New Features of .NET 4.0

Microsoft recently released Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 beta.  I'd like to highlight some of the key new features available to .NET 4.0.

Web Forms

• Developers can manage control IDs that affect rendered client ID
• Remove ID bloat, and 'mangling'
• CSS:
• Ideally remove the need to use CSS adapters
• Defer to CSS styles and bypass existing style properties
• non-inline style attributes
• Support non-table-based HTML rendering
• URL-routing for web forms
• Friendly url handling for web forms
• configuration model for url routing
• View state
• Disable on the page, enable on specific controls - they will provide granular control of viewstate - today it is backwards
• Disable on control, enable on child controls
• GridView/ListView work better without viewstate
• ASP.NET dynamic-data

Ajax

• Continue ASP.NET Ajax innovation : RIA
• Appeal to JavaScript Developers
• Provide support for the page developer
• jQuery including Intellisense
• Templates and data binding
• Client side handling, REST or Web Services
• Covers page developer and component developer scenarios
• DOM manipulation, selectors ...
• Ajax higher-level components
• Ajax Control Toolkit is a part of the strategy - they will make the toolkit part of the overall ASP.NET package
• New controls
• Centralized script libraries and break-up for performance

ASP.NET MVC

• Appeal to those wanting separation of concerns, TDD, full control
• Ruby on Rails, Django, PHP
• Building on from ASP.NET MVC 1.0
• ASP.NET MVC (Model View Controller)
• Asynchronous controllers
• Sub-controllers & Views
• Declarative controls

ASP.NET Dynamic Data

• Making building data-driven web apps easily
• Attacking the Ruby on Rails crowd
• Building on from FX3.5 SP1
• Dynamic-data and MVC
• Scaffolding, templates and data validation
• Support for abstract data layer
• Removes need for specific DL (SQL, entities ...)
• Allows scaffolding of objects
• Support for many to many relationships
• Dynamic data on MVC -- this is on codeplex today
• Built around something called field templates
• Enhanced filtering:
• Auto-complete, search filters

ASP.NET Core

• Address customer pain points
• Improve scale and performance
• Cache extensibility and performance:
• Enable caching like Velocity

There's a couple of videos on Mircosoft's Channel 9 that talk specifically about the points mentioned above:

• ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap by Scott Hunter
• New Features of ASP.NET 4.0 by Steven Walther