Video of Scott Guthrie Shooting Private Donut (and some good ASP.NET AJAX links)

Occasionally I get to do cool non-traditional things as part of my job.  Two weeks ago, I was the guest star in a fun "Red vs. Blue" Halo video produced by Rooster Teeth.  You can watch it online here (it is 3 minutes in length).

Below is a screen-shot of me in the movie, right after I shoot "Private Donut" the first time (you will have to watch the video to understand).

 

I also spend some time in the video trying to explain to the "reds" what ASP.NET AJAX can offer them. <g>

ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit Update Released

In other ASP.NET AJAX news, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit team last week shipped an update to the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit (which is a free, shared source library, containing 34+ ASP.NET AJAX Controls that are built by both Microsoft and non-Microsoft developers).  This ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit update contains a bunch of great new updates:

  • JavaScript comment/whitespace stripping - When compiled in "Release" mode, all of the JavaScript files in the Toolkit now automatically have all comments and unnecessary whitespace removed.  This can reduce the download size of the scripts by over 50%. This is implemented as an automated MSBuild task that you can take and use within your own ASP.NET AJAX projects to streamline your custom JavaScript sizes as well (I'll blog about how to use the MSBuild task in the next few days).
  • Localization support - The Toolkit now has an infrastructure for localizing the text in JavaScript files using the standard ASP.NET AJAX support for resource files. There are placeholder files for the following 14 languages: Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese (Simplified), and Chinese (Traditional).
  • ASP.NET Theme/Skin support - You can now use ASP.NET's theme/skin support to specify properties for Toolkit controls across an entire web site in one central location.

You can try out and download the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit online here.

Free Microsoft Learning Course: Developing Enhanced Web Experiences with Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Extensions

Microsoft Learning has published a free premium online clinic that provides a great way to learn how to use ASP.NET AJAX.  It can be watched for free and covers AJAX concepts and how to use ASP.NET AJAX end-to-end (it is 2 hours long).  You can watch the course online here.

More ASP.NET AJAX "How Do I?" Videos

Joe Stagner has been busy creating more ASP.NET AJAX "How Do I?" videos (I first blogged about this series in this blog post from last month).  He published three new videos last week:

For more of Joe's ASP.NET AJAX videos, please check out the ASP.NET AJAX videos section on www.asp.net.

Damian Mehers (who implemented the ListSearch ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit control above) has also published a cool video on ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit that you can watch here.

ASP.NET AJAX Downloads and Deployments

In the first 6 weeks since ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 was released, we've already had several hundred thousand downloads of the final V1.0 release.  Last week we got back the results from a recent web crawler study on the Internet that found over 60,000 unique Internet sites that had already deployed sites using the final ASP.NET AJAX V1.0 bits within the first month.  Click here to see screen-shots of some of these sites, and read interviews with the developers who built them.

Hope this helps,

Scott

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