Latest Microsoft Blogs

I recently got a question on one of my client template posts asking me how to bind a select tag’s value to data in client templates . I was surprised not to find anything on the web addressing the problem, so I thought I’d write a short post about it. It really is very simple once you know where to look. You just need to bind the value property of the select tag, like this: < select sys : value ="{binding color}" > If you do it from markup like here, you just need to use the sys: prefix. It just works. Here’s the full source code for my sample page: <! DOCTYPE html > < html > < head > < title > Binding a select tag </ title > < script src = http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/beta/0911/Start.js type...

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] A few people have emailed me recently asking about the availability of a Visual Studio –vsdoc intellisense hint file for jQuery 1.4.1.  I blogged about –vsdoc files in the past – they provide additional intellisense help information for Visual Studio, and enable you to get a richer intellisense experience with dynamic Javascript libraries.  If you are using VS 2008 SP1 you’ll want to download and install this patch in order to have VS 2008 automatically use –vsdoc files with intellisense.  VS 2010 has support for –vsdoc files built-in. jQuery 1.4.1 –vsdoc download The good news is that you can download...

Back in September I blogged about the new Microsoft AJAX CDN (Content Delivery Network) service that the ASP.NET team is now providing.  The CDN provides edge caching support for AJAX libraries (including jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX).  The service is available for free, does not require any registration, and can be used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.  It offers a great way to speed up your external facing web-sites. SSL Support Now Provided One of the features in September that we said was coming (but which was not available at the initial launch) was SSL support for scripts served off of the CDN.  This is necessary for scenarios where you have SSL enabled pages on your site, and you want to reference a script...

In previous posts, I’ve shown different ways to build a client-side class browser, using the ASP.NET Ajax Libary and jQuery. In this post, I’ll focus on a few lines of code from the latest version of that sample. Those few lines of code enable my custom script to benefit from the script loader’s features such as lazy and parallel loading and dependency management. An important feature of the script loader is the separation of the script meta-data from the script code itself. The meta-data can include the name of the script, its dependencies, instructions on how to figure out if it’s already loaded, its debug and release URL patterns and a declaration of the lazy components and plug-ins it introduces. The script loader can also handle composite...

I’ve already posted twice about that little class browser application. The first iteration was mostly declarative and can be found here: http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2009/09/14/building-a-class-browser-with-microsoft-ajax-4-0-preview-5.aspx The second one was entirely imperative and can be found here: http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2009/10/15/entirely-unobtrusive-and-imperative-templates-with-microsoft-ajax-4-preview-6.aspx This new version builds on top of the code for the imperative version and adds the jQuery dependency in an attempt to make the code leaner and simpler. I invite you to refer to the imperative code (included in the archive for this post ) and compare it with the jQuery version, which shows a couple of ways...

Last week, I wrote a post about how the new Microsoft Ajax Library Preview 6 made it a lot easier to write unobtrusive and imperative data-driven applications . Because for the previous preview, I had written a cool little class browser using a declarative style, I thought it would be nice to rewrite this in a completely imperative way. The mistake I made though was to call it unobtrusive. Never mind that ‘unobtrusive’ is a perfectly well-defined word that actually existed way before JavaScript. ‘Unobtrusive JavaScript’ has a very specific meaning that people feel strongly about. To be worthy of that label, an application must basically conform to (at least) those two requirements: Markup and behavior are strictly separated. That means no DOM...

The ASP.NET team today released a significant new update of the Microsoft Ajax Library (Preview 6).  This update includes a bunch of new capabilities and improvements to our client-side AJAX library, and can be used with any version of ASP.NET (including ASP.NET 2.0, 3.5 and 4.0), and can be used in both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC projects.  Today’s release includes the following feature improvements: Better Imperative Syntax : A new, simplified, code syntax for creating client controls. Client Script Loader : A new client-side script loader that can dynamically load all of the JavaScript files required by a client control or library automatically, and executes the scripts in the right order. Better jQuery Integration : All...

Today is the release of the sixth preview of Microsoft Ajax Library. Don’t get fooled by the somewhat silly and long name: this is a major release in many ways. The scripts have been majorly refactored since preview 5. Check out the other posts out there (links at the bottom of this post) to see just some of the many new features that are in there. Some of my favorite are all the small improvements that have been made to make imperative instantiation of components and templated contents easier than ever. Many of you have told us that you preferred to do things imperatively and this release makes it a lot better. When Preview 5 came out, I built a simple class browser using the declarative syntax. The class browser shows the hierarchy of namespaces...

Earlier today the ASP.NET team launched a new Microsoft Ajax CDN (Content Delivery Network) service that provides caching support for AJAX libraries (including jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX).  The service is available for free, does not require any registration, and can be used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. What does a CDN provide? Content delivery networks (CDNs) are composed of "edge cache" servers that are strategically placed around the world at key Internet network points.  These "edge cache" servers can be used to cache and deliver all types of content – including images, videos, CSS and JavaScript files. Using a CDN can significantly improve a website's end-user performance, since it enables...

The Microsoft Ajax Library 4.0 Preview 5 is the first release of Microsoft Ajax that I didn’t participate in: I left the team a few months ago. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love what’s in there, and I really do. And by the way I’ve also seen what’s in Preview 6 too and man that will seriously rock. So I thought I’d write a little something to celebrate the new preview. The new features include recursive templates, which is pretty much begging us to implement a treeview with it, and we’ll do just that in this post. There is also an intriguing capability, which enables you to dynamically set what template to render for each data item, and where to render it. At first, this doesn’t look like the most useful thing in the world, but it actually...