Programming

.NET on the ‘Net Feb 8-14: Windows 2008 Server Made My Valentines Day

Wyatt Barnett
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Hey ladies and laddies. It was a very, very significant week in .NET. First and foremost, Windows Server 2008 was released to manufacturing and it is currently available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers. The most significant offshoot, for us ASP.NET types, is that this opens the door to production IIS7 hosting. Which oftentimes translates to “no more calling the sysadmins to tweak some IIS setting because I can set them in my web.config” or “holy smokes Batman, this integrated pipeline is awesome!” Also, for those of us crazy enough to be developing on Vista, Service Pack 1 was also released to manufacturing this week and should hit widespread availability by March 18.

In addition, Microsoft also released a Visual Studio hotfix aimed at significantly increasing performance and quashing some bugs in the web design tools. One very significant offshoot is that JQuery now works with Visual Studio 2008 intellisense. Finally, Scott Guthrie updated the ASP.NET MVC roadmap while, for the poor souls stuck working in SharePoint, the Visual Studio Team released a significant update.

In arguably the coolest release of the week, Tim Sneath announced the release of Video.Show 1.0. For the uninitiated, it is effectively a Silverlight-powerd YouTube-in-a-box solution that looks very, very slick. For more information, see Jon Galloway’s post on the release. We might actually see Silverlight on a non-MS owned property soon now.

Speaking of Jon (fine human being and fellow co-author of SitePoint’s ASP.NET Anthology), he also posted a classic on Getting JavaScript and ASP.NET Talking Outside of AJAX. Also on the client scripting front, Rick Strahl tells you how to embed ASP.NET server variables in JavaScript the clean way. Don’t let the great title fool you, but VON#’s “Put Down the XmlNode and Step Away From the Stringbuilder” is an excellent guide to getting going with XmlSerialization.

For those of you into multimedia, there were a few highlights. First, Joe Stagner gives us a 4-part video series on everyone’s favorite conundrum: uploading in ASP.NET. Second, he also dug up a 7-part video series on one of the coolest, yet least understood bits of ASP.NET 3.0: the Windows Workflow Foundation. Finally, for those of you who do the podcast thing, .NET Rocks interviewed Miguel de Icaza and Geoff Norton of the Mono project.

Last but not least, there were two great posts about some best practices near and dear to my heart: keeping your stuff running secure. In the red corner, we have Gustavo Duarte telling us how to Lock Down Sql Server 2005. And in the blue corner, we have Kyle of daptivate.com telling us the Top 10 Best Practices for Production ASP.NET Applications.

Enjoy!