Josh Gough

Atlanta Cutting Edge User Group Recap: AJAX.NET Beyond the UpdatePanel

Atlanta Cutting Edge User Group Meeting

The March 5 Atlanta Cutting Edge user group (http://www.atlantace.com/) meeting was about Microsoft’s AJAX.NET Library.

The presenter was Eric Engler. His slides are available here: http://www.ericengler.com/downloads/AJAX-BeyondUpdatePanel.zip

The rest of his presentations are available at: http://www.ericengler.com/Presentations.aspx

Technical Highlights from the Presentation

• Described the AJAX.NET JS library as a “mini” CLR implemented in JS
• Strongly recommended to turn off DEBUG=”true” when you deploy
• AJAX.NET supports namespaces, classes, and interfaces
  • Explained that the support for Interfaces in JS adds overhead, but the JS client-side miniCLR does not enforce interface type checking unless DEBUG=TRUE, hence the reason you want to do all your debugging with it turned on, and then turn it off when you deploy.
• Mentioned WPF/E as a possible successor / competitor to AJAX.NET
  • http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/asp.net/bb187358.aspx  -- This looks like it is geared toward very highly interactive rich media clients, in the spirit of Flash-based technologies like FLEX and OpenLaszlo
  •  Rounded Corners Extender from AJAX Toolkit: See this video demonstrating this control extender: http://www.asp.net/learn/videos/view.aspx?tabid=63&id=98  

Adoption Assessment

Microsoft has released AJAX.NET as a v1.0 product, meaning it offers support for this product. To download or learn more about it visit:

http://ajax.asp.net/

With its 1.0 status, I think it’s definitely worth evaluating for adoption in actual projects.

Videos, Demos, and Resources for Learning More

MS has done a great job providing demo videos about AJAX.NET on this site:

http://www.asp.net/learn/videos/default.aspx?tabid=63#ajax

See the rounded corner demo and many others on this page.

Debugging Options and Unit Testing JavaScript

Some questions were raised about debuggability of AJAX. Questions about how to test in FireFox came up. There are several well known and robust tools for debugging in FireFox: 

•  FireBug: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1843/ excellent debugger
•  Venkman: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/venkman/ another great debugger extension
•  Web Developer Toolbar: http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/documentation/  IE may have one of these now too, but it still doesn’t compare to this original from Chris Pederick.
• JSUnit: http://jsunit.net/ A port of JUnit to JS for running test cases inside the web browser.

posted on Tuesday, March 06, 2007 1:11 PM by JoshuaGough

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