Nuno Filipe Godinho

     As I said some while ago, there are several projects running related with Virtual Earth and one of them is the generation of a Server Control for ASP.NET that will allow us to develop solution and at the same time take some of the complexity of using Virtual Earth, and so here's the announcement that this control is made available as part of the Windows Live Tools July Refresh and you can even watch a video related to this subject on Channel 9 with Mark Brown that is a member of the Virtual Earth Team, where he talks about all the elements that were made available with this control.

   One of the great issues that exist when developing solutions is the Security, and when we talk about SaaS or S+S the issue becomes a lot more complicated and so we have to use Federated Identity, and there are several ways to do this and as Frederik Chong from Microsoft and Dwayne Taylor from RDA wrote on their article Federated Identity: Scenarios, Architecture and Implementation this is not a easy issue to solve and so they show some ways that can be used, and although this is a 2006 article, it's still very interesting to read about the issues, but now the Federated Security Team is developing a framework for Federated Identity with the codename "Zermatt" that's present on the Microsoft Connect Services site, and this already have a public beta that can be downloaded and used.

     Being ASP.NET AJAX a very important part of ASP.NET one thing that would help is knowing what and when will be delivered and so a Roadmap is a must-have, and Microsoft delivered precisely that in order for us to get to know what's being done and have some notion about when it will be delivered, and I think there's some great stuff there like AJAX in ASP.NET MVC, Interoperability, Accessibility and even support for OpenAJAX-compliant XML metafiles, never forgetting that the Javascript support in Visual Studio must evolve also. So if you want to have detailed information about this subject check here for the complete document with all the explanation regarding this Roadmap.

     WPF is a very interesting technology since it provides the possibility to have a better User Experience on our Windows Applications, and by doing so it attracted many designers, enthusiasts as well as Developers, Architects and IT Managers, but what happens with new technologies is that sometimes they are misused by developers and became a problem. And so in order to help developers and architects attend to this type of problems the Patterns and Practices Team has been working on a project named "Composite Application Guidance for WPF", that will make the necessary "mind" adjustments and bring flexibility to the development of new applications in WPF.

During the conversation about the different types of ASP.NET Applications, there was an issue that was talked when using AJAX Enabled ASP.NET Applications, and that issue was the fact that the HTTP protocol only supports single call by request, and in order to prevent information from getting lost in the communication between Client and Server, the best way is to disable the UI during the Partial Rendering, and in order to do this there are several techniques, like placing a div on top of all the UI in order to prevent the user from selecting another options during the execution. Disabling the action controls in order to prevent the user from misuse the UI, and some others.

  There are several ways to develop ASP.NET, and this has been growing and it tends to continue to grow in order to chose the best approach to the problem in hand, and so I decided to write a little bit about this subject.

    The Virtual Earth Control for ASP.NET will be made available with the July CTP of Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, and so keep in touch for news on the dev.live.com/tools site.

    The Beta 2 of Silverlight 2.0 is already available in order for us to develop using this version of Silverlight that now as some more new stuff in terms of controls, skining, among others that we will analyze during our next posts. This version is available for both Windows and Mac because we continue and will always continue to talk about a technology that is Cross-Platform and Cross-Browser.