Welcome back! One thing I've learnt working for Microsoft is that the US doesn't shut down over the break. The web team in Redmond has been particularly busy releasing a bunch of new technologies at the recent CodeMash event earlier in the month.
So what did we release? Last month we released the Beta of VS 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1). Included in this service pack is support for the new IIS Express 7.5 and tooling support for SQL CE 4. There are many more details on Scott Guthrie's blog and a great rollup of all the links.
How are we supporting the new web stuff that is coming through? We shipped ASP.NET MVC 3. Included is a new additional view-engine called "Razor" and richer JavaScript scenarios that take advantage of emerging HTML5 capabilities. Check out this tutorial to teach you the basics.
Wow this is getting deep! How are you supporting the newbies? In addition to all these great products we released WebMatrix. WebMatrix elegantly integrates IIS Express, SQL Compact and programming frameworks (ASP.NET and PHP) into a single, integrated experience. Laurence Moroney wrote a great tutorial for those who are new to Web development and want to get started with WebMatrix.
What about reference examples? I learn best when I have best practice code to learn from. Have you seen the All-In-One Code Framework? It aims to be a one-stop experience for developers searching for and requesting code samples from Microsoft. Also we have Orchard (a free, open source, community based project) that provides Content Management System (CMS) and Blogging support out of the box. Orchard itself is built as an ASP.NET MVC 3 application using Razor view templates (and by default uses SQL CE 4 for data storage). Read these tutorials to learn more.
What about the Cloud? Isn't Microsoft "All In"? Take a look at Deploying Orchard to Windows Azure and Steve Marx's post on how to deploy WebMatrix applications to Windows Azure. If you are an MSDN subscriber you can activate your Windows Azure platform benefits as well.
But you didn't mention Windows Phone 7! Ok slightly off topic but because you asked for it, I have written a blog post on using Windows Azure with Windows Phone 7, HTML5 and iPhone. |