If like me you are sick to death of Cassini (whats that then? its the built in web server that visual studio uses) and also sick to death of playing around with IIS 7 then relief is at hand. Scott Gu just announced the new IIS express which you can set as the default server in Visual Studio 2010 instead of Cassini or IIS 7 proper.
Why would you want to do that? you may be asking, well there are several good reasons for changing over:
1. IIS Express will start up and run like Cassini does when you run an application in debug from Visual Studio. This means that you do not really need to have IIS 7 installed and running on your dev machine (some places I worked at did not even allow IIS on dev machines anyway).
2. IIS Express is lightweight (10 MB install).
3. Supports SSL (Even installs its own self signed certificate nice!).
4. Supports URL routing
5. Does not need to be running in an administrative account to debug in Visual Studio 2010.
6. Will also work on Windows XP.
All in all this is a really smart positive step forward for web development in ASP.NET and about time Cassini got retired (it was a nice idea, but IMHO it was always half cooked , I like my dev tools well done thank you very much!) The public beta will be available soon and future VS editions will install it automatically.
Read the full details here over at Scott Gu's blog
Scott Gus Blog Post
I have to say that I really like what Telerik are doing these days, I have always liked and used their Rad Control suites and the Rad Ajax and Silverlight Controls really make it easy for me to get great looking sites with cutting edge functionality up and running with much less effort. These days though, its not just Windows, Silverlight and ASP.NET controls they do.
You should really take a look (if you haven't already) at their Open Access ORM, this is a cutting edge data access tool (ORM) which REALLY takes the ouch out of building CRUD methods or creating your own DAL. The Q1 release saw some serious performance improvements and the wizards which run out of Visual Studio have gotten even better. You can build your DAL 2 ways, either by pointing Open Access at your existing database, or even creating a Database based upon the business objects you already created, what matters most though is that Open Access works on most available Databases, which means you are free from your data store and can easily move from database to database. Open Access also handles really complex mapping so it is much easier to work with existing complex data structures and relationships.
Also, Teleriks code completion and Re-factoring tool Just Code has now got unit testing support and Just Mock (Very Cool mocking framework) is also in Beta, in the same vein and quality/performance of their other tools, these also look set to take the pain out of testing and mocking. The new Beta of Just Code also includes integration with Just Mock to make it even easier to get mocking set up in your applications.
Anyway, the 2010 Q2 betas are now ready to download so there is no better time to take a look at all the pain you could be avoiding!
Rad Controls for ASP.NET AJAX
Rad Controls for Silverlight
Just Mock
Open Access Orm
Just Code
