Archive for May, 2009

May 30th Links: ASP.NET, AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio

Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I’ve done myself in the past. 

You can also now follow me on twitter (@realscottgu) where I also post links and small posts.

ASP.NET

AJAX

  • Automatically Minify and Combine JavaScript in Visual Studio: Dave Ward has a great article that describes how you can add a build command to Visual Studio that enables you to automatically compress and combine client-side JavaScript files.  This makes your pages load faster on the client and improves the perceived performance of your sites.

  • Client-side Data Binding in ASP.NET AJAX 4.0: Fritz Onion has a great article about the new client-side templating features of ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 (which you can download and use today in .NET 3.5 projects).  This enables powerful client data-binding scenarios against JSON based data.  Also check out Politian’s Blog to find some great tutorials on how to use it.

ASP.NET MVC

  • Visual Studio NUnit Templates for ASP.NET MVC: The VS Web Tools team has released updated NUnit templates that work with ASP.NET MVC 1.0.  This enables you to automatically create a test project that uses NUnit instead of MSTest when you do a File->New Project and select the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Project item.

  • Custom Route Constraints in ASP.NET MVC: Keyvan Nayyeriu has a nice post that discusses how to create a custom route constraint in ASP.NET MVC (one of the extensibility points in Simone’s list above).  You can use these to control whether a route rule is used or not, and they can enable some pretty rich routing scenarios.  Note that in addition to creating route constraint classes, ASP.NET MVC also supports using Regular Expressions and HTTP Method filters to constrain routes as well. Keyvan is the co-author with Simone of the Beginning ASP.NET MVC Book (free chapter available).

Visual Studio

Hope this helps,

Scott

Web Storage Portability Layer: Abstract on top of HTML5 and Gears Storage

Robert Kroeger has released a nice library for local database access. The Web Storage Portability Layer nicely abstracts on top of HTML5 and Gears for database access.

The WSPL consists of a collection of classes that provide asynchronous transactional access to both Gears and HTML5 databases and can be found on Project Hosting on Google Code.
There [...]

GWT team Wave’s goodbye to annoying question; It’s the API stupid

“Why doesn’t Google use GWT more?”

That is a question that I was asked maaaany a time. There are sites like Base and the old mashup editor and others…. but “why not something big like Gmail?”
It was always so tough because it wasn’t a totally fair question.

Google has some of the best Ajax hackers out there. [...]

A good day for Open Video. A long way to go!

What are the odds? At roughly the same time we saw the top two user generated video sites on the Web show us a glimpse at the future:
At Google I/O, Vic showed us an HTML 5 demo of YouTube. It looks the same, but the controls are in HTML, powering the video tag. The related [...]

CSS Gradients in Action

Chris Williams has been having some fun with CSS gradients on a quest to create nice looking elements without images.
He uses CSS like this:
PLAIN TEXT
CSS:

 

.albumInfo {

        background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(#626262), to(#000000), color-stop(.5, #202020), color-stop(.5, #000000));

        height: 8em;

        padding: 1em;

        border-top: [...]

LIDNUG: Free Online Virtual Chat with Me Today

LIDNUG (Linked .NET Users Group) is hosting an online chat with me today (Wednesday) from 11:30am to 1pm PST (Pacific Standard Time).  Anyone is free to join and the agenda topic will be open – so bring your questions!

Click here to learn more about how to register and attend it.

Hope to chat with you more then,

Scott

CleverCSS: Rich Python-like DSL for CSS

We have mentioned Sass and other CSS abstraction libraries before, but somehow CleverCSS slipped by.
The nesting DSL looks similar to other solutions:
PLAIN TEXT
CSS:

 

ul#comments, ol#comments:

  margin: 0

  padding: 0

 

  li:

    padding: 0.4em

    margin: 0.8em 0 0.8em

    h3:

      font-size: 1.2em

    p:

      padding: 0.3em

    p.meta:

      text-align: right

  [...]

JSPlacemaker - Geo data extraction in pure JavaScript

Content extraction is still a hot topic on the web. We have lots of great text content but not much clue as to what those texts are. To make it more obvious we do term extraction for tagging but also geo location extraction for giving the text some spacial reference.
A fairly new web service that [...]

Firefinder: Quick access to what you are looking for

Robert Nyman has a new Firebug extension called Firefinder.
The idea is to quickly text CSS selectors/XPath in a document to see what will match, or how many instances of a certain element there are (thinking certain type of heading, for instance).
It offers:

A quick way to filter HTML elements via CSS selector(s) or XPath

Highlight them in [...]

Cramdas; Don’t mess with the semantics of function, just let me stop typing it so often

There are two types of code. A large pile of crap code, and a small pile of crap code. Favour the small.

The above sentence was explained to Ben and I from a top notch IBM engineer who has written more code than I have had hot dinners.
Less code is good. Less to read, easier to [...]