Scott Hunter from Microsoft talked about the future of ASP.NET 4.0 Webforms, ASP.NET MVC Framework, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, and ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 at PDC 2008:
He showed some demos of ASP.NET Dynamic Data, which is Microsoft's answer to Ruby on Rails for Microsoft .NET Developers-
"ASP.NET Dynamic Data enables you to quickly build a functional data-driven application, based on LINQ-to-SQL or ADO.NET Entity Framework data models."
I am not sure if this ASP.NET Dynamic Data 4.0 Preview is what we can expect in the .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 or if we will see it much earlier. It has some new features:
- A BusinessLogicDataSource control that uses a data provider model which enables the developers to build their own custom business logic.
- A new version of the LinqDataSource, control, contained in the sample projects, that leverages the new ASP.NET declarative query mechanism to simplify common data access operations.
Both controls support a rich ASP.NET declarative query syntax that makes it easy to do things like search data for text or have filters based on ranges.
- A new Dynamic Data filter model that enables the developers to apply templates to pages just like field templates (including user defined filters).
- Attributes for controlling the filters appearance and order.
- A datasource control for ADO.NET Data Services that works with ASP.NET and an ADO.NET Data Service Provider for Dynamic Data.
You can download an example of these new features using both ASP.NET Dynamic Data with webforms and ASP.NET MVC Framework.
Check it out here.