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 ... (more)

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 underl... (more)

hen I recently received this message from a frustrated reader: After hours and hours of slamming my head into the desk it turns out it was the darn "d" in the response. My home computer is on .NET 2.0 and my work computer is on 3.5. Jimminie Christmas! I realized that the “.d” in... (more)

As a longtime listener myself, I was eager when Craig asked me to come on the Polymorphic Podcast to talk about jQuery. I’ve always enjoyed how he doesn’t shy away from talking about HTML and JavaScript, which is still too uncommon in the .NET world. With that in mind, I knew we... (more)

As an ASP.NET developer working on the client-side, one problem you’ll encounter is how to reference the HTML elements that ASP.NET web controls generate. All too often, you find yourself wasting time trying to reference TextBox1, when the element is actually rendered as ctl00_... (more)

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 b... (more)

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, significantl... (more)

As much as I enjoyed attending MIX09 this year, it wasn’t a difficult decision when Karsten asked me to write an article for the MIX Online site. Reading this here, there’s a good chance the article is targeted below the amount of jQuery expertise you already have. However, it’s b... (more)

The problem of how to handle dates in JSON is one of the more troublesome issues that may arise when directly calling ASP.NET AJAX web services and page methods. Unlike every other data type in the language, JavaScript offers no declarative method for expressing a Date. Consequ... (more)

So far, my examples of using jQuery to interact with ASP.NET AJAX services have avoided passing complex data to the server during the request. This has been intentional, because I didn’t want to over-complicate the examples. For primarily read-only scenarios, like the RSS reader e... (more)

Thanks to all of your excellent feedback during the months since the last release of PostBack Ritalin, an improved version is ready for release today. With the addition of “disable all elements”, I believe the control is now feature complete, worthy of a version 1.0 release. Not... (more)

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 a... (more)

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 c... (more)

Having used JavaScript for over a decade, I’ve read many books covering the language. Some focused primarily on syntax. Others recounted and solved specific real-world problems. Learning a language as a set of tasks is one way to get up to speed quickly, but it’s not a very good... (more)

When working directly with JSON serialized ASMX services, be it via jQuery, pure XmlHttpRequest calls, or anything else other than the ScriptManager, one question inevitably arises. That question is of the inexplicable .d attribute that appeared in ASP.NET 3.5. What is it? Why i... (more)

The time for this is long past due. The current logo does not make the sort of first impression that it needs to. It’s a good reminder that we should usually stick to our core competencies (i.e. I shouldn’t pretend to be a graphic designer). I know at least a handful of you are ... (more)

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, ... (more)