Editor's Note
Summer in New York
Joshua Trupin
Even though it's still June, we're finishing up the September 2007 issue right now, and it's about a billion degrees outside. Seriously, a billion. New York is undergoing a "Vaporization Alert" week—people who have ventured out onto the streets are sinking ankle-deep into asphalt. Flaming, overturned taxis light up the ozone-filled sky. It's a typical summer in New York. The great outdoors is no place for people to go on days like this. So stay inside, crank up the air conditioning to high (global warming is at least another three years off), and enjoy this month's MSDN Magazine.
We've put our enforced indoor time to good use by gathering up some core info about Web 2.0 technologies for this issue of the magazine. Have you ever overheard someone sitting next to you on the bus discussing AJAX technologies? You probably want to know more about it! This month, we'll take an in-depth look at ScriptManager, which is the core of ASP.NET AJAX. As the name implies, it is the component that manages your scripts. If you really want to understand what's going on under the hood, you should start here.
Taking a step back from the guts of the app, Dino Esposito begins a two-part series looking at AJAX application architecture in his Cutting Edge column. Since AJAX is the core of Web 2.0 applications, this series will certainly be important reading if you're just diving in.
If you've been building apps on the ASP.NET platform for a while, you'll be interested in learning about extending your site with search. Marco Bellinaso explains how you can easily implement advanced searching capabilities by tying your ASP.NET code into search engines like those provided by Live Search and SharePoint.
In addition to all this Webby goodness, we've got an article about the networking namespace in the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. Now, we don't know exactly who's responsible for naming conventions, but the namespace is called System.Net. Calling something in the .NET Framework something.Net is sort of, well, confusing. Not that we're particular experts on these things, but wouldn't System.Networking be clearer? Or maybe the oppressive heat is just getting to us.
We've also been thinking that the name "Web 2.0" is really annoying. Does anyone have a better suggestion? Web 1.1, perhaps? On second thought, the boat may have sailed on this one already.
As annoying as "Web 2.0" sounds to our untrained ears, we're actually making good use of enhanced Web features on the
MSDN Magazine site (
msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag). You might not be aware of our innovative new Code Explorer feature, but all of our new code samples now feature it. Instead of downloading the entire sample, you can navigate through the ZIP file right on the site, find the individual file you want, and then click to display it.
.gif)
(Click the image for a larger view)
Why did we go to this effort? We want to make MSDN Magazine more useful than ever. It was also something we could do inside. Who wants to go outside when it's a billion degrees out? —J.T.
Thanks to Paul Andrew, Mason Bendixen, Naren Datha, Shawn Farkas, Kit George, Matt Gibbs, Ladi Prosek, Cosmin Radu, Karthik Raman, Varun Sekhri, Richard Turner, and Danny van Velzen.