Monday, March 29, 2010

.NET 4 ASP.NET (da Gu’s & whitepaper) 70-515 Exam Prep Catto Code Crackin #12

Hey Now,

In this 12th post of the Catto Code Crackin series we’ll continue with the section ‘da Gu & WhitePaper’. In .NET 4 there are many new features. I wanted to take a break from the book so I figured let’s check out what da Gu posted on the new .NET 4 features & the official whitepaper.

Microsoft announced the .NET 4.0 Beta Exams on St. Patrick’s Day which are a free exam & if passed you get certified. Much of the study & prep materials are not available yet, therefore I’ve been studying for a similar exam 70-562 which is the .NET 3.5 ASP.NET Application Development. I hope by posting this content it will help myself along with other people in the community learn & get excited about .NET 4. If you are serious about studying for a MS Exam 2 must have resources: the Self Paced training books are a great books to buy along with practice exams from eBay.

Da Gu’s Blog post

1. Multiple Monitor Support
2. Built-in Charting Controls for ASP.NET and Windows Forms
3. URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms
4. SEO Improvements with ASP.NET 4
5. Searching and Navigating Code in VS 2010
6. Auto-Start ASP.NET Applications
7. Clean Web.Config Files
8. VS 2010 Code Intellisense Improvements
9. New Code Focused Web Profile Option
10. Starter Project Templates
11. Multi-targeting
12. HTML / ASP.NET / JavaScript Code Snippets .
13. Add Reference Dialog Improvements
14. Output Cache Extensibility with ASP.NET 4
15. WPF 4

Details

  1. Multiple Monitor Support
    • We can rip a tab of in the VS IDE & move it anywhere such as another monitor. Kind like how Chrome treats tabs.
    • We can do this by clicking on a code file tab, then drag it outside the VS IDE
  2. Built-in Charting Controls for ASP.NET and Windows Forms
    • Wow this topic is huge 4 guys from Rolla placed some great content
    • <asp:chart> control: it’s in data section of tool box
    • Chart Picture
    • Series
    • Chart Area
    • Sorting & many more
  3. URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms
    • URL Routing is good for SEO
    • SEO friendly URLs
    • No more query strings within URLs
    • Allows Mapping URLs
  4. SEO Improvements with ASP.NET 4
    • SEO is good since we can add meta tags & there are more page properties
    • New Page MetaKeywords & Page.MetaDescriptions properties
    • URL Routing
    • Response.RedirectPermanent() method (when we move content)
  5. Searching and Navigating Code in VS 2010
    • Searching in VS2010 has seen improvements
    • Navigate To –
    • (Ctrl+comma) keyboard shortcut open Navigate To dialog box
    • Fuzzy Search allows smart filters (when we don’t know exactly the name)
    • View Call Hierarchy allows us to discover where a method or property is being called from.
    • Ctrl + K, Ctrl + T Open View Call Hierarchy menu command.
    • Highlighted References can be cycled threw by Ctrl+Shift+Up Arrow.
  6. Auto-Start ASP.NET Applications
    • There is an oiption for Auto start
    • Our apps can be warmed up with ASP.NET 4 & IIS 7.5 by performing application startup & pre=cache logic run before any user hit the app.

§ <applicationPools>

§ <add name="MyAppWorkerProcess" managedRuntimeVersion="v4.0" startMode="AlwaysRunning" />

§ </applicationPools>

  1. 7 Clean Web.Config Files
    • Clean Web Config Files are stripped down into a simple web.config file
    • Here it is:
§  <?xml version="1.0"?>
§ <configuration>
§ <system.web>
§ <compilation targetFramework="4.0" />
§ </system.web>
§ </configuration>
  1. 8 VS 2010 Code Intellisense Improvements

    • Pascal Case Intellisense when we type GridView1.PIC then the intellisense will display the PageIndexChanged member.
    • Searching for Types is new for example type list & we’ll see list<>, SortedList<> ect.
    • Intellisense filtering – Insellisense w/ fuzzy logic kinda.

  2. 9 New Code Focused Web Profile Option

    • New environment settings: Web Development (code optimized ) – Anti WYSIWYG
    • This affects how tool windows are displayed / hotkeys
  3. 10 Starter Project Templates

    • Start Projects New Templates are nice such as
    • Empty ASP.NET Web Application – minimal project
    • ASP.NET Web Application (has master pages, layout / CSS / directories such as styles & scripts)

  4. 11 Multi-targeting

    • We can target .NET 4 or .NET 3.5 or .NET 2.0 diifferent framework versions
    • This feature is more accurate & better than in VS08
    • Reference Assemblies for each .NET versions is in VS10
    • Internal IIS ASP.NET dev server lists the .NET version now previously it listed the root url, port, virtual path, physical path & stop button.

  5. 12 HTML / ASP.NET / JavaScript Code Snippets

    • There are many code snippets available to us
    • Example is when we can start typing a control then get intellisence, then press tab to complete the control name then press tab a second time to complete the control code.

  6. 13 Add Reference Dialog Improvements

    • Adding Reference Dialog box is much improved. Speedier
    • Quicker including a Project tab
  7. 14 Output Cache Extensibility with ASP.NET 4

    • Cache Extensibility is good
    • The addition of the output cache provider enables us devs to easily pursue more aggressive & more intelligent output caching strategies for sites & apps.
    • Improve performance & responsiveness

  8. 15 WPF 4

    • WPF 4 is dead right w/ Silverlight 3 out of browser?
    • Controls are improved in WPF4
    • Office Ribbon
    • Graphics & many more

Here are a couple other topics from the white paper

Here are the main points from the white pager:

Core Services

New Features in AJAX Library


Web Forms
ASP.NET MVC
Dynamic Data
VS 2010 Improvements
Web Application Deployment w/ VS10

& here are some topics that catch my eye & I feel are important for the exam:

Query Extender control – used to modify the results from a query from a data source control
CSS improvements – less table layouts. Examle the menu control now uses un ordered lists not tables wihich makes it render better in webkit.
Chart Control is a really good control for us to us. It has 36 distinct charts, chart areas, titles, can use AJAX with it, smart data labels, filtering & much more.
Wizard Controls & CreateUserWizard controls <asp:CreateUserWizard Dynamic Data – Big sections here including enabling dynamic data for existing sites, creating new projects of dynamic data types, support for filters & more.

As we’ve seen .NET 4 has quite a few enhancements, Scott Gu’s blog & the whitepaper are great resources for us.

That is all, there will be more,

Catto

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