Lists of Four in Honor of the .NET 4 Release

Thursday, April 8, 2010

As a count down to the release of the .NET 4 Framework on April 12, 2010, I am going to list out the top Four features from the top Four products for the next Four days leading up to the official release!

4 work days until the official release of .NET 4!

Today’s list is the top Four features of ASP.NET 4 that I am most excited about.

1.) ClientIdMode

Accessing controls from AJAX scripts and Javascript has now become much easier! Control naming will now be much simpler. Backwards compatibility is also provided for those pesky older pages.

2.) ASP.NET Chart Control

The chart control is a fully functioning graphing tool that supports databinding. The charts give control over the axes, legends, titles, data and even gives data manipulation tools. The most exciting feature may be the 3D graphing that is provided!

3.) ViewStateMode

ViewState can now be turned on and off for individual controls within a page. ViewStateMode works in conjunction with EnableViewState to allow a developer to only use ViewState for specified controls.

4.) CSS Support in Update Panels

This is a smaller thing, but has been an annoyance for some time. In previous versions of ASP.NET you couldn’t specify a CSS class for an Update Panel. The work around was always to add either an ASP.NET panel control inside of the Update Panel or a HTML Span tag. Now you can add the CSS property to an Update Panel and it will be added to the HTML Div tag that is rendered.

These are Four new features of ASP.NET 4 that I am very excited about!