Archives
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JSON-style dictionary parameters in C#?
Eilon has an interesting post about using the new anonymous object initializer syntax in APIs that take dictionaries. The end result looks very much like the JSON parameterized function calls that are very common in many JavaScript frameworks, which shows once more how C# is getting many of the nice features of dynamic languages while remaining statically-typed. While I wouldn't use that just to get named parameters like those frameworks are often doing, it looks well-justified in this context because the parameter it's being used for is actually not predetermined.
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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.
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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." -
Plastic X-plorer paint job
The guitar Harmonix chose for the Xbox 360 version of Guitar Hero II is not exactly my favorite guitar. The Gibson X-plorer just reminds me too much of german hard-rockers from the eighties... and mullets. Harmonix' plastic rendition of the guitar doesn't look any better than the original of course, and white doesn't help. I've seen things at Toys'R'Us that look less toy-like. I can't do much about the shape but seeing that I had already done a red paint job on my faceplate a while ago, I thought that at least the color had to change.
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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.