Dave Ward

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 available method, but it is not safe. On the other hand, textual JSON parsers written in JavaScript may be much safer, but are dramatically slower. In client-side situations, where milliseconds count, such a large performance overhead is typically too prohibitive to accept. Recently, an exciting new alternative has emerged: browser-native JSON parsing. Integrating JSON parsing as part of t... (more)

Highslide JS .NET v4.1.4

A new version of Highslide JS .NET is available today. Nothing major has changed in the .NET control, but the newer Highslide JS version includes several bug fixes, compatibility improvements, and performance benefits. To eliminate one common source of confusion, I’ve decided to begin versioning Highslide JS .NET based on the version of Highslide JS embedded within the the control. For ex... (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)

Simplify Calling ASP.NET AJAX Services From jQuery

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 ha... (more)

$(document).ready() and pageLoad() are not the same!

Recently, I’ve attended several presentations in which ASP.NET AJAX’s pageLoad() shortcut is demonstrated as interchangeable with jQuery’s $(document).ready() event. The suggestion that both methods are equivalent actually appears to be true in simple demos, but is not the case and is certain to lead to later confusion. While they seem similar on the surface, $(document).ready() and pageL... (more)