Tony Lombardo

It’s a time of change here at Infragistics.  We’re way past the half way point on our “Aikido” (Now officially just AJAX) framework, and with the 9.1 release many of the remaining classic Infragistics controls are being re-born as Web 2.0 loving replacements.  I’ve got some mixed emotions, since I’ve been here long enough to have worked on these classics, but it’s an exciting time to see what the dev team has produced.

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One of the most common complaints I hear about the Infragistics tools is “there’s so much ViewState, it’s bloated!”.  One of the most common questions I hear is not surprisingly, “How do I reduce the ViewState?”.  Before I jump into the answer (which is a simple “turn it off”), I want to discuss what ViewState is.

If you haven’t seen, there’s a ton of new downloads available from Microsoft.  IE8 has finally been released!

So the other day I was helping out a coworker on a project and was taken aback by the complexity of the project.  I was expecting a hacky WinForms app with a single form and one monolithic method.  Instead, I saw an organized solution with 6 projects, including a test project.  It took me a good 30 minutes to follow through the logic from one class to the next, across projects and assemblies.  This of course made me feel dumb, so my first reaction was – this project is too complex! 

As if playoff football wasn't exciting enough, I decided to dive into Windows 7 this weekend.  I've been building the perfect media pc for the past couple of years, and have yet to find the right recipe.  My main reason for trying out Windows 7 was to see if the Media Center experience had improved at all.

Believe it or not, sometimes Infragistics releases even catch me by surprise.  Well, that happened today.  I knew that we were targeting the middle of December for our Silverlight LOB CTP, but I've been so busy lately I didn't even notice it's already the middle of December!  My wife told me that Christmas is only a week away and I didn't believe her.  I did the math.. she was right.  Guess I should start shopping.

When I first started "web development" I knew nothing more than a handful of tags, and that "Javascript is bad!".  As my HTML vocabulary grew, I started to see some of the really cool things you could do with DHTML, but most of it required that naughty Javascript.  Well, eventually I shook free from the unfounded notion that Javascript was bad, and have never looked back.  My goal here is to give you tips to help you become the skill full ninja you've always wanted to be.  We'll start out with some debugging tips working with Javascript, but I'm going to do this as a multi-part series which will also include working with css, and other points of interest for web developers.