AJAX

Here is a list of cheat sheets for the Windows and .NET platform that I frequently use and I think are of great interest. Visual Studio 2005 Keyboard Shortcut References Visual C# 2005 - PDF grayscale | PDF color Visual C++ 2005 - PDF grayscale | PDF color Visual Basic 2005 - PDF grayscale | PDF color SharePoint and Office stuff CSS Reference Chart for SharePoint 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services v3) CSS Reference Chart for SharePoint 2003 New Office 2007 User Interface - Word | PDF Web and ASP.NET stuff Microsoft AJAX ClientScript Cheat Sheet - ZIP JavaScript Cheat Sheet - PNG | PDF Other stuff

Finally ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, known as Atlas, is released in a fully supported version. The Download is available at http://ajax.asp.net. Here’s a summary from Scott’s blog: The ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, which is available for free with full Microsoft support, can be extended with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit - a set of more than 30 controls for ASP.NET. Microsoft also releases the client-side ASP.NET AJAX JavaScript library under the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) which allows you to modify the library and the server-side code is released under Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL) so your debugging will be easier.

We have been doing a lot of work, on our product, with dynamic updates of web pages - you know the AJAX stuff. Most of the server side results are returned as XML and are delivered from different Web Services. Since I really like optimizations and like good and nice looking code I have been going back and forth in decision of how to return data to the client; XML or JSON. JSON are in some cases more effective but when the object model it tries to represent gets more complex you neither get nice looking code nor saves that much bytes.

The XML Reference Guide is a great site containing everything you need to know on XML standards, from the Document Object Model to RSS to AJAX. Each topic contains in-depth descriptions and samples wich allows you to easily read up on a technology or just have it as a reference whenever you need to. Bookmark this and save for future use.

Ever wondered what JavaScript closures are? Morris Johns has put togehter a nice introduction to the mysterious closures - JavaScript closures for dummies. Make sure to read it before you do any more JavaScripting. Understanding JavaScript closures will make your JS programming more efficient and you can avoid the dreaded memory leaks in Internet Explorer especially when making home brewed Ajax applications. And of course learning this stuff is fun for us developers…

Microsoft has release the first public release of the Windows Live Gadgets SDK, you can find it MicrosoftGadgets.com. You can also find the Gadgets Development Overview for Microsoft Sidebar for Windows Vista Beta 2 on the site. Developing Gadgets for both live.com and Microsoft Sidebar will be really easy and fun. But I see a problem with only having live.com as the only web-based Gadget host (host meaning where the Gadget can execute). I would like to see an implementation in either Microsoft SharePoint Services or as a standalone product, so you can host Gadgets in an Intranet scenario. There are some examples on how to host your own Gadgets; for example Donovan West has an example using an iframe solution. The problem is still that the Gadgets are hosted externally which is not that great if you think about security issues.