Archives
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DevConnections '06 photos
Some photos from DevConnections (a.k.a. AspConnections)...
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Eilon's class browser for the Microsoft AJAX Library
Back in the CTP days, Wilco wrote a nice class browser that has been used for a while by the ajax.asp.net documentation site.
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DOM events in the Microsoft AJAX Library
In previous CTPs, the client-side DOM event model was the IE model. You would use attachEvent and get the event data from window.event. In other words, we had just implemented the IE model in Firefox and Safari. This didn't fly as well as we expected for a number of reasons. For instance, it wasn't very well received from a philosophical point of view: making standards-compliant browsers behave like the one non-compliant browser was interpreted by some as a malicious attempt by the Evil Empire to undermine the standardization of the Web by enforcing proprietary APIs. It wasn't. It just seemed at the time like a smart way to build cross-browser compatibility and the reason we did it this way and not the other way around is that both Safari and Firefox have extensible DOM Element prototypes whereas IE doesn't. In other words, there was no way we could make IE behave like the standard, but we could make the others behave like IE. Any other way to make a library cross-browser has to introduce a third API that abstracts the standard and proprietary APIs. This third API is of course just as proprietary as the IEism, whereas our previous approach had the advantage of not introducing a new one. Still, the implementation was fairly complex and relied on the presence of extensibility points that we had no guarantee we would find on other browsers that we may want to support in the future. Another problem with our first implementation was its reliance on the server to detect browsers and selectively send the compat scripts to the client. So we decided to change our compat layer and come back to a more conventional approach that will be easier to adapt to new browsers and that doesn't rely on the server, let alone on browser detection.
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Dynamic languages in ASP.NET
David Ebbo wrote a very interesting article that explains in great details how they gave ASP.NET the ability to be driven by dynamic languages. The compilation system, on which David worked for a few years, is explained, as well as why it doesn't apply to dynamic languages. Then he goes on to explain how they were able to integrate IronPython anyway, taking advantage of an existing feature, no-compile pages.
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Meet the team in Vegas next week
I'll be in Las Vegas next week for ASP Connections with some other people from the AJAX team. If you're going too, stop by and say hi.
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ComponentArt on migrating to ASP.NET AJAX Beta 1
Miljan over at ComponentArt wrote his first post explaining how their migration to Beta 1 went (i.e. great, the whole thing was done in four days). He has some very nice things to say about the platform, which we're all very flattered about: "After getting over the initial hump, we found ASP.NET AJAX Beta 1 to be remarkably well functioning and stable."