A lot of new things are flying around in the .NET world. We have all the new (released) goodness of .NET3.5 and VS2008, so there's still a bit to talk about there. And there are some new CTPs out there (most notably the ASP.NET Extensions which contains among other things ASP.NET MVC). This article is actually my initial thoughts about something else: Volta.
An "Official" Script#??
Volta is a new way to create Web apps using any .NET language. You tag (with attributes) parts of your app into tiers. The Web tier gets translated into html and Javascript, and the other tiers get set up as services callable from the created javascripts.
The translation seems to work fairly well (although my first app resulted in Javascript trying to read the registry from an HTML page... but that was my own stupidity... not Volta's)
It all feels very much like Script# with attribute's added. I guess the big difference is that Volta converts IL code to JS, so that makes it available from any programming language (not just C#).
Actually it smells like GWT (Google's Java to JS applications). Although it seems like there's a bit more involved with Volta.
Initial Thoughts
I'm still wrapping my head around this, but my initial thoughts are that I still like Script# a little more. I already think in terms of modules/tiers, so I tend to separate my code accordingly into separate projects. To me, this seems to be allowing me to bring everything back into a single project (or at least to have multiple tiers in a single project)... which I guess there are other mechanisms like directories to separate tiers.
I guess another problem for me is learning yet another new programming model (albeit one that shouldn't be that hard to pick up on). I will be blogging a little more on this as I find more time to experiment.
I know my thoughts seem a little negative, but I really am intrigued. I have a goal to eliminate Javascript from my vocabulary. And it's all my former co-worker George's fault. It was his idea first.
Print | posted on Wednesday, December 12, 2007 4:12 AM