ASP.NET Debugging : jQuery

ASP.NET MVC and JSON and when do you use Async

Tom — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:00:00 GMT

I wanted to post somewhat of a discussion starter around some of the new technologies that ASP.NET has recently released.

ASP.NET MVC

This technology has one huge benefit of allowing you to do unit testing on your site. But there are also a number of other advantages to it, for example, you can have a web page call commands inside a controller. This allows multiple pages to call the same command which helps keep things clean. It also does a pretty good job of separating the code from the presentation layer. But I did find myself doing a lot of coding like I used to with classic ASP or even IDC where we loop through results and have <%= %> snippets all over the aspx page.

JSON/AJAX

These technologies have really opened the door to a lot more asynchronous commands on the web. They allow you to do lots of small submissions and updates without the need to submit and refresh the whole page.

jQuery

This is a really interesting new functionality in that it really isn’t anything new but just a way of collecting things in a cleaner way. The way it is designed really gives us an ability to do things that you generally don’t consider doing. For example, you can make images clickable without having any link code in the html. It can also give some interesting ways to hide some of your IP (although they can always see it using something like netmon).

Silverlight

I think with Silverlight 3, we have really raised the bar for making Silverlight a choice for developing an application. Especially if you combine it with RIA, there are a lot of great applications of Silverlight that before would be much harder to create. I know Silverlight 3 is just in developer beta, but I have been using it quite a bit lately and I think it is really going to change things. The deep linking and search engine optimization functionality really help make this a good solution as well.

So when would you use which?

That is what I’d like to hear from everyone. If you have a page, when do you decide that you should do something async? When do you decide that you should just submit the entire page? Have you considered using Silverlight yet? What functionality makes it attractive to you? Is it the off-line functionality?

My take

I wanted to give some of my thoughts on these things, but remember that they are just thoughts as a lot of these technologies I haven’t used enough to know which is best for what situation.

I think that most of these technologies allow for very fast creation of a site. I think a lot of it boils down to what you are comfortable with or what you have available. If you have designers at your disposal, Silverlight is a great choice as they can create the Xaml to make your application look amazing.

I think one of the powerful things about MVC is that you can combine it with AJAX, jQuery, JSON to get a bunch of these things in the same application. But it still is a question as to when to use what. For me, I really like using jQuery to control the UI and then have it call commands through AJAX/JSON. It also allows you to update a page with new content without having to refresh the page. Which makes the user experience a lot cleaner.

As for Silverlight, in general I think it is a wildcard out of the bunch. You can do all the same things you can with these other technologies but within the same framework. So I think if you want to have the best of all worlds and learn the smallest amount, this may be a good way to go.

So what are your thoughts? And do you have any other functionality that you would like that see that isn’t available yet?

ASP.NET Troubleshooting

Tom — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:31:03 GMT

So with how long ASP.NET has been out for now, I am really curious to know how people go about tracking down issues in their project.

I’d like to know things like:

How do you know there is a problem
What tools do you use to confirm that the problem really is a problem
How do you gather data about the problem
How do you determine if the problem is your code or something else (like the network, hard drive failure, etc)
If the problem is your code, how do you ensure your fix resolves the problem (how do you test the fix)

If there are any others, I’d also like to hear them.

Also, if you do anything in the Cloud now, I’d love to hear how you troubleshoot that. And it can be from any cloud service provider.

And have any of these things changed with some of the new ways to program that have come out. For example, AJAX, MVC, Silverlight, IE8, jQuery, etc.

IntelliSense for jQuery

Tom — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:28:00 GMT

As for reported here, we now have an official IntelliSense documentation file that will allow you to get rich intellisense for jQuery from inside of Visual Studio.

When you go to download jQuery, you will see a Documentation link. Or you can download it directly from here:
http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.2.6-vsdoc.js

Using this file is simple, if you are inside an ASPX page, you can reference it like this:

<script src="jquery-1.2.6.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<% if (false) { %>     <script src="jquery-1.2.6-vsdoc.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<% } %>

The if (false) part will make sure we don’t render or execute this as a script but it will get loaded by IntelliSense.

If you are inside a javascript file, you can reference it in the normal way like:

/// <reference path="jquery-1.2.6-vsdoc.js" />

This also supports plug-ins. So you will get IntelliSense on the as well. Hope that those of you using jQuery can put this file to good use.