Those wacky, zany
folks in Redmond send more mixed signals than anyone else in the industry,
don’t they? For several years, it’s been unclear to what extent they would
actually leverage the .NET
Framework, and their protracted time-to-market on new versions of products
makes us wonder how much indecision contaminates their development process.
We’re left wondering if the .NET Framework will remain an over-hyped side dish,
whether Avalon will replace ASP.NET,
whether any MS product will ever be more than a warmed-over version of a
predecessor.

Well, they must have
heard us grumbling, because the major overhaul in the Microsoft catalog
announced at TechEd this summer has brought us
a cornucopia of enhancements, most of them good, and many of them exactly what
we asked for. One of the biggest boons is the long-awaited SQL
Server 2005. However, there are many highlights worthy of note to
developers as well.

If there’s one fact
to keep in mind when considering the new Visual Studio 2005 (VS), it’s the
depth of integration between VS, the .NET Framework 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0. The
leveraging of these products into a more-or-less seamless whole is the
fundamental goal of Microsoft’s latest round of development. This being the
case, this particular 10 things list focuses on features deriving from this
integration.

Many 10 things lists could be created out of new Visual
Studio 2005 features; if there are some in particular you feel should be
addressed, feel free to comment!

10 things

1. Classes can now be passed as parameters

Restricting array
classes to types that meet an application’s needs means one of two things:
designing arrays that only hold types you want them to hold—cumbersome—or using
generic arrays and living with the fact that they’ll accept anything. The best
of both worlds is to be able to use a base class array yet have a way to
restrict it to types that we want. It’s sort of possible to do this already, by
writing wrappers for all the array class’s methods, but that’s a lot of
blah-blah at the application logic level.

It is better to have
a way of making arrays type-dynamic, so that we can tell the array that a
particular object type is headed its way. You can design an array class that
will accept any class desired by the client. This is done with the generic List
class, which can accept type as a parameter, submitted by the client, and then
will accept objects of that type.

2. “Generics” enables type-independent class design

A key failing of the
.NET Framework has been its lack of some analog to Java’s “template”
mechanism, a means of parameterizing object types and classes (C++ has a
similar template feature). You now have a similar mechanism called generics.

Using generics, you
can design a class that is type-generic, permitting you to make use of whatever
type is submitted, without generating an error; you now have syntax to create a
class that sees type as a parameter. Generics are language-independent, and in
addition to permitting you to create your own classes, the generic mechanism is
available in collection classes included with .NET Framework 2.0.

3. Dealing with unmanaged garbage

Even if all unmanaged
resources are freed when they aren’t needed, the fact is that garbage collection,
as in real world, only happens so often. Good wrappers do nothing more than set
it out on the curb to be picked up. We get into trouble with this because the
collection is scheduled, rather than dynamic (at least where accumulation of
unmanaged resources is concerned). Up till now, we’ve been able to do this
manually, with the IDisposable interface, but now we don’t have to do it ourselves.

The CLR keeps tabs on
the managed heap, but the problem with unmanaged resources is that they are
taken up by wrappers in the managed heap, creating a Catch-22. Wrappers begin
accumulating wrapping resources that need to be made available again, without
waiting for scheduled garbage collection. You can run out of space as the
managed heap allots memory for the wrappers but can’t provide the resources
they want to wrap—and you can’t wait for the next garbage collection. You need
to be able to trigger the reclamation of those resources. Garbage collection
has been improved by the inclusion of two new methods to deal with these
problems.

AddMemoryPressure and ReleaseMemoryPressure
work as follows. AddMemoryPressure causes garbage collection to happen more often; a managed
object using a chunk of unmanaged memory will call AddMemoryPressure,
and the collector sees the object as being of a size equally itself plus its
wrapped unmanaged resources. The object then calls ReleaseMemoryPressure
after finishing with the resources it wrapped, creating a kind of memory
management equilibrium. What’s particularly nice about these methods is that
the methods accept a parameter allowing you to plus- or minus- the
“pressure.”

4. Put user authentication into apps without having to build it yourself

Just this past week,
a colleague came into my office and lamented that he would need to take a
security course sometime soon because of problems he was having with a Web app.
He’s not alone; the biggest challenge of having to create infrastructure to
manage user authentication concerns is that is it very complex, and most
developers aren’t trained in it (and shouldn’t have to be).

It’s common to
respond to this problem by way of forms authentication—the application you’re
designing authenticates the client up-front, then cookies the client with an
encrypted authentication, which it consults with each subsequent request for
additional pages from the same server or group of servers. The problem was that
even though you had all the tools for building such a system, you had to do
exactly that—build it yourself. Now, by way of ASP.NET 2.0, we have classes
provided to do most of the work.

As an extra, ASP.NET
2.0’s authentication classes not only gives us built-in user account set-up and
storage, password handling and look-up, but can also automatically add and
retrieve user roles.

5. Manage user-based content display and user data persistence

In addition to
built-in parts for managing user roles, we are now provided with a control—LoginView—that allows us to set up content-by-user, displaying the
pages appropriate for whoever has logged in to an app, with almost no code. In
addition, we have classes giving application program access to application
configuration; with this capability comes storage of user-specific data in the
configuration database, so apps can easily track user data between visits to a
site—again, with almost no code. This feature can even be used with anonymous
users.

6. User choice of application interface

Creating Web apps and
pages that give users the ability to customize is often desirable and almost
invariably complex. Building infrastructure like this for individual
applications is incredibly costly. The new Visual Studio suite reduces the
complexity dramatically: leveraging themes for application interface (which
Whidbey unfortunately demonstrated sparingly), an XML mechanism for
presentation configuration is built into the LoginName
control. IT departments can easily put together skins that bring their Web apps
into stylistic conformity with their general corporate look and feel with
little mess; but the real pay-offs are simple programmatic theme application to
new pages via the property PageTheme,
and the inclusion of theme in the “personalization” database
described above, enabling the inclusion of user-theme-selectability in apps
with only a handful of lines of code.

7. Team System

One of the variations
of the new Visual Studio .NET 2005 is Team System, a productivity suite that
leverages Solutions Framework 4.0 for life-cycle development and provides
efficiency tools for team activity. Built on clearly-defined team member roles,
it is driven by an architectural best practices paradigm, with work-item
tracking, code analysis, unit testing, planned backup, UML and other features. A
topic worthy of a 10 Things list in itself.

8. Independence from IIS, three cheers!

There are developers
out there who shout at the sky, turn green and rip their shirts over IIS. This
month I watched a co-worker fling dirty looks toward Washington State till
nearly midnight over a permissions issue when trying to execute a Web service
client that had run fine from VBScript from ASP.NET. Now we’ll have a more
favorable outburst over freedom from Internet Information Server.

This isn’t total
freedom, mind you—for final testing, we still need IIS, but we can get the bulk
of our development out of the way without having to struggle with the corporate
system cops over IIS installations and potential security gaps. Visual Studio
2005 can run on individual machines without IIS. We can run the apps we are
working on without it, allowing most of the debug work to happen before
worrying about IIS at all.

9. Web services authentication support

Web services, like
any other Web-based data transaction, usually require authentication of the
users trying to access the servers upon which services reside. We usually have
to address this when designing and implementing a new Web service and it’s a
nuisance. Web Services Enhancements 2.0 provides classes for implementing Web
service authentication support, with useful (and often business-critical)
options in password-hashing, password return, and token handling, giving your
VS Web services development more transport-protocol-independence than before.

10. Solution to the Web services XML problem domain

There are few more
frustrating aspects to the otherwise action-packed world of IT application
development today than emerging standards. XML
Web Services hold incredible promise but are still very young, and common
problem domain vocabulary is key. Microsoft would love
to provide the standards here—they wish—but
since the world isn’t quite ready for that (as Passport attests), we now have the problem of selecting a standard to use
when designing and implementing XML Web services.

What to do? Select a standard
and code forever, turning it into an implementation? Life’s too short. Until
the dust settles in the critical-mass-standards for Web services showdown, we
can leverage Web Services Enhancements 2.0, which lets us choose from the
existing not-yet-canonized standards, downloading canned implementations, so we
can get right to work with common Web services infrastructure that needs only
our business logic. You can add WSE 2.0
to your Visual Studio 2005 arsenal from MSDN.