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
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Described the AJAX.NET JS library as a “mini” CLR implemented in JS
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Strongly recommended to turn off DEBUG=”true” when you deploy
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AJAX.NET supports namespaces, classes, and interfaces
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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.
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Mentioned WPF/E as a possible successor / competitor to AJAX.NET
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:
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JSUnit: http://jsunit.net/ A port of JUnit to JS for running test cases inside the web browser.