Who is this Whidbey Guy?
(Page 1 of 4 )
For many of us, ASP.Net has signified a new era of application development. The more we learn and experience the power and productivity of ASP.Net, the more impressive it continues to be. But Microsoft has already identified areas where improvements can be made, and common routines can be 'componentized'. These improvements have been made and will be available to the world of developers in the next version of ASP.Net, code-named "Whidbey". There are some truly exciting developments coming our way, and this article is an introduction to few of them!
The History
ASP. Good ol' ASP. The server-side solution that all of us became familiar with back in the day. Yes, it was almost as readable as a Dr. Seuss book, and very forgiving if you forget to declare a variable or even call it with the proper casing! But aside from its simplicity, the drawbacks are too many, including poor performance, and the oft maligned 'spaghetti-code' style of scripting.
So, in marches ASP.Net. WOW! The improvements are unbelievable! The performance, the scalability, the reliability. So many ASP controls to contribute to Rapid Application Development (RAD), so much power to configure your applications in mere XML files! Not to mention the object-oriented programming approach, no wonder it has become the fastest spreading Web development platform in the world. But as with any first version of anything, there were areas that could do with some improvement, and areas that really needed improvement.
Enter Whidbey. Tall, dark and handsome, a pure center-of-attention kind of guy. The mysterious Whidbey is in actuality the next release of ASP.Net, boasting a wide spectrum of new features and improvements that will no doubt take the development world by storm. This is not a complete re-write as was ASP.Net to ASP, therefore the learning curve won't be quite as severe. And not only that, but 100% backward compatibility is promised, a little assurance for our already strained brains, as we can ease or rush into the new code at whichever pace we can handle.
Keep in mind please, that at the time this article is being written, there is no publicly available download of the platform. So the information in this article is based on the culmination of information from MSDN, www.asp.net, forums, and any other rogue sources that could be surfaced. By the time of the first stable release, there will no doubt be enormous amounts of information available, but hopefully I can provide you with a taste, an appetizer if you will.
Next: What to Look Forward to in Whidbey >>
More ASP.NET Articles
More By Justin Cook
