Tales from the Evil Empire

I would be very grateful if you could drop me a note in comments answering the following questions:

My team is looking for a new full-time developer. The project is to build a completely new open-source CMS based on ASP.NET MVC 2. It’s a lot of fun :)

In previous posts, I’ve shown different ways to build a client-side class browser, using the ASP.NET Ajax Libary and jQuery.

I’ll be at PDC tomorrow, Wednesday and Thursday. If you are attending and want to say hi, you’re most likely to find me in the Web Pavilion (in the big room, next to the Surface lounge).

Every so often, somebody points out how bad of a metric code coverage is. And of course, on its own, it doesn’t tell you much: after all, it’s a single number. How could it possibly reflect all the subtlety (or lack thereof) of your designs and of your testing artillery? Of course, within all the various *DD approaches, some better than others enable you to know whether or not your code conforms to its requirements, but I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on the general idea of a software metric and how it relates to the mothers of all metrics: physical ones, cause you know, I used to be a scientist. Proof: the lab coat on the picture.

I’ve already posted twice about that little class browser application. The first iteration was mostly declarative and can be found here:
http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2009/09/14/building-a-class-browser-with-microsoft-ajax-4-0-preview-5.aspx

Last week, I wrote a post about how the new Microsoft Ajax Library Preview 6 made it a lot easier to write unobtrusive and imperative data-driven applications. Because for the previous preview, I had written a cool little class browser using a declarative style, I thought it would be nice to rewrite this in a completely imperative way. The mistake I made though was to call it unobtrusive. Never mind that ‘unobtrusive’ is a perfectly well-defined word that actually existed way before JavaScript. ‘Unobtrusive JavaScript’ has a very specific meaning that people feel strongly about. To be worthy of that label, an application must basically conform to (at least) those two requirements:

Today is the release of the sixth preview of Microsoft Ajax Library. Don’t get fooled by the somewhat silly and long name: this is a major release in many ways. The scripts have been majorly refactored since preview 5. Check out the other posts out there (links at the bottom of this post) to see just some of the many new features that are in there. Some of my favorite are all the small improvements that have been made to make imperative instantiation of components and templated contents easier than ever. Many of you have told us that you preferred to do things imperatively and this release makes it a lot better.