Contents tagged with ASP.NET AJAX
-
Launching QuickTime movies in the player using ASP.NET AJAX framework
As my dearest friends know, I once existed as a broadcast monkey prior to my life as a code monkey. It gives me great joy that it's finally at least somewhat practical to deliver short-form high definition video via the Internet, even if it is only a couple of minutes at a time. That said, the best bang for the buck in terms of compression is easily H.264, encoded by way of QuickTime. Flash can actually play these files, but it's not practical to do it in-browser when you're talking about something that's 1280x720 or 1920x1080. That's probably why Apple spawns the movies in the player itself. It's a pretty seamless experience, and since "everyone" has iTunes, "everyone" has QuickTime. (If you want to get into some stupid religious debate about this, please, do it elsewhere.)
-
Science project no more: playing with client frameworks
Awhile back I mentioned how sometimes I get sucked into these science projects, and I end up not doing more productive things. That particular science project was me trying to build a drag-and-drop list. Sounds silly, right? Because there are existing solutions. But I had good intentions.
-
Career: Ninja or super multi-functional
In my self-employed "summer vacation" without a standard day job, I find myself working on things that I'm interested, a luxury you obviously don't get whilst working for The Man. Some of it is naturally for the now five-years-old CoasterBuzz, which is an embarrassment of a site for me to look at (despite its continued financial success). What I've been into is AJAX stuff, building controls of all things. Every control I build is easier than the previous, and I find myself feeling ninja-like around the AJAX framework. I really enjoy working on this stuff.
-
ASP.NET AJAX: Moving target
Working with the ASP.NET AJAX framework has been fun. I think the basics are well covered for the most part, and beyond that, your imagination can likely come up with some really interesting UI.
What's frustrating, however, is the way it has become a moving target. There's the original release, 1.0, as an extension to ASP.NET v2. Then there's v3.5, which comes in .NET v3.5, which includes ASP.NET v2. In the background, we had the "futures" package, and now the forthcoming v3.5 SP1, which has better a version of the history control, so don't use futures. Oh, and the roadmap for v4 was more or less recently released. It's madness. (Oh, and the documentation on MSDN, linked to from the old v1.0 docs, is poorly organized compared to the old stuff.)
So if you're a developer trying to get up to speed, where do you start? What's really important? For me it's easy, because I do independent stuff that interests me, and I happen to be between regular day jobs. I've been pretty focused on v3.5 and doing useful things with it, like a Facebook-esque auto-complete list (puts a "token" representing a data item in the box that you chose via auto-complete).
In the corporate world, adoption of anything new is slow. This makes me wonder... who are the people using the latest bleeding edge stuff, and why? Sure, they're the bloggers and authors and such, and the new open Microsoft is getting their feedback, but are they the right people? There are a whole lot of smart people involved, but I wonder if the chaos of versions and service packs and futures and community driven stuff are well connected. (The ControlToolKit's ReorderList control throws script errors in IE of all things for me, which doesn't instill confidence.)
Sometimes it's hard to just focus on what you have in front of you. I guess with all of the excitement over various pieces of the framework, the latest being the MVC piece, I worry that there is so much going on that there is risk for ASP.NET to become a convoluted mess, and that would suck. -
Any bets on whether or not JavaScriptSerializer will really be obsolete?
Anyone who does a bit AJAXy goodness knows that it's nice and easy to transport simple objects and arrays back and forth to your server as JSON pieces. And hey, if you're doing it right, trying not to be uber chatty and keep it all zippy, you probably aren't doing anything that complex in terms of the objects you're shuttling around.
-
Anatomy of an ASP.NET site for amusement park fanboys
This is a post I've meant to write for a very long time. Since 1998, my part-time job of sorts has been to maintain a number of community sites. One of those, started ten years ago, was Guide to The Point. "The Point" in this case is Cedar Point, an amusement park an hour west of Cleveland and about two hours from Detroit. It's home to more roller coasters than any other place on earth, and for people how grow up in the region, it's a summer ritual. In 2004, I joined forced with a friend doing another site, and we called it PointBuzz, inspired in name by my woefully neglected general coaster enthusiast site CoasterBuzz. These sites have become a business to a certain degree, since the ad revenue isn't exactly small coin. And if you can make money doing something you enjoy, why not?
-
Gotchas and learnings from refactoring to use ASP.NET AJAX
I promise that one of these days soon I'm going to talk a little about where POP Forums v8 is headed, and what you'll be able to do with it. I don't imagine there's a huge demand for the app, but regardless, it will be available.
-
If only I could have this feature in the library
I really like the ASP.NET AJAX script library. The Sys.UI.DomElement class in particular has some really useful pieces parts. As much as I'm enjoying using it, every once in awhile you find one little thing you wish it did.
-
Impressions of VS2008 after a couple of weeks
I've spent some quality time with Visual Studio 2008 now after two weeks, and I feel like I can give a more extensive impression of the product. Aside from my previous complaint about the FTP browser, I've really enjoyed working with it, but I do sometimes feel a little underwhelmed.
-
ASP.NET AJAX in Action: Awesome!
I haven't bought a programming book in awhile, but I was getting the itch to start reading something a little more in depth to engage my head and perhaps inspire a little. Blogs and other sites just don't offer the kind of depth that a good book can.