The Future of WebForms And ASP.NET MVC

ASP.NET Themes

If you watch the ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap talk at PDC, you’ll see that there are five main areas of investment that the ASP.NET team is working on. I’ll provide a non-comprehensive brief summary of the five here.

Core Infrastructure

With our core infrastructure, we’re looking to address key customer pain points and
improve scale and performance.

One feature towards this goal is cache extensibility which will allow plugging in other cache products such as Velocity as a cache provider. We’ll also enhance ASP.NET Session State APIs. There are other scalability investments I don’t even personally understand all too deeply. ;)

To learn more about our cache extensibility plans, check out this PDC talk by Stefan Schackow.

Web Forms

In WebForms, we’re looking to address Client IDs which allow developers to control the id attribute value rendered by server controls. We’re adding support for URL routing with Web Forms. We’re planning to improve ViewState management by providing fine grain control over it. And we’re making investments in making our controls more CSS friendly. There are many other miscellaneous improvements to various control we’re making that would require me to query and filter the bug database to list, and I’m too lazy to do that right now.

AJAX

With Ajax, we’re implementing client side templates and data binding. Our team now owns the Ajax Control Toolkit so we’re looking at opportunities to possibly roll some of those server controls into the core framework. And of course, we’ve added jQuery to our offerings along with jQuery Intellisense.

To see more about our investments here, check out Bertrand Le Roy’s Ajax talk at PDC.
Data and Dynamic Data

In Dynamic Data (which technically could fall in the Web Forms bucket) we’re looking to add support for an abstract data layer which would allow for POCO scaffolding. We’re implementing many-to-many relationships, enhanced filtering, enhanced meta-data, and adding new field templates.

There’s a lot of cool stuff happening here. To get more details on this, check out Scott Hunter’s Dynamic Data talk at PDC.
ASP.NET MVC

We’re still working on releasing 1.0. In the future, we hope to leverage some of the Dynamic Data work into ASP.NET MVC.

Notice here that ASP.NET MVC is just one of these five areas we’re investing in moving forward. It’s not somehow starving our efforts in other areas.

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