The Web Camp in Redmond on Friday 18th and Saturday 19th June is starting to shape up nicely with some last minute speakers added to the roster ! Phil Haack the Program Manager for ASP.NET MVC and Stephen Walther the Program Manager for Ajax Control Toolkit and Microsoft’s jQuery contributions are now on board! They’ll be joining me on stage on Friday as we look at MVC and jQuery as well as give their unique insight into their respective technologies! It should be a blast so be sure to bring your questions along for these rock stars! If you’ve not done so already, sign up for Web Camp - Redmond – we’ve only got a few seats left! If you can’t make it for the Web Camp in Redmond but would like to have your question answered...(read more)
Last month I blogged about how Microsoft is starting to make code contributions to jQuery , and about some of the first code contributions we were working on: jQuery Templates and Data Linking support . Today, we released a prototype of a new jQuery Globalization Plugin that enables you to add globalization support to your JavaScript applications. This plugin includes globalization information for over 350 cultures ranging from Scottish Gaelic, Frisian, Hungarian, Japanese, to Canadian English. We will be releasing this plugin to the community as open-source. You can download our prototype for the jQuery Globalization plugin from our Github repository: http://github.com/nje/jquery-glob You can also download a set of samples that demonstrate...(read more)
On the 1st of June I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the Remix conference in Melbourne, Australia on the Microsoft/jQuery contribution story and the new Templating engine that were announced at Mix10 in Las Vegas earlier this year. This conference punctuated the Web Camps world tour that I’ve been on and was a welcome break to enjoy someone else running a big event :-) I loved the widescreen, colorful slide template they gave me to use and the “love the web” theme for the conference was definitely running high through the attendees. I overheard someone say that half the attendees were non-microsoft developers which was great to see as many of the talks were on open source, geo-location, HTML5 and other topics that were useful...(read more)
Thanks everyone who came to my Ajax talk tonight at the .NET Developers Association ! The slides and demos from the talk can be downloaded by clicking the following link: ASP.NET Ajax: What’s New? You need Visual Studio 2010 to view the code samples. The first project, named Demos, contains the following samples: ASPAjax4 1_CompositeScripts.aspx – Demonstrates how to use the ScriptManger to combine, compress, and cache JavaScript files automatically. 2_EnableCdn.aspx – Demonstrates how to retrieve ASP.NET Ajax framework scripts from the Microsoft Ajax CDN automatically. jQuery 1_Selectors.aspx – Demonstrates how to use jQuery selectors 2_WebForms.aspx – Demonstrates how to use the client tablesorter plugin with ASP.NET Web Forms. 3_MVC.aspx...(read more)
Here’s a little pattern that is fairly common from JavaScript developers but that is not very well known from C# developers or people doing only occasional JavaScript development. In C#, you can use a “using” directive to create aliases of namespaces or bring them to the global scope: namespace Fluent.IO { using System; using System.Collections; using SystemIO = System.IO; In JavaScript, the only scoping construct there is is the function, but it can also be used as a local aliasing device, just like the above using directive: ( function ($, dv) { $( "#foo" ).doSomething(); var a = new dv( "#bar" ); })(jQuery, Sys.UI.DataView); This piece of code is making the jQuery object accessible using the $ alias throughout the code...(read more)
The goal of this blog entry is to describe how you can host a simple Ajax application created with jQuery in the Windows Azure cloud. In this blog entry, I make no assumptions. I assume that you have never used Windows Azure and I am going to walk through the steps required to host the application in the cloud in agonizing detail. Our application will consist of a single HTML page and a single service. The HTML page will contain jQuery code that invokes the service to retrieve and display set of records. There are five steps that you must complete to host the jQuery application: Sign up for Windows Azure Create a Hosted Service Install the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio Create a Windows Azure Cloud Service Deploy the Cloud Service Sign...(read more)
The jQuery library has a passionate community of developers, and it is now the most widely used JavaScript library on the web today. Two years ago I announced that Microsoft would begin offering product support for jQuery, and that we’d be including it in new versions of Visual Studio going forward. By default, when you create new ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC projects with VS 2010 you’ll find jQuery automatically added to your project. A few weeks ago during my second keynote at the MIX 2010 conference I announced that Microsoft would also begin contributing to the jQuery project. During the talk, John Resig -- the creator of the jQuery library and leader of the jQuery developer team – talked a little about our participation and discussed...(read more)
One objection that people always raise against Ajax applications concerns browser history. Because an Ajax application updates its content by performing sneaky Ajax postbacks, the browser backwards and forwards buttons don’t work as you would normally expect. In a normal, non-Ajax application, when you click the browser back button, you return to a previous state of the application. For example, if you are paging through a set of movie records, you might return to the previous page of records. In an Ajax application, on the other hand, the browser backwards and forwards buttons do not work as you would expect. If you navigate to the second page in a list of records and click the backwards button, you won’t return to the previous page. Most likely...(read more)
At the last MIX conference, Netflix announced that they are exposing their catalog of movie information using the OData protocol. This is great news! This means that you can take advantage of all of the advanced OData querying features against a live database of Netflix movies. In this blog entry, I’ll demonstrate how you can use Netflix, jQuery, JSONP, and OData to create a simple movie lookup form. The form enables you to enter a movie title, or part of a movie title, and display a list of matching movies. For example, Figure 1 illustrates the movies displayed when you enter the value robot into the lookup form. Using the Netflix OData Catalog API You can learn about the Netflix OData Catalog API at the following website: http://developer...(read more)
Dusan published this interesting post a couple of weeks ago about a novel JavaScript chaining pattern: http://dbj.org/dbj/?p=514 It’s similar to many existing patterns, but the syntax is extraordinarily terse and it provides a new form of friction-free, plugin-less extensibility mechanism. Here’s a JavaScript example from Dusan’s post: CallStream( "#container" ) (find, "div" ) (attr, "A" , 1) (css, "color" , "#fff" ) (logger); The interesting thing here is that the functions that are being passed as the first argument are arbitrary, they don’t need to be declared as plug-ins. Compare that with a rough jQuery equivalent that could look something like this: $.fn.logger = function () { /* ... *...(read more)
June 17, 2010