6 download directly with the samples.  Enjoy the demos and deck, note that the demos require VS 2010 Beta 2, which you can get here.  NOTE: The demos attached to this post need you to drop your own copy of the NorthwindDatabase and the AspNet DB (the AspNET DB is in the default ASP.NET 4 templates).  I ran into an upload file size limitation on community server.  If you would like the full demo with the databases I have a RapidShare link here.  Note that the admin user/password is Jim/aspNET

Recently there was an issue posted to the ASP.NET customer forums where  somebody was having problems using Profile Services with ASP.NET Ajax Preview 5.  The reason is that the scripts for Application Services have been moved to a separate script file (to improve script download size).  We did not include the script in the Preview 5 release however, so if you want to use Preview 5 with Application Services features, you need to work around by taking the Sys.Services code and merging it into the Preview 5 MicrosoftAjax.js file.  For your convenience and at Dave Reed’s suggestion, I’ve gone ahead and done this, so if you are targeting this scenario, use the new versions of MicrosoftAjax.js and MicrosoftAjax.debug.js that are included in the zip file attached to this post.

Many of you have probably heard that we’ve released ASP.NET Ajax Preview 5 on Codeplex, and it’s available here.  Aside from all the cool updates to the codebase, Preview 5 also includes some updated samples, as well as support for UpdatePanel when using ASP.NET 3.5 SP1. 

The kind folks over at Coding QA Podcast (www.codingqa.com) did an interview with me yesterday, where I talk about some of the challenges with testing and building Microsoft AJAX and talk a little bit about myself.  There’s also a brief discussion of the Lightweight Test Automation Framework, and the new IE8 Debugger.  I forget what the questions are every so often, but in my unbiased opinion it’s a pretty good listen ;).  Click here to jump to the Coding QA Podcast site.