This will certainly take a few months to really understand and process, but today's public preview release of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions is really a big deal.
What do we get to look forward to? For all the details, see the download page - here are the highlights from my perspective.
- ASP.NET MVC - a model-view-controller framework "burned in" to the .NET Framework. It's about time and I can't wait for a project to try this out on. ScottGu has details on this and has been doing a very detailed series of "how-tos" in anticipation of this day. Lots of power and potential here.
- New Ajax stuff - Back-button support - enough said!
- ADO.NET Entity Framework - goodbye NHibernate?
- ADO.NET Data Services (i.e. Astoria) - again a lot here, but having REST/JSON/XML native methods and structures is another hotly anticipated feature set (not to mention all the rest in this library).
- Silverlight Controls for ASP.NET - wow it just keeps getting better. A Silverlight MediaPlayer control (yes - <asp:MediaPlayer /> is now a reality) for drag-and-drop implementation of audio and video in your web pages, and a server control <asp:Silverlight /> to enable ASP.NET to reference the XAML objects and their events. Combine with the above to get best-in-class integration of rich UI elements with active web content and data.
- Finally - Quickstarts to get you going.
Merry Christmas!!!
2008 is going to be awesome.