Dynamic Data Controls - the Present and the Future

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As part of the May 2007 ASP.NET Futures, we released an alpha version of the Dynamic Data Controls. You can watch my screencast to get a quick introduction to it. The general goal is to make it really easy to create data driven web sites in ASP.NET.

 

While the current alpha drop is fun to play with and gives an idea of the ‘flavor’ of the feature, it is not by any mean complete. Several of you have posted questions on the forums, mostly asking for ways to customize the behavior in various ways. In a lot of cases, the level of customization that you are asking for just isn’t there yet.

 

However, there will be more releases, and they will solve a lot of those issues. One other major change that will happen is that Dynamic Data Controls will become based in LINQ, while currently they are not (they use the ASP.NET SqlDataSource control). With LINQ, you will be able to customize the query used by the dynamic framework using powerful LINQ syntax.

 

In the meantime, I apologize that the feature set is still quite limited. We do very much appreciate all feedback that you have for us on this exciting new feature.

 

Thanks!

David

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 06, 2007
    good post. It is very informative. Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    June 26, 2007
    Thank you for the good post.  I really liked the screencast, and that actually gave me the push to install the futures in my machine.

  • Anonymous
    August 16, 2007
    Thanks for the CTP and the screencast. It is very intersting as I'm currently developing a similar project at my company to alliviate the need for developers to develop the very basic base-data administration pages. Of course a lot of issues pop up like how do you make the page customizable and such. I know it isn't in the normal for the ASP.NEt team to share code but I would be very interested to see the source for these controls instead of having to use reflector to study them.

  • Anonymous
    August 16, 2007
    Hi Johannes, We cannot share the source code for those, though of course you can use reflector on it.  I know, this seems a bit silly since you can 'almost' see the sources anyway, but I don't make the rules! :) Note that we should have a beta out around October, and it will be based on Linq.  Hopefully you will find it useful and will not need to develop your own solution.

  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2008
    Number of Scaffolding options grows in MVC for ASP.NET

  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2008
    As most of you already know Scott has announced that the Dynamic Data ( see screencast ) is going to