PeterKellner.net

So, I suppose you should just be able to see the fact that Ajax is working by the lack of page flashing.  That may be true on a normal page on a slow connection, but if you are testing locally, it may not be so obvious.  You can certainly crank up your debugging tools like firebug or Fiddler, or you can do the cheap trip about I’m about to explain.

Simply, add a sleep statement to your page_load event (Thread.Sleep(3000);) and run your page.  If you are using IE7 like I am, on the post back (for a full page), you will see the windows icon spinning in the tab control.  If you see that, you are getting a full page post back. If not, chances are you are not.

Hope this helps!

I’ve just started my journey into the land of JavaScript for real and am learning things most of you already know.  For example, as the Silicon Valley Code Camp coordinator and web site author, I just recently decided to add a Virtual Earth Map showing attendees and speakers (see the home page).  I wrote a simple web response handler that returns all the data in JSON so I could plot the data.  Then, after a couple searches on the web, I found a way to send a request to the service asynchronously and get the result. The code looks something like this:

(That’s right, Code Camp is coming!  11/8 and 11/9 again at Foothill College)

Article Series

So, first, a little background.  As many of you know, I’ve been the ring leader of Silicon Valley Code Camp here in northern California for the past 2 years.  Since Code Camp is a limited budget, 100% volunteer effort, the most important thing is to have efficient communications between everyone.  Attendees, Speakers, Organizer, Sponsors and everyone else involved in the event.  To that end, the first code camp web site was created.  It was based on CSS provided by Microsoft.  Check out the post I made two years ago about it titled "Zero to Professional Web Site in Two Days".

I’m basically a back end database kind of guy, but over the past years have been doing more front end web stuff.  Asp.Net has been a huge help for me, and now with Visual Studio 2008 and the JavaScript debugging capabilities, I’m finding doing web stuff is just not so bad.  Many of you know I’ve written several MSDN articles and one of them was over a year ago on how to add Ajax to my Membership solution (back then it was called Atlas).  The article is still out there though now a little out dated.  In it, I extensively use Alessandro’s code he posted on his blog.  My point here is Alessandro keeps up with this stuff, and as it turns out, he wrote an excellent book that’s been helping me out.

I enthusiastically recommend it to anyone trying to incorporate Ajax into their asp.net applications.  It’s not only got a great introduction, but also goes into lots of useful details for day to day programming.

Amazon.com: ASP.NET AJAX in Action

Recently, is seems that many web sites and blogs are starting to use a navigation technique where you have multiple hyperlinks grouped in a box, with size, color, or brightness giving some meaning.  I like this very much and have been on the lookout for a while for a control to do this in ASP.NET.  Turns out, DevExpress has one!  It’s called the CloudControl and you can read more about it at the following URL.

Microsoft just published my third article. This one is titled: "Member/Role Management with IIS, Part 3: AJAX Enhancements with Microsoft’s Atlas".

You can find it on MSDN here, or on my blog here.

Here is the introduction.

Introduction

This article extends one of the web pages developed in Part II of this series using Microsoft’s implementation of AJAX called Atlas. It utilized two techniques for reducing web server traffic to the browser to enhance the users web experience. The first technique uses the UpdatePanel tags to limit the refreshed area of the web page to limited areas and the second has to do with implementing some javascript using Atlas techniques so that the web page is updated on every key stroke in a textbox. A user list is displayed based on what is actively typed into this textbox. After reading this article the developer will be able to implement AJAX (Microsoft’s implementation Atlas) in their own application.

June CTP (Community Technical Preview)

Atlas is still in beta from Microsoft and because of this, code that worked in previous CTP versions of Atlas may not work with later CTP’s. This is exactly what happened with the version of the MSDN article built with the March CTP version of Atlas. The link below is to revised Atlas Membeship Management source.

Update Source For June CTP of Atlas