I admit I’ve been lax and haven’t been installing the Visual Studio “Orcas” releases. I’ve followed the cool stuff, but I haven’t actually installed it. This session made me wish we were already in this.

The session was called “Developing AJAX Applications with Visual Studio ‘Orcas’” but it should have been called “New ASP.NET Controls and How Visual Studio Supports JavaScript Development.”

In the non-JavaScript developments, we see new controls of interest in ASP.NET 3.5. The ListView control is sort of like a repeater but gives you a little more control over list creation. For example, you could set a list template to something like <ul runat="server"></ul> and a list item template of <li><%# DataBoundField %></li> to make an unordered list… and the output HTML is no more or less than exactly what you specified - great control over the HTML. The DataPager control is an extender for any databound control that allows you to easily add paging

• no more having to natively support it in your controls.

The JavaScript developments were the big show here, though. Full Intellisense for JavaScript including keywords, declared variables, properties, methods… even if you reference an external JavaScript file, it’ll figure that out and give you Intellisense for all of those methods. And it’s smart about it - it does dynamic type evaluation on variables, for example, and figures out that at the time you’re asking for Intellisense it’s, say, a number, so you only see the Intellisense for methods applicable to numeric objects. Hot.

To assist in the Intellisense effort, they’ve added XML documentation support such that the Intellisense is driven by the XML doc comments in your script. If you document your script, it’ll appear just like standard .NET Intellisense with method descriptions, parameter information, and so on. To get around the loose typing of JavaScript, you add attributes to the XML doc comments to tell Intellisense what the expected parameter types and what the return type of the method is (<param name="myParam" type="String">Some Parameter</param>). Specifying the return type is how the Intellisense knows the way to treat return values from your methods. ASP.NET AJAX libraries will all be commented this way.

JavaScript debugging is vastly improved, too. If you have a script in your page, you can set a breakpoint in the page and *gasp* when you run the page it’ll break on your breakpoint. This is a huge improvement because you used to have to figure out where in your ASPX the script really was and try to figure out whether the breakpoint was actually hit… and sometimes it wasn’t… it was just a nightmare. Now? Brilliance.