Contents tagged with Microsoft AJAX Library
-
Ajax usage survey among .NET developers
Following the more open-sourcey informal study that was recently advertised on Ajaxian, Simone Chiaretta publishes and analyses the results of his own study that he recently made and that is aimed exclusively at .NET developers. While Richard Monson-Haefel's study is being made for the third consecutive year, which makes for some interesting trend information, Simone's analysis is more directly interesting to us. The differences between the results of both studies for .NET developers also goes a long way showing how such data crucially depends on who you're asking. Case in point, it's pretty clear that the intersection of Ajaxian readers and .NET developers is much more open-source-oriented (not that there's anything wrong with that) than the mainstream .NET developers.
-
Does JavaScript need method overloading?
John Resig of Mozilla and jQuery fame has a very interesting post about method overloading in JavsScript. In a nutshell, he proposes a utility function that gives a relatively simple way of overloading a method. The different versions are distinguished by the number of arguments (not their types). Another way of seeing it is that he factors out into a single place code that would usually be at the start of the method. Go check it out, it's a really interesting use of closures. I'll wait until you're done.
-
JavaScript stack overflow
Here's one that some of you may have seen before, but I thought I'd post it to save some time to those who didn't.
-
Microsoft now in the OpenAjax steering comittee
Thanks to all members who voted. I'm looking forward to working with the other members.
-
OpenAjax InteropFest 1.0: Microsoft's entry
Yesterday I got to write our entry in OpenAjax's InteropFest. The goal of this event is to demonstrate how different Ajax libraries can be parts of the OpenAjax ecosystem and interact with each other through the OpenAjax hub. The currently central feature of the hub is to expose a publish/subscribe message bus so that both producers and consumers of events can speak through a third party that is neutral to specific Ajax implementations.
-
Should I use a type attribute on script tags?
I have immense respect for Douglas Crockford, but that doesn't mean I can't disagree with him... Douglas has written on a number of occasions that he prefers plain script tags, with no attributes. The argument goes like this:
"This script block uses the
languageattribute. This was a feature that was introduced by Microsoft in order to support VBScript. Netscape then adopted it to support its own nonstandard deviations. W3C did not adopt thelanguageattribute, favoring instead atypeattribute which takes a MIME type. Unfortunately, the MIME type was not standardized, so it is sometimes"text/javascript"or"application/ecmascript"or something else. Fortunately, all browsers will always choose JavaScript as the default programming language, so it is always best to simply write<script>. It is smallest, and it works on the most browsers." -
How to build a cross-browser history management system
When we built the history management feature in ASP.NET Futures, we spent considerable time experimenting with the different behaviors of the main browsers out there. The problem with such a feature is that it has to rely on a number of hacks because browser vendors basically never anticipated this need. Now they're thinking about it, so all this may be simplified in a few years, but in the meantime, it's a very complicated feature to build. One of the things that struck me was how little reliable literature is available on the subject. There is a lot of partial information, lots of false or unverified information, but very little that's really comprehensive, reliable and up to date. Good references I found include Brad Neuberg's Really Simple History and Handling Bookmarks and Back Button as well as Mike Stenhouse's Fixing the Back Button and Enabling Bookmarking for Ajax Applications. But it was a lot easier to just experiment directly on the different browsers and verify our theories directly.
-
ASP.NET Ajax in action available
It's my great pleasure to announce the availability of ASP.NET Ajax in action by Alessandro Gallo, a.k.a. Garbin, David Barkol and Rama Vavilala. It's a great resource to anyone working with ASP.NET Ajax and it's been written by some of the best specialists (check out how many forums posts they have on http://forums.asp.net/). It's also been my great honor to write one of the forewords (the other one is by Scott Guthrie, who wrote more than half of the ASP.NET books forewords out there ;).
-
ScriptDoc 1.0 available
ScriptDoc is a tool that extracts documentation from JavaScript files and packages it into XML files that can be consumed by documentation building tools such as Sandcastle. The 1.0 version is now able to extract documentation from doc comments as well as from the structure of the code itself. It generates a documentation file that uses the same format as C# doc comment files and a reflection file that describes the structure of the object model and that follows the same schema that Sandcastle is using.
-
IE6's main memory leak hot-fixed
I just learned through Ajaxian that IE6's main memory leak has been hot-fixed two weeks ago through Windows Update.