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• Using client templates, part 1

  Last week, we shipped the first preview for the Ajax work we're doing in ASP.NET 4.0 under the simple form of a simple script file (release and debug versions). This should show how much emphasis this release puts on the client-side. As a matter of facts, I'll use a plain HTML file here instead of an ASPX file to make it perfectly clear that everything here (except for the web service that provides the data) runs on the client. One of the scenarios we're trying to improve is updating parts of the page with new data without a postback (in other words, Ajax). That's a scenario you could implement in a number of manners. First, you could put an UpdatePanel control around your server rendering of the data and be done with it. That... Posted Jul 31 2008, 02:39 AM by <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy">Tales from the Evil Empire</a> Filed under: ASP.NET, Atlas, HTML, injection, JavaScript, JSON, Microsoft AJAX Library

• ASP.NET Ajax client-side templates and declarative markup article in MSDN Magazine

  I wrote a short column in Dino Esposito 's latest MSDN Magazine article to introduce two new features that we will ship with the next version of ASP.NET Ajax . The features will enable you to declaratively instantiate client-side components and to build data-driven HTML from simple templates. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc546561.aspx Read More... Posted Jun 17 2008, 07:11 PM by <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy">Tales from the Evil Empire</a> Filed under: ASP.NET, Atlas, HTML, JavaScript, Microsoft AJAX Library

• What's that exception you have here?

  Mike Harder found this one that I didn't know about: all exceptions that you may get from the browser are not Error instances. DOMException is an exception that gets thrown when a DOM operation fails, but for some incomprehensible reason it doesn't derive from Error like SyntaxError or TypeError : try { document.createElement( ' ' ); } catch (ex){ alert(ex instanceof Error); } This will alert false. But wait, that's not all. There are other exceptions that derive from DOMException, so in order to handle that exception, you'd want to be able to know if an exception derives from it, something like that: try { document.createElement( ' ' ); } catch (ex){ if (ex instanceof DOMException){ // Do stuff } } Well, if you... Posted Apr 23 2008, 06:21 PM by <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy">Tales from the Evil Empire</a> Filed under: HTML, JavaScript, Opera

• Cache sharing between sites

  There's been some debate recently about good ways that we could enable web sites to share the browser cache in the future. The problem is that popular JavaScript frameworks currently end up being downloaded several times from different sites that use them and this is a great waste of resources. Of course, there are some ways to achieve re-use of scripts across sites today by hosting those frameworks in a central location, but that is an expensive thing to do for framework developers, most of which are open source projects (it basically amounts to asking the framework developers to pay for the hosting cost of everyone that uses them). To summarize the debate, Doug Crockford has been mentioning a possible solution . He also wrote another piece... Posted Apr 04 2008, 08:32 PM by <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy">Tales from the Evil Empire</a> Filed under: HTML, JavaScript

• Web development best practices finally made fun

  Read More... Posted Apr 02 2008, 07:23 PM by <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy">Tales from the Evil Empire</a> Filed under: Firefox, HTML, Internet Explorer, JavaScript, Opera, Safari

• OpenAjax requests comments on browser wishlist

  The OpenAjax Alliance has been working with some of the top Ajax developers on a wishlist that aims at gathering and prioritizing the development features that we need the most from next generation browsers. The process is completely open and Wiki-based, so feel free to contribute. http://www.openajax.org/blogs/wp-trackback.php?p=53 Read More... Posted Apr 01 2008, 01:13 PM by <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy">Tales from the Evil Empire</a> Filed under: Firefox, HTML, Internet Explorer, JavaScript, Microsoft AJAX Library, OpenAjax, Opera, Safari

• A case for partial rendering

  I've been seeing more and more authors lately dismissing partial rendering (a.k.a. UpdatePanel) as a poor man's version of Ajax, something you should only choose if you're too lazy to implement "true" Ajax. I think that view not only has a slightly pedantic ring (isn't laziness one of the most powerful driving forces in computer science? isn't it perfectly ok to choose the most productive approach in some contexts?) but also misses the point that there are cases where server-side rendering absolutely makes sense. For example, search engines don't execute JavaScript today, which means that if you're doing all the rendering on the client, your contents won't be indexed. If you want search engines to index... Posted Mar 11 2008, 06:24 PM by <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy">Tales from the Evil Empire</a> Filed under: ASP.NET, Atlas, HTML, JavaScript, Microsoft AJAX Library

• Getting absolute coordinates from a DOM element

  For some reason, there is no standard API to get the pixel coordinates of a DOM element relative to the upper-left corner of the document. APIs only exist to get coordinates relative to the offset parent. Problem is, it's very important to get those coordinates for applications such as drag and drop, or whenever you need to compare coordinates of elements that may be in completely different parts of the document. In Microsoft Ajax, we implemented such a function but it proved to be one of the most difficult problems we had to solve. Not so surprisingly, every single browser has its own coordinate quirks that make it almost impossible to get the right results with just capability detection. This is one of the very rare cases where we reluctantly... Posted Jan 29 2008, 08:51 PM by <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy">Tales from the Evil Empire</a> Filed under: Atlas, Firefox, HTML, Internet Explorer, Microsoft AJAX Library, Opera, Safari

• A honest recap of the IE8 meta-tag controversy

  This will affect all Web developers, which is precisely why the debate is very heated. Anyway, here's a honest recap of the issue. I tend to agree with the author's conclusion although that is obvisouly not the position of Microsoft... http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/ie8-super-standards-mode.ars http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/ie8-super-standards-mode.ars/2 Note: at the smallest signs of a flame war, I will close the comments on this post. Ars has a good forum and comment system where your voice is much more likely to be heard and endlessly contradicted. ;) Read More... Posted Jan 25 2008, 03:43 PM by <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy">Tales from the Evil Empire</a> Filed under: HTML, Internet Explorer, JavaScript, Microsoft

• How to build a cross-browser history management system

  When we built the history management feature in ASP.NET Futures, we spent considerable time experimenting with the different behaviors of the main browsers out there. The problem with such a feature is that it has to rely on a number of hacks because browser vendors basically never anticipated this need. Now they're thinking about it, so all this may be simplified in a few years, but in the meantime, it's a very complicated feature to build. One of the things that struck me was how little reliable literature is available on the subject. There is a lot of partial information, lots of false or unverified information, but very little that's really comprehensive, reliable and up to date. Good references I found include Brad Neuberg's Really Simple... Posted Sep 07 2007, 03:47 PM by <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy">Tales from the Evil Empire</a> Filed under: ASP.NET, Atlas, HTML, JavaScript, Microsoft AJAX Library, Safari