Editor's//Comment
From the Source
By Matt Gibbs
Greetings from Redmond. My name is Matt Gibbs; I m the Development Manager for the ASP.NET team at Microsoft. I am writing this month to announce a new column starting next month called From the Source . It will be written by members of the ASP.NET team and will cover a broad range of topics leveraging their areas of focus and expertise.
In addition to showing how particular features of ASP.NET work, we ll go below the surface to discuss some details of how they were designed, explore how they were tested, and show how they can be further extended or customized. We ll share the lessons we ve learned from working with ASP.NET developers on some of the most complex and highly trafficked applications.
During the past couple of years, the ASP.NET team has regularly released Technology Preview or Futures builds to share what we are working on and solicit your feedback. In From the Source , we ll preview the new feature ideas that are in early development and share some of the scenarios we are working to enable. Your feedback has been instrumental in shaping our priorities and design decisions in the past, and my expectation is that this will help us be able to share earlier what we are targeting so that we can get more feedback and improve the platform in the best ways.
I m often asked how our team goes about testing. It is no easy task. There are multiple operating systems, and multiple versions of them, and multiple service packs for them, and multiple browsers for them, and multiple versions of the browsers, and multiple releases of them. I could keep going. Our developers are responsible for ensuring the quality of their features as they develop them, and our testers design comprehensive test plans that cover an amazing set of scenarios. In From the Source , we ll discuss some of the tools we use and approaches we take in testing. You ll learn about using mock objects to replace ASP.NET intrinsic objects for independent automated testing.
In the coming months, as Silverlight continues to evolve, we ll look at ways to leverage it in Web applications. This will include adding richer media to applications, as well as writing browser DOM event handlers in managed code and invoking Web services in managed code. We ll also look at ways to manipulate Silverlight elements from JavaScript and learn about WPF/e markup.
The majority of the sites on the Internet today are hosted, meaning that the application runs on a machine in an environment with many other applications. For security reasons, this environment is different than what you are probably used to on your development machine. We ll look at some best practices for developing for a hosted environment, and talk about how Code Access Security works.
I look forward to seeing the variety of topics the team puts together, and welcome suggestions for topics that you would like to see. I can be reached at mailto:[email protected].
Matt Gibbs is the Development Manager for the ASP.NET team at Microsoft. He can be reached at mailto:[email protected].
