December 2007 - Posts

How ASP.NET devs are building AJAX apps
21 December 07 10:49 AM | despos | 4 comment(s)

Ran into this post and felt like I had to spread it around.

It discusses the results of a survey regarding how developers are integrating AJAX in their applications. I can't say much about the scientific or non-scientific nature of the survey, but it makes anyway for an interesting reading.

A first comment I have is that I'm kind of surprised to see that the best ranked product in the category of "Powerful suites of controls" is only the 5th favorite option (Telerik). It seems that .NET Web developers prefer tools that help to ajax-ify ASP.NET pages rather than the rich and powerful new frameworks that you have to marry and keep for a project-life-time :)

Thanks to Simone Chiaretta for the nice work. 

 

 

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Aspects of AJAX
21 December 07 10:00 AM | despos | 1 comment(s)

You probably know already about Gaia AJAX Widgets.

Featured on dnrTV, Gaia widgets provide a comprehensive set of ASP.NET server controls with rich AJAX capabilities--from Button to AutoCompleter and from modal dialog boses to panels. If you're a "classic" ASP.NET developer just should feel just at home. The programming model is kind of familiar and little intrusive--I'd say--in your coding practices and habits. Gaia also pushes to the limit the idea of aspect-oriented AJAX. What's that? It's code, in the end, based on the principle that you can dynamically configure "aspects" of a given control. Yes, it's close enough to what MS calls extenders. But in Gaia it is a native part of the framework.

A few days ago, the Gaia people (btw, a young company based in Norway) launched a competition with an interesting award: €10000 (sort of $14K). The deal is to create an open source AJAX collaboration web site (or similar) to make the world a little better place. Definitely, an ambitious project :)

And, of course, you must use Gaia AJAX Widgets for the purpose.

Instead of just focusing on food (and gain weight) in the forthcoming holiday season, why not just trying something else? :)

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History article
17 December 07 04:27 PM | despos | with no comments

ASP.NET Extensions 3.5 is here and I'm slowly talking a look at it. You can read some considerations about the History feature on DotNetSlackers.

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JavaScript exception instead of a message box
11 December 07 09:56 PM | despos | 1 comment(s)

The AJAX integrated support in ASP.NET 3.5 is nearly identical to ASP.NET AJAX Extensions with the significant exception of WCF services. I noted, though, also a slightly different behavior in the ScriptManager class as far as error handling for partial rendering operations is concerned.

When an exception is thrown during a partial rendering operation the HTTP request returns a regular HTTP 200 status code but instead of the updated markup, it includes a full description of the error.  In ASP.NET AJAX Extensions for ASP.NET 2.0, the default error handler pops up a client-side message box with the exception message or any text you assign to the AsyncPostBackErrorMessage property. In ASP.NET 3.5, instead, you get a JavaScript exception. 

 

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