Tales from the Evil Empire

Here’s a little experiment. I’m really after feedback on this one as I’m trying to decide whether this is a good idea. It’s also entirely possible somebody else did this before. That would be good feedback too. Anyway, here it is.

If you’ve been doing some script development in Visual Studio and Firebug, you may have experienced something like this:

Wally McClure, MVP extraordinaire and ASP Insider, just published a short book about the new features in ASP.NET 3.5 SP1. It is a short and to the point read that should get you started in no time. I wouldn’t have shown web service access as the main advantage of jQuery myself (the selector and animation support adds more value for ASP.NET Ajax developers) but that’s a minor thing, and there are plenty of other resources to learn about jQuery. Topics in Wally’s book include:

Apparently Brian likes our declarative syntax. And jQuery. And he did something quite fun with them, something we had clearly not anticipated: using Microsoft Ajax’s new declarative syntax to call jQuery plug-ins instead of Microsoft Ajax behaviors as was the original intent.

There are plenty of options to test JavaScript code. My goal here is not especially to add to this long list but I needed something for my samples that was brain dead simple to understand and that I could redistribute without any concerns about licensing (this is licensed under the very liberal MS-PL). I just think it’s good practice to distribute tests with sample code because it promotes TDD and helps to understand the intent of the code.

All client-side template engines enable you to create HTML (feel free to go ‘duh’). What they don’t all allow is the creation of event handlers and components over the markup they generate. The general approach with those engines is to do a second pass of code over the markup to create handlers and components. This is quite unfortunate as this generally requires some knowledge of the markup (which plays against separation of concerns) or something like the introduction of marker CSS classes into the markup.

As HTML is becoming more and more semantic, at least in intent, and all styling is moving into CSS, one has to wonder what it is now representing. It seems like it is now a format for unstructured data (a.k.a. rich text), in the same sense that XML and JSON are formats for semi-structured and structured data and CSV is a format for tabular data.

There’s been quite a few blog posts and tweets lately around the following (slightly distorted) quote: