Visual Studio (Orcas) now at Beta 1

Microsoft have released the official Beta 1 of the next version of Visual Studio (codename Orcas). As usual the MSDN site has a ton of information and the download links. Channel 9 also have a video with Soma discussing Orcas and related stuff.

I’m looking forward to Orcas, I think it’s going to be the best .Net IDE they have produced yet. Whether it will be less buggy than 2003 and 2005 both were is yet to be seen but having Javascript and CSS intellisense will no doubt please many people. I especially like that they have added the capability to use the /// method of commenting like in C# to JavaScript allowing developers to add intellisense to their own JavaScript Libraries.

The Web Development UI has had a decent polish too making it far more useable.

Scott Guthrie has also posted on new features including Lambda Expressions and Query Syntax

The MSDN Downloads give you the option of an iso though that option appears to be available for MSDN subscribers only at the moment but you can get a VPC image in the same way the CTP images were released which is a better option as you’ll not screw up your machine with beta software ;0)

Microsoft unveil new name for WPF/E

WPF/E has been officially named by microsoft. The new name? Silverlight.
Tim Sneath has an anouncement on his blog that details what Silverlight is.

Learn to Light up the web with Silverlight visit the official Silverlight website.

Add Shortcut Keys to your Web App.

I just found this great blog entry on Ajaxian that highlights a superb piece of JavaScript that will enable you to include Shortcut keys in your web applications. This is great news as it will improve accessibility and make for richer interfaces. I haven’t yet managed to find details of licensing but it looks good and I suspect it’s opensource.

The Ajaxian Blog has a bit more detail or you can hop straight over to OpenJS and see the detail in full.

Javascript alternative to XSLT

A couple of interesting developments in the sphere of web development have come to light lately. One that caught my eye was the development of JSLT as an alternative to XSLT. The ajaxian blog has a lot more detail on the subject but as you can see below the syntax alone is quite different, just how performant it is in the real world is yet to be seen.

one clarification that should be made though is that JSLT is an alternative to XSLT not an implementation of XSLT in javascript. Rik Arends (the creator of JSLT) describes what it does:

“
JSLT parses/tokenizes all javascript-code and processes it for macros and language extensions recursively, maintaining proper nesting.
                                                            “

New Javascript framework available… for drawing vector shapes in a browser!

Coming from the same stable as the Prototype Window framework the Prototype Graphic Framework promises to deliver vector drawing to the browser in an easy to use library. The framework has renderers for SVG, Canvas and VML though the Canvas version still needs a bit of work.
More details and link available from the Ajaxian blog entry.

Download the Creating controls with the ASP.Net control toolkit webcast.

I fully intended to watch the entire webcast last night but unforseen technical issues with my home office pc meant I dropped out shortly after it started. Thankfully the webcast is available for download. The Public sector developer weblog has the links available. Note: I was asked for registration details again whenI downloaded it this morning so be prepared to use your live login or register to download.

Five Ajax Anti Patterns

Catching up on the Ajaxian Blog I found a post covering Jack D Herrington’s article on 5 Ajax anti patterns. The article covers 5 pitfalls of coding Ajax and reasons to avoid or at the very leats think carefully before implementing.

It’s a very well written article (IMHO) and worth a read.

Topics covered include:

• Invalid use of timers.
• Not inspecting return results in the callback.
• Passing Complex XML when HTML would be better.
• Passing XML when you should pass JavaScript Code.
• Doing too much on the server.