Tales from the Evil Empire

I just posted the following snippet on Twitter. The exercise is to write meaningful and preferably cool code that fits in a Twitter message along with the #twitcode keyword, which leaves 130 characters.

JavaScript has two ways of delaying execution of code: setInterval and setTimeout. Both take a function or a string as the first parameter, and a number of milliseconds as the second parameter. The only difference is that the code provided to setInterval will run every n milliseconds whereas the code in setTimeout will run only once.

A new version of the AJAX Control Toolkit is now available for download from the CodePlex website. It contains three new controls:

We had an interesting discussion recently on the ASP Insiders mailing list and ended up talking about what cool stuff we could build on top of jQuery. Many interesting things were mentioned and it was a very useful discussion but one suggestion in particular struck my curiosity as it was something I had investigated before and that could be improved on with very little code.

What are your favorite XBLA games?

If you’re still intimidated by jQuery or DOM manipulation in general, if you need to quickly build web animations, if you’re more a designer guy, if you think tooling makes sense, or a combination of the above, you should probably check out Glimmer.

Politian has a great blog series where he goes into the details of building a data-driven Ajax application using the new 4.0 client templates and data.

CSS can be a tricky thing. I’m trying to do something that I think should be pretty simple. Let’s say a page contains a section (e.g. an admin panel) that must be styled independently from the rest of the page, but consistently and predictably. The DOM and CSS for the main part of the page is undetermined (e.g. because it’s part of a user-defined theme). Of course, you could use iframes, which are about the only isolation mechanism in HTML but we can’t do this here because iframes are quite rigid in shape (they are rectangles), they make scripting the DOM more difficult and they pretty much require an additional round-trip to the server to serve their contents.