Ajax

Microsoft’s open source projects may help it sell software

If you’re linking to outside JavaScript code in your Web pages, you’re probably (hopefully!) aware that there are certain security risks. Microsoft’s Scott Isaacs talked about the problem at a session at PDC 2008 and said there are essentially two ways most sites handle this threat: some ignore it and hope for the best, while others bring in IFrames — which have their own problems, like clickjacking.

The problem remains unsolved, but one approach Microsoft is trying is a new technology called Web Sandbox, which it announced at PDC. The Web Sandbox is a server-side program that retrieves outside scripts, transforms them to make them secure and embeds them directly to the HTML. You can see Isaccs’ complete talk explaining how to use Web Sandbox on Channel 9.

Which brings us to today’s news: Web Sandbox is now being released as open source, under the Apache License 2.0. What’s interesting here isn’t just that Microsoft is continuing its overtures into OSS, but that it’s continuing to do so primarily on the Web front. Two of its other major flirtations with open source have been its support of jQuery and its release of the code for its business-oriented Silverlight controls.

I don’t think anybody is accusing Microsoft of being altruistic, so I won’t bother making the case that this is an obvious example of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” But it seems to me that Microsoft’s open source strategy hinges on being open on the Web and sticking with proprietary software everywhere else. Pricing for Windows 7 hasn’t been released yet, but I’m guessing it’ll cost more than Ubuntu.

That two-pronged approach makes a lot of sense. The Internet has always been free to use, and if people aren’t going to pay for your software, you may as well give away the source. Desktops and enterprise apps, on the other hand, still provide major sources of income for software vendors.

For Microsoft to stay relevant as a software company, it has to continue to attract top developers, both to itself and to the ISVs who develop for Windows. Playing nice with OSS on the Web may help Microsoft keep up with the cool new upstarts so that it can continue to make money where there’s money to be made.

ASP.NET Ajax Roundtable

The Ajax interface has proved an interesting animal. Many people trace asynchronous JavaScript use back to Microsoft’s early Outlook Web clients, but it was not promoted by Microsoft much until open-source AJAX [for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML] as used by Google became popular about three years ago. Then, Microsoft embraced it wholeheartedly, creating its own ASP.NET Ajax version of AJAX, and saving some trouble for its developer legions. Yet, third parties still have a role to play in moving ASP.NET Ajax forward, as  SearchWinDevelopment.com’s Vendor roundtable series can attest.

ASP.NET Ajax Roundtable Part 1 - Browser Compatibility

ASP.NET Ajax Roundtable Part 2 - Resurgence in JavaScript

ASP.NET Ajax Roundtable Part 3 - Open Source

From the labs: Doloto splits code for Web 2.0 applications

A whole new thing called ‘Web 2.0′ has arisen along with the AJAX phoenix. AJAX can improve responsiveness of networked applications by getting the client to do more work. But the first request from and the first download to the client-side cache can incur a dramatic performance hit.

Microsoft Research boffins have been cogitating on this, and have produce a PDF paper discussing Doloto, a system that analyzes application workloads and automatically performs code splitting of existing large Web 2.0 applications.

Since code download is interleaved with application execution, users can start interacting with the Web application much sooner, without waiting for the code that implements extra, unused features, using the Doloto framework, the team writes.

LINQ, WPF supported in Visual Studio 2008

Now that VS 2008 is out of the box, so to speak, it appears that a new era in Windows development is upon us. Language-Integrated Query is one of several game-changing technologies now supported in the Microsoft software kit. Although it is still early and there is a lot of learning to do, LINQ is poised as a whole new way of developing with data.

It is fair to say that the first rush of .NET technology was about catching up with Java, although there was much unique about .NET too. With LINQ, for now, it seems Microsoft has stolen a march on the Java opposition.

I spoke recently with Jason Beres, director of product management at Infragistics, which is one of the major third-parties in the Microsoft market. Beres said people will take LINQ very seriously. “I think it going to be the de facto way to do any real data binding or object access moving forward,” he said.

With the new Microsoft tool kit comes Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Is WPF game changing? That is hard to say. When it was first conceived, the ubiquitous Web interface seemed to be overstressed, and ready to be replaced by a new generation of WPF-based Smart Clients that would use something like WPF. But, before WPF made it too market, AJAX came on strong as a means to give new life to Web interfaces.

This means the plate of companies like Infragistics is pretty full. Infragistics has just rolled out NetAdvantage for WPF 2007, which is compatible with Visual Studio 2008. At the same time, according to Beres, the company has been re-tooling its frameworks around ASP.NET AJAX as well.

For Infragistics and others, Silverlight looms as another alternative interface. Watch for Infragistics and others to provide Silverlight components, especially now that Silverlight 2.0 (which, more than its predecessor, rightly bears the mantle of “WPF/Everywhere”) arrives in its first beta form.

LINQ, WPF and VS 2008 have been primary areas-of-interest for the SearchWindowsDevelopment.com site for some time. We invite you to check out our LINQ VS 2008 pages, and to stay tuned.

RELATED INFORMATION:
> VS 2008 and LINQ Topic Page
> Introducing WPF
> Introduction to Silverlight 1.0

AJAX Enabled Web sites in Visual Studio 2008

Visual Studio 2005 provides an Web site application template to create AJAX enabled ASP.NET Web sites.

However, when you use Visual Studio 2008, you will not find this template in the New Web site creation templates.  The reason for this is that  Visual Studio 2008, by default creates a .NET Framework 3.5 application.  See the .NET Framework type at the top right section of the window image below.

AJAX is now integrated into the framework.  In Visual Studio 2008 all web sites that are created using .NET Framework 3.5 are AJAX enabled.  You don’t have to create a separate AJAX enabled web pages.

Ajax applications, not their developers, should scream and shout

Ajax is cool, but the programming paradigm may be a bit overwhelming, particularly for those new to JavaScript, Web development or, gulp, both. Fortunately, Ajax remains relevant as it approaches its third birthday (hereby granting it AARP membership in the world of Web technologies), which means plenty of guidance is out there for the taking.

First we head to the independent site ASP.NET Resources, where Millan Negovan has updated his set of Microsoft Ajax Library Cheat Sheets. (The update coincides with the release of Visual Studio 2008, into which ASP.NET AJAX has been deliciously baked.)

Negovan is offering two new cheat sheets — one for the DomElement class and one for the DomEvent class. There are seven documents in all, and they can be downloaded from the blog entry above.

Next up is Kazi Manzur Rashid’s blog. This blogger has started what promises to be a lengthy tutorial series on the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, which is Microsoft’s shared-source compilation of client-side controls that one can plug into ASP.NET AJAX application.

The first part of the series, which is being posted on DotNetSlackers, takes a closer look at two ASP.NET AJAX “input helper” controls — FilteredTextBox and NumericUpDown. Subsequent articles will touch upon additional input helper controls, as well as container and pop-up controls, the toolkit’s architecture and the basics of building a control for the toolkit.

Meanwhile, this InfoQ post dissects a presentation made back at MIX07 that focuses on improving ASP.NET AJAX application performance. It’s worthwhile reading for anyone who has struggled to make his or her Ajax apps “scream on the client,” as the presentation title put it.

Finally, the Shameless Plug Dept. has a few SearchWinDevelopment.com Learning Guides to recommend. These, admittedly, are, um, aged, so we can’t guarantee that every single link still works, but we nonetheless deem them worthy of your attention.

• ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Learning Guide
• ASP.NET AJAX Learning Guide
• Ajax Learning Guide

And that’s all we have to say about that.

How does ASP.NET Ajax rate among Ajax frameworks?

There’s Ajax and there’s Ajax. There is Ajax in the Java world where it’s no-holds-barrred, Katy-bar-the-door, and find-yourself-a-framework-or-die. Then there is Ajax in the .NET world where Microsoft created its own Ajax framework which is offered to you  as part of the company’s other Web development offerings.  

However, Microsoft’s Ajax framework is not the sole Ajax framework available to .NET developers. And at least one blogger thought it was worthwhile to query the Web audience to see how .NET Ajax framworks stacked up.

Italian Simone Chiaretta, .NET developer and Subtext core member, was spurred in his quest by the recent Richard Monson-Haefel Ajaxian survey on Ajax framework use, but wanted to see what things looked like for .NET. Chiaretta found —  lo-and- behold  – that Microsoft’s ASP.NET Ajax was tops by far among responders.He writes:

… among the 95% of the .NET developers that said they are using some flavor of Ajax either in production, development or prototype, the most-used Ajax toolkit is ASP.NET Ajax, with 73,7%, followed by the Ajax Control Toolkit which is used by almost half of the .NET developer that are using Ajax.

Despite, Microsoft’s predominance, there is percolating use of other Ajax frameworks amid the .NET crew. Interestingly, among ASP.NET users cited in Monson-Haefel’s survey, ASP.NET Ajax use is represented by 36.3% of responders, and is in a statistical dead heat with Prototype and jQuery open-source alternatives. Writes Burton Group’s Monson-Haefel:

What is interesting about the Ajax market is that it’s more diversified in 2007 than it was in 2005 - the number of toolkits keep growing and jostling position in terms of usage.

Check out the .NET Ajax Survey, the Monson-Haefel Ajax survey, and filter of Monson-Haefel’s data.

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit updated for VS 2008

You can add the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit to the list of products that has been updated to target Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5.

The toolkit itself is hosted on the AJAX Control Toolkit page on CodePlex, Microsoft’s site for its shared-source development projects.

In addition, and not unexpectedly, Scott Guthrie has a blog post in which he announced the toolkit update and pointed to a variety of videos and tutorials. There’s also a bit of information about migrating Web projects to Visual Studio 2008 — as is evidenced by the blog entry title, ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit and Web Deployment Project Releases for VS 2008.

Finally, the .NET Developments blog’s Shameless Plug Dept. would be remiss in not referring readers to the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Learning Guide, which was published on SearchWinDevelopment.com back in April.