Programming ASP.NET 3.5, 4th Edition

(Some of) The Winnowing Process

But first, a note on how our benefactors on the ASP.NET team are starting to make their ideas and plans more transparent, rather than operating in a black box, as they did with earlier releases. The ASP.NET community site at http://www.asp.net has always been a central source of information and answers for ASP.NET development. Its Downloads page, as shown in Figure 21-1, is now also one possible portal into the future.

The Sandbox projects in the General Downloads area are independent projects from members of the ASP.NET team. They can comprise interesting prototypes such as Blinq, useful code libraries such as the RSS Toolkit or the Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library, or plug-ins for Visual Studio. Some of them evolve into ASP.NET or Visual Studio features going forward.

Figure 21-1. The ASP.NET Downloads page

Likewise the ASP.NET Futures download shown in the fourth row in Figure 21-1; this is the place to find a set of alpha technologies the ASP.NET team has put together for initial reaction from the development community in the ASP.NET Futures forum at http://forums.asp.net/1127.aspx. New Community Technology Preview (CTP) builds of the Futures package appear from time to time. They may include new or completely rewritten libraries, or they may be missing libraries.

For example, the Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework mentioned later in this chapter ...