Dave Ward

As jQuery’s popularity in the .NET community has risen over the past year, one recurring theme I’ve seen is the desire to refactor away the details of using it to call ASP.NET AJAX services. Whether through helper function or specialized jQuery plugin, I’ve seen numerous methods proposed and/or in use. Personally, the syntax never bothered me. The contentType parameter is ugly, but I have a Visual Studio code snippet for the $.ajax call and rarely think about it. That came to an end earlier this year, when I started using dataFilter. I needed to isolate my code from the “.d” issue, and wanted to take advantage of browser-native JSON parsing in Firefox 3.5 and IE8, which required a bulky dataFilter. Repeating that entire callback function in every $.ajax call was not ... (more)

Automatically minify and combine JavaScript in Visual Studio

As you begin developing more complex client-side functionality, managing the size and shape of your JavaScript includes becomes a key concern. It’s all too easy to accidentally end up with hundreds of kilobytes of JavaScript spread across many separate HTTP requests, significantly slowing down your initial page loads. To combat this, it’s important to combine and compress your JavaScript.... (more)

A Sneak Peak at ASP.NET AJAX 4.0’s Client-Side Templating

Dave Ward's "Encosia" Blog Hot on the heels of the recent ASP.NET AJAX roadmap, Bertrand and team have released a limited preview of the new AJAX functionality coming in ASP.NET 4.0. To see how the new functionality stacks up, I decided to recreate my recent jTemplates example, using only ASP.NET AJAX and its new templating features. Eventually, I settled on using the DataView class, whic... (more)

Use jQuery to catch and display ASP.NET AJAX service errors

If you don’t properly handle the inevitable errors in your web applications, you can expect your users to eventually react about like this guy. Since they typically squelch any server-side errors, AJAX service calls are especially problematic. In fact, they rarely even throw a client-side error when they fail. Even when a client-side error is thrown, most users won’t notice it and the ... (more)

Improving jQuery’s JSON Performance and Security

When you’re working with JSON, performance and security are often opposing, yet equally important concerns. One of these areas of contention is handling the JSON strings returned by a server. Most JavaScript libraries do a great job of abstracting away the details, but the underlying process has long been a frustrating exercise in compromise. On one hand, eval() is the fastest widely avai... (more)