PeterKellner.net

Last night, I gave a 90 minute presentation on how to use ExtJS with ASP.NET serving up the data at the San Francisco Microsoft Office to what seemed to be between 50 and 100 people.  I started out with just a basic overview of ExtJS, starting with a hello world app, then, finally building it into a full blown paging, updating, inserting and deleting Membership Management editor.  The final application is actually here if you want to see how it runs:

Last week, we had our 5th Meetup of the San Francisco ExtJS Meetup Group at ClickTime.  Xiaohui Chen and I both presented different aspects of some new features in ExtJS V3. Specifically, I showed you to use the new Proxy Writer to do restful CRUD operations from ExtJS to Asp.Net with ease, and Xioahui presented using the new Direct (RPC calls) ExtJS 3 feature for taking those same CRUD calls but passing them through an RPC gateway rather than through REST type calls.

Lots of great feedback from the group.  Here are some pictures of us.  ClickTime provided pizza and soda (and also BTW, is looking for a great ExtJS/JavaScript/.Net engineer).

For the past couple years, I’ve had the T-Mobile Dash Windows Mobile phone.  It’s been a nice phone but not great.  It’s broken a couple times, crashes too often, requires me to carry an extra battery around just to get through the day and gives me an inadequate browsing experience based on the IE4 browser it is running.  It also only has Edge so it’s pretty slow.  On the plus side, it does a great job with Exchange and IMAP email which is 90% of what I do with it so I’m pretty happy.  The keyboard works, the form factor is good and, not to mention, it works very well as a phone.

I’ve been envious of my friends with their 3G IPhones.  They can browse any where on the internet they want at reasonable speeds, seems that anything they want they tell me there is an app for that, they say the lack of a keyboard is not much of a problem (they lie), and the fact that it does crash and it is not a very good phone, also doesn’t seem to bother them.

At tonight’s meet up, we will be having several short presentations on the new features in ExtJS version 3.0.  For my short presentation, I will be showing how to build a simple asp.net application that lets you Create, Update, Delete and Edit Membership data using the ASP.NET built in membership providers.  I will be leverage code from an MSDN article I wrote a while back here along with the URL to the meetup location.

http://www.meetup.com/The-San-Francisco-ExtJS-Meetup-Group/calendar/10302891/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa478947.aspx

My plan is to do a progression where I start with a trivial GridPanel, then work myself in 5 steps to a full working membership editor that looks like this:

Background

At my company, we have been running a workflow process that is taking 6 hours to complete.  This is a new project so we’ve had the good fortune to be able to use the latest Microsoft technologies.  We are a Microsoft shop, so that means Sql Server 2008, C#, ASP.NET, ExtJS, LINQ to SQL (hoping to move to Entity Framework someday) and others.  After spending all day running performance analysis tools and basically performing a full audit of the 6 hour process, we sadly concluded that our time was being eaten up by LINQ to SQL processing.  My experience has always been that anything you do on the compiled code side is usually overwhelmed by database access times, usually at least ten to one.  Well, I learned a lot yesterday.

Programmatically setting JavaScript into an ASP.NET page is very straight forward when you do it in code.  That is, in my case, I simply put it in the Page_Load event of the page and have it load from there.  I’m currently working on an ExtJS project that requires me to show some details on a page that I want to show with JavaScript.  I’ve nicely modularized all the JavaScript into a name space so the code that I want to include on my ASP.NET Page looks like the following:

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" >

    ASPWeb.newsGrid.loadTypeId = 229490;

    ASPWeb.newsGrid.init();

</script>