ASP.NET AJAX Beta 1 Released

October 20, 2006

Scott Guthrie just announced the release of ASP.NET AJAX Beta 1. This is excellent news for us. We had recently tried to implement the Atlas June CTP but were running into some issues with Safari. Hopefully those issues will be resolved. From Scott:

Previous ASP.NET AJAX CTPs didn’t have great support for Safari (UpdatePanel didn’t work at all). With this Beta we have added Safari as a fully tested and supported browser.

Between ASP.NET AJAX, YUI and Jack Slocum’s Yahoo Extensions, looks like I’m going to be busy.

Popularity: 21% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under .Net, AJAX, ASP.Net, Microsoft | Leave a Comment 

Issues with ASP.Net Atlas UpdatePanels and Safari

October 5, 2006

We are in the process of trying to incorporate some Atlas/AJAX into our site. What we added works correctly in IE6 and FF1.5 on Windows and also works correctly in Camino and FF (not sure of the version numbers) on Mac. However, it is not working correctly with Safari. Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of information on what the problem is since I don’t have reliable access to a Mac to dig into it.

While I don’t have specific error messages, we do have a test environment that you can check out. Please note that this test site is being served up through a DSL connection (small upload pipe) and might be a little slow (especially with all the extra overhead AJAX script, etc.). To reproduce the issue, do the following:

Log into our site with our test account by clicking here

  • Once you are in the site, click on the Calendar tab at the top
  • Once in the Calendar, make sure that you are viewing either the Day, Week or Month view (top-right below the main tabs)
  • On the left-hand side, there is a module called Mini Calendar that allows you to navigate through the calendar.
  • If you are on Day or Week view, click the links at the top of the Mini Calendar to navigate to the previous or next item (On Day or Week view, it will navigate by month. On Month view, it will navigate by year)
  • If you are using IE or FF, when you click the next or previous link, the content of the Mini Calendar should update with the previous or next view of the requested information (there is also a small ‘Loading’ graphic that appears in the top-right of the screen). In Safari, nothing happens and apparently there is a JavaScript error thrown.

I posted this to the ASP.Net forums but it isn’t getting much activity so I wanted to throw it out as a post to see if it pops up on anyone’s radar. Any help in getting to the bottom of this is appreciated.

Popularity: 10% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under .Net, AJAX, ASP.Net, Microsoft | 3 Comments 

Atlas for ASP.NET grows up

September 30, 2006

In case you missed it, a couple of weeks ago, Scott Guthrie posted the “Atlas” 1.0 Naming and Roadmap. In it, he mentions that Atlas will be a fully supported product with a ten year product lifetime, a 1.0 release should be coming soon, additional features are still planned, and marketing is staying busy giving it creative new names.

To follow up on Scott’s announcement, Rick Strahl has a good article about the current state of ATLAS. He talks objectively about where it currently is at and what needs to happen to get it where it needs to be. While not belaboring minute details, he does hit the highlights of what Atlas is currently doing well and what needs to be improved.

One interesting thing from Rick’s article is the following quote:

If you’re going down the AJAX path, JavaScript is going to become a more important part of your development environment. This will get easier when Orcas arrives, but in the meantime we have to struggle with the existing tools. Investing some time getting acquainted with JavaScript should probably be high on your list of skills to acquire as a Web developer. Learning about JavaScript object orientation, prototypes, function pointers, closures (an excellent reference can be found here: jibbering.com/faq/faq_notes/closures.html ) and a handful of other concepts specific to JavaScript is a prerequisite to use the ATLAS client library which uses some advanced concepts to provide abstraction and .NET like functionality.

I’ve been doing web development since 1995 and long ago became quite intimate with JavaScript and how to make it do all sorts of cool things (like AJAX back in early 2002 before it even had a name). Only recently as we have been trying to staff up for a project at my day job it has become very apparent that there is a whole generation of ASP.Net programmers that have completely relied on the framework to do the heavy lifting for them. Sometimes that can be good, but as with most things Microsoft, their controls tend to take you about 80% of the way towards your solution and then you need to look for ways to do it yourself. On my projects at my day job, we have taken great effort to separate the developer from the complexities of JavaScript. I’m not so sure why that is though. JavaScript is one of my favorite languages because of its simplicity and power. Granted, it is not always easy to work with since there weren’t any good editors or debuggers for so long, but you either baked your own, or now you can rely on some of the frameworks that are out there.

Popularity: 9% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under .Net, AJAX, ASP.Net, Microsoft | 1 Comment 

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