ASP.NET AJAX Team Blogs

JavaScript class browser: once again with jQuery

Tales from the Evil Empire : Microsoft AJAX Library — 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 : Microsoft AJAX Library — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:50:00 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)

Announcing Microsoft Ajax Library (Preview 6) and the Microsoft Ajax Minifier

ScottGu's Blog : Atlas — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 06:48:09 GMT

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...(read more)

Entirely unobtrusive and imperative templates with Microsoft Ajax Library Preview 6

Tales from the Evil Empire : Microsoft AJAX Library — 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 : Microsoft AJAX Library — 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)

Fluent API for .NET RIA Services Metadata

Nikhil Kothari's Weblog — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 04:34:10 GMT

.NET RIA Services relies heavily on metadata annotations for expressing intent beyond what can be inferrd via convention. For example, validation rules on entities and members can be declared as annotations, which then enable a variety of consumption scenarios. We also have metadata for describing model aspects in DAL-agnostic fashion, and hints for automatic UI-generation. What we have today is just a first step. The general design we're enabling is actually quite flexible. For example, a number of developers want to have metadata specified external to their code, for example in XML files or in a database. Some don't like attributes, and have asked for a fluent interface instead. In RIA Services, we wanted to create a consistent API...(read more)

Announcing the Microsoft AJAX CDN

ScottGu's Blog : Atlas — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 06:46:17 GMT

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...(read more)

Building a class browser with Microsoft Ajax 4.0 Preview 5

Tales from the Evil Empire : Microsoft AJAX Library — 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)

Dialogs and ViewModel - Using Tasks as a Pattern

Nikhil Kothari's Weblog — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:37:28 GMT

The ViewModel/MVVM pattern continues to gain popularity, with a blog post showing up every so often, and with tweets and retweets popping up even more often :-). At the same time, there are some interesting topics beyond the core pattern that continue to fuel experimentation. A big one amongst those is how should applications use dialogs when using the view model pattern. The crux of the problem is the desire to keep the view model independent of UI concerns, and ensure it can be tested in a standalone manner, but that often comes to odds when you want the view model to launch a dialog, and/or do some work after the dialog is closed. The most recent version of Silverlight.FX (v3.2) that I published earlier this week, addresses this scenario...(read more)

Doloto - AJAX application optimization tool

Public Sector Developer Weblog : AJAX — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:52:00 GMT

"Doloto reduces the size of initial application code download by hundreds of kilobytes or as much as 50% of the original download size. The time to download and begin interacting with large applications is reduced by 20-40% or dozens of seconds as shown below, depending on the application and wide-area network conditions." http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/ee423534.aspx Rock with it! - Keith Read More......(read more)

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

Tales from the Evil Empire : Microsoft AJAX Library — 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)

Photos from Death Valley

Nikhil Kothari's Weblog — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 14:57:01 GMT

[ Full post continued here... ] Read More......(read more)

BouncingPlane Behavior for Silverlight

Nikhil Kothari's Weblog — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:15:22 GMT

Time for a brief but fun post... some time back Tim Heuer posted the Silverlight 3 bouncing plane gratuitous demo . Click an element, and the nearest corner would bounce backwards and forwards as it comes back to rest. Tim had the code to setup the storyboards, and handle the mouse interaction in code-behind. I look at it, and immediately see a reusable component (even if it is a gratuitous one), or more specifically a behavior, that encapsulates all the logic, and can be attached declaratively in XAML to one or more elements simply without needing any code-behind logic. So I created one such behavior. I used this behavior in my TwitterBug sample at TechEd recently, and thought it could use a dedicated blog post. :-) Here is a screenshot, which...(read more)

LINQ to Bing, Silverlight and .NET RIA Services

Nikhil Kothari's Weblog — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:20:20 GMT

In my last post, I described BLinq, or LINQ to Bing , an API that allows you use LINQ to access the Bing search results (ok, so perhaps BLinq was not the best of names, given prior art on that name ... but anyway). I also alluded to .NET RIA Services integration, which I'll cover in this installment. In fact, IQueryable and the LINQ pattern lie at the very heart of .NET RIA Services, in allowing developers to access data in a consistent manner not just on client or server but across client and server, and enabling code to compose queries naturally. If you haven't read the intro post, please take the few minutes to check out the LINQ snippets to get a general sense before continuing on. You might use Bing in your rich internet application...(read more)

BLinq - Linq to Bing Search APIs

Nikhil Kothari's Weblog — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:35:45 GMT

As part of validating and playing with some of the extensibility features in .NET RIA Services, I needed to write a LINQ provider. This was also a good opportunity to delve into some of the deeper technical aspects of the IQueryable construct, expression trees and related concepts, which I had not gotten into first-hand until now. For my prototyping, I decided to write a LINQ provider for querying Bing to search for pages and images. This post will focus on using the LINQ provider itself, and seeing it in action, and in my next post I'll tie it all back to .NET RIA Services. I am calling this BLinq. :-) Bing has a new search API that provides you the option of using REST interface (XML or JSON) or a SOAP interface. My LINQ provider provides...(read more)