Microsoft News Tracker

Microsoft Developer Division General Manager Scott Guthrie today revealed the roadmap for a series of additional Web development products that build on top of last week’s RTM of Visual Studio and .NET FX 3.5. In outline form with liberal quoting from Guthrie, it looks like the following:

ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Release

“We are planning to deliver even more ASP.NET functionality next year with a “ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions” release.  The first public preview of this will be available for download next week on the web.

The preview release will include:

• ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) for structuring Web applications. See Part 1 of Gutherie’s ASP.NET MVC Tutorial series for more details
• ASP.NET AJAX Improvements
• Enhanced ASP.NET Dynamic Data Support
• ASP.NET Silverlight Support: Easily integrate Silverlight within ASP.NET applications.

ADO.NET Data Services

In parallel with the ASP.NET Extensions the ADO.NET Entity Framework will be released. “This provides a new modeling framework that enables developers to define a conceptual model of a database schema that closely aligns to a real world view of the information.  We will also be shipping a new set of data services (codename “Astoria”) that make it easy to expose REST based API endpoints from within your ASP.NET applications.”

Silverlight 2.0 Release

Next year will mark the debut of a .NET enabled version of Silverlight that had been previously designated as v 1.1, but has now been renamed to v 2.0,  “This release will include a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .NET Framework, and will enable a rich .NET development platform in the browser.”  A partial list of revealed features is in the post and more are promised. A beta of Silverlight 2.0 will be released in Q1 of 2008 with a Go-Live license for early adopters.

“We will also be releasing a free Visual Studio 2008 tools update that provides great Silverlight 2.0 tools support within Visual Studio 2008, and enables developers to easily build Silverlight applications using any .NET language.  We will be supporting Silverlight development with both the Visual Studio 2008 Standard/Professional products, as well as with the free Visual Studio 2008 Express editions.“

IIS 7.0

Due early next year Windows Server 2008 release, IIS7 represents a major of update of Microsoft’s web-server stack and Microsoft will “shortly begin sharing details of a new web application deployment framework for IIS that enables you to easily automate the deployment of web applications on either a single server or across a web farm of machines.”

Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries

As announced last month Microsoft is permitting the download of some of the source for .NET Framework libraries and enabling integrated source debugging using Visual Studio 2008 under its Shared Source program.  “We are finishing up the final deployment of the source servers that host this now, and will be publishing instructions on how to enable the integrated debugging experience within Visual Studio 2008 shortly.“