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ASP.NET grows up



David Worthington
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July 1, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 5)
The seeds that Microsoft planted ASP.NET are now sprouting. .NET 4.0 adds nuance and fit and finish to Microsoft's Web application platform that experts say will lead to better performing, more dynamic applications. But developers will need to rethink how they build them.

A panel of industry luminaries told SD Times that .NET 4.0 addresses longstanding pain points in Web Forms development and introduces significant client-side functionality to ASP.NET AJAX. Also, its Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern will promote the creation of higher-quality software through greater componentization and testability.

When ASP.NET was introduced, many developers had difficulty making the mental switch from a stateful to stateless world, said Brian Goldfarb, director of developer and user experience platforms at Microsoft. Stateless applications have no record about what has occurred previously, such as earlier configuration settings.

A feature called ASP.NET View State removed the need to understand the difference, so developers that originally built Windows Forms applications could create Web applications more easily, Goldfarb explained.

Despite its good intentions, Microsoft's implementation of View State caused more than a few headaches. "It is a core feature of ASP.NET that made the stateless Web environment feel more like a stateful environment, but it introduced efficiency problems," said Todd Anglin, technical evangelist at Telerik.

In the past, developers were forced to turn off View State globally through ASP.NET's Web configuration, or to disable it control by control, causing applications to use more memory and take extra time for data retrieval, explained Tony Lombardo, Infragistics' lead technical evangelist. "Developers can now opt in instead of manually turning it off. It should make developing [applications] easier without falling into pitfalls that create slow applications."

Microsoft is also delivering improvements around session state. It has been "pretty fat" in the past, and could make applications run slowly, Lombardo said. "Now, there's compression with state."

Likewise, client ID rendering for controls has been modified to reduce the size of HTML files. "It has been a big headache to shrink down [the] size of rendered HTML, because IDs had complex containers. ID strings became large, and as ID strings get longer and longer, the page can get unmaintainable," Lombardo said.



Related Search Term(s): ASP.NET, Microsoft

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