Latest Microsoft Blogs : Microsoft AJAX Library

Enabling the ASP.NET Ajax script loader for your own scripts

Tales from the Evil Empire : ASP.NET — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:00:00 GMT

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...(read more)

JavaScript class browser: once again with jQuery

Tales from the Evil Empire : ASP.NET — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:43:26 GMT

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...(read more)

How to render the same template on the server and client with minimal redundancy

Tales from the Evil Empire : ASP.NET — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:50:53 GMT

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...(read more)

How the Script Loader in the Microsoft Ajax Library will make your life wonderful

Microsoft's Social Web Guy - ASP.NET — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:33:02 GMT

Everyone in the Microsoft Ajax team has a favorite feature, the CDN, jQuery Integration, and mine happens to be the Script Loader. I’m fond of it because it has some really cool features that aid the performance of my web application and take away much of the headache associated with organizing and loading any scripts that I use either from Microsoft, my own application or indeed a third party library like jQuery. The headache I’m referring to can be best characterized in the example below where I am loading scripts needed to use controls from the Ajax Control Toolkit (ACT) and the various components of the Microsoft Ajax Library. There are multiple scripts required and prior to the Script Loader I would be bringing them in all manually and...(read more)

Entirely unobtrusive and imperative templates with Microsoft Ajax Library Preview 6

Tales from the Evil Empire : ASP.NET — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:12:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Ajax Control Toolkit: new controls, bug fixes

Tales from the Evil Empire : ASP.NET — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:28:59 GMT

And we have a new release of Ajax Control Toolkit. I didn’t work on this one but there are some nice things in there nonetheless :) First, new controls! SeaDragon : I’ve blogged before about Seadragon , the JavaScript-only way to do Deep Zoom . It became a lot easier to use a few month ago when the need for tools disappeared and you can just point to any image on the web and immediately get the URL and script tag to put on your page: Now with this release of Ajax Control Toolkit, including and controlling Deep Zoom from an ASP.NET page is also very easy : < ajaxToolkit : Seadragon ID ="Seadragon" CssClass ="seadragon" runat ="server" SourceUrl ="sample.xml"/> James Senior just released a screencast...(read more)

Building a class browser with Microsoft Ajax 4.0 Preview 5

Tales from the Evil Empire : ASP.NET — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:29:37 GMT

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...(read more)

querySelectorAll on old IE versions: something that doesn’t work

Tales from the Evil Empire : ASP.NET — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 01:03:13 GMT

In today’s post, I’m going to show an interesting technique to solve a problem and then I will tear it to pieces and explain why it is actually useless. I believe that negative results should also be published so that we can save other people from wasting time trying the same thing. So here goes… A few days ago, a post on Ajaxian proposed a new version of a somewhat old technique to implement querySelectorAll on old versions of IE, using the browser’s native CSS engine. That sounds like a great idea at first, and the hack is quite clever. The idea is to dynamically add a CSS rule to the document that has the selector that you want to evaluate, and an expression that adds the matched elements to a global array. When I read this, it reminded me...(read more)

Why is ASP.NET encoding &’s in script URLs? A tale of looking at entirely the wrong place for a cause to a non-existing bug.

Tales from the Evil Empire : ASP.NET — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:27:15 GMT

Several people have reported seeing errors in their logs that seem to be due to requests such as this: /ScriptResource.axd?d= [lots of junk] & t=ffffffffee24147c The important part here is the HTML-encoded “&” sequence, which stands for “&” of course. If this exact URL is sent to the server, the server won’t know what to do with the escape sequence (URLs are not supposed to be HTML-encoded on the wire) so the parameters won’t get separated as expected, potentially resulting in a server error. This bug in the toolkit is an example of that: http://ajaxcontroltoolkit.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=13134 Of course, when people see 500 errors popping up in their server logs, they immediately assume the application...(read more)

Survey: Ajax usage among .NET developers

Tales from the Evil Empire : ASP.NET — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:13:20 GMT

If you haven’t already and you are a .NET developer, please take a couple minutes and answer this survey, whether you use Ajax or not. There are a number of Ajax surveys around, but Simone’s is the only one that focuses on .NET developers. The survey: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB22973CYKW2H Simone’s post: http://codeclimber.net.nz/archive/2009/05/21/ajax-usage-among-.net-developers-in-2009.aspx Read More......(read more)

setInterval is (moderately) evil

Tales from the Evil Empire : ASP.NET — Fri, 15 May 2009 05:04:36 GMT

JavaScript has two ways of delaying execution of code: setInterval and setTimeout . Both take a function or a string as the first parameter, and a number of milliseconds as the second parameter. The only difference is that the code provided to setInterval will run every n milliseconds whereas the code in setTimeout will run only once. Before I explain why I think setInterval is evil, allow me to rant on a related subject for a paragraph: you should never pass a string into any of those functions and instead always pass a function reference (unless you really, really know what you’re doing). If you pass a string, it will have to be evaluated on the fly, and eval is quite evil itself (unless you really, really know what you’re doing). It might...(read more)

New release of the Ajax Control Toolkit

Tales from the Evil Empire : ASP.NET — Thu, 14 May 2009 05:19:17 GMT

A new version of the AJAX Control Toolkit is now available for download from the CodePlex website. It contains three new controls: HTMLEditor - allows you to easily create and edit HTML content. You can edit in WYSIWYG mode or in HTML source mode. The control exists as a server-side extender but can also be instantiated purely on the client-side with a single line of code. Many thanks to Obout for building this. ComboBox - provides a DropDownList of items, combined with TextBox. Different modes determine the interplay between the text entry and the list of items. this control behaves very much like a Windows combo. Many thanks to Dan Ludwig for building this. ColorPicker - can be attached to any ASP.NET TextBox control to provide client-side...(read more)

Creating jQuery plug-ins from MicrosoftAjax components

Tales from the Evil Empire : ASP.NET — Tue, 05 May 2009 05:23:00 GMT

We had an interesting discussion recently on the ASP Insiders mailing list and ended up talking about what cool stuff we could build on top of jQuery. Many interesting things were mentioned and it was a very useful discussion but one suggestion in particular struck my curiosity as it was something I had investigated before and that could be improved on with very little code. I had already written a little plugin to enable instantiation of Microsoft Ajax components on the results of a jQuery selector : jQuery.fn.create = function (type, properties) { return this .each( function () { Sys.Component.create(type, properties, {}, {}, this ); }); }; I have another version that is a little more elaborate and takes a bag of properties and events instead...(read more)

A blog on Microsoft Ajax client templates and data

Tales from the Evil Empire : ASP.NET — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:45:01 GMT

Politian has a great blog series where he goes into the details of building a data-driven Ajax application using the new 4.0 client templates and data . Check it out! http://politian.wordpress.com/ Read More......(read more)

Some MIX talks

Tales from the Evil Empire : ASP.NET — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 04:14:22 GMT

Stephen Walther just published links to the video, slides and sample code for his Ajax talk at MIX09: http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2009/03/22/mix-slides-code-and-session-recording.aspx It’s pretty cool to see all the work we put into Ajax this past year or so presented at MIX. This is a really nice presentation, like Stephen’s always are. Another presentation I had lots of fun watching (not just because the speaker is making an incredible impression of me but also because I’ve been spending a good part of my time lately contributing to the application he’s showing) is Rob Conery’s. Rob is showing an interesting way to develop ASP.NET applications, aimed at ease of use and customization rather than architectural purity. Check it out...(read more)