Version 4

I am now a subscriber to the MDSN print magazine. My first issue discussed a number of new tech offerings from Microsoft. These include the.NET Framework 4, ASP.NET MVC, and ASP.NET AJAX 4.0. While researching these topics, I also came across information on new ASP.NET 4 core services. I will briefly cover all of these areas today.

The .NET Framework 4 has a number of modern facilities. It has support for parallel computing like PLINQ. It also includes lambda calculus support (functional programming). Code contract is supported in this release. Code contact programming is an advanced method of assert programming. Finally there are a number of new programming languages supported like F#, IronPython, and IronRuby. The last two are the .NET versions of the popular Python and Ruby.

ASP.NET MVC is to be used for building web applications. It makes use the of the model view controller pattern. This is an alternative to ASP.NET Web Forms programming. One major goal of ASP.NET MVC is to be very testable. That means it was designed to be used with Test Driven Development (TDD).

ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 contains support for data driven web applications. You can do live data binding. You can also make use of the DataView control. ADO.NET data services can be employed. You can also make use of the Observer design pattern.

ASP.NET 4 has many upgrades to the ASP.NET core services. These include a new auto start feature. It allows you to initialize an application pool before accepting the first HTTP request. It also supports a true HTTP 302 redirect. There are new configurable URL size limits instead of the old hard coded 260 characters. You may set a flag to enforce validation of cross site scripting (XSS). Finally you can perform data access directly from the client in the web browser.