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  • Java Champion Stephen Chin on New Features and Functionality in JavaFX

    - by janice.heiss(at)oracle.com
    In an Oracle Technology Network interview, Java Champion Stephen Chin, Chief Agile Methodologist for GXS, and one of the most prolific and innovative JavaFX developers, provides an update on the rapidly developing changes in JavaFX.Chin expressed enthusiasm about recent JavaFX developments:"There is a lot to be excited about -- JavaFX has a new API face. All the JavaFX 2.0 APIs will be exposed via Java classes that will make it much easier to integrate Java server and client code. This also opens up some huge possibilities for JVM language integration with JavaFX." Chin also spoke about developments in Visage, the new language project created to fill the gap left by JavaFX Script:"It's a domain-specific language for writing user interfaces, which addresses the needs of UI developers. Visage takes over where JavaFX Script left off, providing a statically typed, declarative language with lots of features to make UI development a pleasure.""My favorite language features from Visage are the object literal syntax for quickly building scene graphs and the bind keyword for connecting your UI to the backend model. However, the language is built for UI development from the top down, including subtle details like null-safe dereferencing for exception-less code."Read the entire article.

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  • Welcome Stephen Chin and James Weaver to Oracle!

    - by arungupta
    Stephen Chin and James Weaver - the two JavaFX "rockstar" speakers from the community are joining Oracle's Java Evangelist Team. Both of them have co-authored a recently released book - Pro Java FX 2 and are well known for their passion to promote JavaFX. This shows Oracle's continued commitment to Java and JavaFX. Jim blogs at javafxpert.com and can be reached on @JavaFXpert. Steve blogs at and can be reached at steveonjava.com and can be reached at @steveonjava. You'll have an opportunity to meet and engage with them at different community facing activities. Welcome Stephen and James to Oracle!

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  • Stephen Forte visits IDEP Foundation Recipient of our post-tsunami .NET Charity Auction

    Earlier this week I got an email from Stephen Forte saying he was in Bali and would love to meet the folks from IDEP Foundation. IDEP is an Indonesian NGO for which Stephen and I coordinated a charity auction 5 years ago and raised $10,000. We raised another chunk of money in a repeat auction in June of that year as well. I sent an email to my dear friend Petra, a Canadian ex-pat, who runs IDEP. I met Petra through Keith Pleas who had connections to IDEP and was looking for help for them after...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Finding the Value in SOA by Stephen Bennett

    - by J Swaroop
    Here's an excerpt from a very interesting article on CIO update titled "Finding the value in SOA" by Stephen Bennett of Oracle "Because of this, SOA must not be seen as a solution development approach that starts and ends once a solution is delivered. It must be seen as an on-going process that, when coupled with a strategic framework, can change and evolve with the business over time. Unfortunately, many enterprises adopt SOA without utilizing a strategic framework, causing a host of challenges for their business. Just a few of the challenges I have seen include: More complexity and moving parts Increased costs Projects taking longer than before Solutions more fragile than ever Little or no agility Difficulty identifying and discovering services Exponentially growing governance challenges Limited service re-use Duplication of effort leading to service sprawl Multiple siloed technology focused SOAs Funding for service oriented projects being cut" Read the complete article

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  • Scrum Master Stephen Forte Teaches Agile Development, Silverlight and BI at GIDS 2010

    - by rajesh ahuja
    Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 – Gold Standard for India's Software Developer Ecosystem Bangalore, March 25, 2010: The author of several books on application and database development including Programming SQL Server 2008 and certified Scrum Master Stephen Forte is coming this summer to India's biggest summit for the developer ecosystem - Great Indian Developer Summit. At the summit, Stephen will conduct a workshop guaranteed to give attendees a jump start in taking a certified scrum master exam. Scrum, one of the most popular Agile project management and development methods, which is starting to be adopted at major corporations and on very large projects. After an introduction to the basics of Scrum like project planning and estimation, the Scrum Master, team, product owner and burn down, and of course the daily Scrum, Stephen will show many real world applications of the methodology drawn from his own experience as a Scrum Master. Negotiating with the business, estimation and team dynamics are all discussed as well as how to use Scrum in small organizations, large enterprise environments and consulting environments. Stephen will also discuss using Scrum with virtual teams and an off-shoring environment. He will then take a look at the tools we will use for Agile development, including planning poker, unit testing, and much more. On 20th April at the GIDS.NET Conference, Stephen will also conduct a series of sessions on Microsoft computing technologies. He will teach how to build data driven, n-tier Rich Internet Applications (RIA) with Silverlight 4.0. Line of business applications (LOB) in Silverlight 4.0 are easy by tapping the power of WCF RIA Services, the Silverlight Toolkit, and elevated out of browser support. Stephen's demo centric session will walk you through an example of building a LOB application with Silverlight 4.0. See how Silverlight and WCF RIA Services support domain logic, services, data binding, validation, server based paging, authentication, authorization and much more. Silverlight 4.0 means business. Silverlight runs C# and Visual Basic code, and so it seems natural that a business application might share some code between the Silverlight client and its ASP.NET Web server. You may want to run some code client-side for interactivity, but re-run that code on the server for security or reliability. This is possible, and there are several techniques you can use to accomplish this goal. In Stephen's second talk learn about the various techniques and their pros and cons. Some techniques work better in C#, others in VB. Still others are simpler with a little extra tooling or code-generation. Any serious Silverlight business application will almost certainly face this issue, and this session gets you going fast. In the third talk, Stephen will explain how to properly architect and deploy a BI application using a mix of some exciting new tools and some old familiar ones. He will start with a traditional relational transaction centric database (OLTP) and explore ways to build a data warehouse (OLAP), looking at the star and snowflake schemas. Next he will look at the process of extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) your OLTP data into your data warehouse. Different techniques for ETL will be described and the various tradeoffs will be discussed. Then he will look at using the warehouse for reporting, drill down, and data analysis in Microsoft Excel's PowerPivot 2010. The session will round off by showing how to properly build a cube and build a data analysis application on top of that cube, and conclude by looking at some tools to help with the data visualization process. Every year, GIDS is a game changer for several thousands of IT professionals, providing them with a competitive edge over their peers, enlightening them with bleeding-edge information most useful in their daily jobs, helping them network with world-class experts and visionaries, and providing them with a much needed thrust in their careers. Attend Great Indian Developer Summit to gain the information, education and solutions you seek. From post-conference workshops, breakout sessions by expert instructors, keynotes by industry heavyweights, enhanced networking opportunities, and more. About Great Indian Developer Summit Great Indian Developer Summit is the gold standard for India's software developer ecosystem for gaining exposure to and evaluating new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software and standards. Packed with premium knowledge, action plans and advise from been-there-done-it veterans, creators, and visionaries, the 2010 edition of Great Indian Developer Summit features focused sessions, case studies, workshops and power panels that will transform you into a force to reckon with. Featuring 3 co-located conferences: GIDS.NET, GIDS.Web, GIDS.Java and an exclusive day of in-depth tutorials - GIDS.Workshops, from 20 April to 24 April at the IISc campus in Bangalore. At GIDS you'll participate in hundreds of sessions encompassing the full range of Microsoft computing, Java, Agile, RIA, Rich Web, open source/standards, languages, frameworks and platforms, practical tutorials that deep dive into technical skill and best practices, inspirational keynote presentations, an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products activities, engaging networking events, and the interact with the best and brightest of speakers from around the world. For further information on GIDS 2010, please visit the summit on the web http://www.developersummit.com/ A Saltmarch Media Press Release E: [email protected] Ph: +91 80 4005 1000

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  • SQLAuthority News – Pluralsight Course Review – Practices for Software Startups – Part 1 of 2

    - by pinaldave
    This is first part of the two part series of Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. The course is written by Stephen Forte (Blog | Twitter). Stephen Forte is the Chief Strategy Officer of the venture backed company, Telerik, a leading vendor of developer and team productivity tools. Stephen is also a Certified Scrum Master, Certified Scrum Professional, PMP, and also speaks regularly at industry conferences around the world. He has written several books on application and database development.  Stephen is also a board member of the Scrum Alliance. Startups – Everybodies Dream Start-up companies are an important topic right now – everyone wants to start their own business.  It is also important to remember that all companies were a start up at one point – from your corner store to the giants like Microsoft and Apple.  Research proves that not every start-up succeeds, in fact, most will fail before their first year.  There are many reasons for this, and this could be due to the fact that there are many stages to a start-up company, and stumbling at any of these stages can lead to failure.  It is important to understand what makes a start-up company succeed at all its hurdles to become successful.  It is even important to define success.  For most start-ups this would mean becoming their own independently functioning company or to be bought out for a hefty profit by a larger company.  The idea of making a hefty profit by living your dream is extremely important, and you can even think of start-ups as the new craze.  That’s why studying them is so important – they are very popular, but things have changed a lot since their inception. Starting the Startups Beginning a start-up company used to be difficult, but now facilities and information is widely available, and it is much easier.  But that means it is much easier to fail, also.  Previously to start your own company, everything was planned and organized, resources were ensured and backed up before beginning; even the idea of starting your own business was a big thing.  Now anybody can do it, and the steps are simple and outlines everywhere – you can get online software and easily outsource , cloud source, or crowdsource a lot of your material.  But without the type of planning previously required, things can often go badly. New Products – New Ideas – New World There are so many fantastic new products, but they don’t reach success all the time.  I find start-up companies very interesting, and whenever I meet someone who is interested in the subject or already starting their own company, I always ask what they are doing, their plans, goals, market, etc.  I am sorry to say that in most cases, they cannot answer my questions.  It is true that many fantastic ideas fail because of bad decisions.  These bad decisions were not made intentionally, but people were simply unaware of what they should be doing.  This will always lead to failure.  But I am happy to say that all these issues can be gone because Pluralsight is now offering a course all about start-ups by Stephen Forte.  Stephen is a start up leader.  He has successfully started many companies and most are still going strong, or have gone on to even bigger and better things. Beginning Course on Startup I have always thought start-ups are a fascinating subject, and decided to take his course, but it is three hours long.  This would be hard to fit into my busy work day all at once, so I decided to do half of his course before my daughter wakes up, and the other half after she goes to sleep.  The course is divided into six modules, so this would be easy to do.  I began the first chapter early in the morning, at 5 am.  Stephen jumped right into the middle of the subject in the very first module – designing your business plan.  The first question you will have to answer to yourself, to others, and to investors is: What is your product and when will we be able to see it?  So a very important concept is a “minimal viable product.”  This means setting goals for yourself and your product.  We all have large dreams, but your minimal viable product doesn’t have to be your final vision at the very first.  For example: Apple is a giant company, but it is still evolving.  Steve Jobs didn’t envision the iPhone 6 at the very beginning.  He had to start at the first iPhone and do his market research, and the idea evolved into the technology you see now.  So for yourself, you should decide a beginning and stop point.  Do your market research.  Determine who you want to reach, what audience you want for your product.  You can have a great idea that simply will not work in the market, do need, bottlenecks, lack of resources, or competition.  There is a lot of research that needs to be done before you even write a business plan, and Stephen covers it in the very first chapter. The Team – Unique Key to Success After jumping right into the subject in the very first module, I wondered what Stephen could have in store for me for the rest of the course.  Chapter number two is building a team.  Having a team is important regardless of what your startup is.  You can be a true visionary with endless ideas and energy, but one person can still not do everything.  It is important to decide from the very beginning if you will have cofounders, team leaders, and how many employees you’ll need.  Even more important, you’ll need to decide what kind of team you want – what personalities, skills, and type of energy you want each of your employees to bring.  Do you want to have an A+ team with a B- idea, or do you have a B- idea that needs an A+ team to sell it?  Stephen asks all the hard questions!  I was especially impressed by his insight on developing.  You have to decide if you need developers, how many, and what their skills should be. I found this insight extremely useful for everyday usage, not just for start-up companies.  I would apply this kind of information in management at any position.  An amazing team will build an amazing product – and that doesn’t matter if you’re a start-up company or a small team working for a much larger business. Customer Development – The Ultimate Obective Chapter three was about customer development. According to Stephen, there are four different steps to develop a customer base.  The first question to ask yourself is if you are envisioning a large customer base buying a few products each, or a small, dedicated base that buys a lot of your product – quantity vs. Quality.  He also discusses how to earn, retain, and get more customers.  He also says that each customer should be placed in a different role – some will be like investors, who regularly spend with you and invest their money in your business.  It is then your job to take that investment and turn it into a better product in the future.  You need to deal with their money properly – think of it is as theirs as investors, not yours as profit.  At the end of this module I felt that only Stephen could provide this kind of insight, and then he listed all the resources he took his information from.  I have never seen a group of people so passionate about their customers. It was indeed a long day for me. In tomorrow’s part 2 we will discuss rest of the three module and also will see a quick video of the Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Resolve a URL from a Partial View (ASP.NET MVC)

    Working on an ASP.NET MVC application and needed the ability to resolve a URL from a partial view. For example, I have an image I want to display, but I need to resolve the virtual path (say, ~/Content/Images/New.png) into a relative path that the browser can use, such as ../../Content/Images/New.png or /MyAppName/Content/Images/New.png. Astandard view derives from the System.Web.UI.Page class, meaning you have access to the ResolveUrl and ResolveClientUrl methods. Consequently, you can write markup/code like the following:' /The problem is that the above code does not work as expected in a partial view. What's a little confusing is that while the above code compiles and the page, when visited through a browser, renders, the call to Page.ResolveClientUrl returns precisely what you pass in, ~/Content/Images/New.png, in this instance. The browser doesn't know what to do with ~, it presumes it's part of the URL, so it sends the request to the server for the image with the ~ in the URL, which results in a broken image.I did a bit of searching online and found this handy tip from Stephen Walther - Using ResolveUrl in an HTML Helper. In a nutshell, Stephen shows how to create an extension method for the HtmlHelper class that uses the UrlHelper class to resolve a URL. Specifically, Stephen shows how to add an Image extension method to HtmlHelper. I incorporated Stephen's code into my codebase and also created a more generic extension method, which I named ResolveUrl.public static MvcHtmlString ResolveUrl(this HtmlHelper htmlHelper, string url) { var urlHelper = new UrlHelper(htmlHelper.ViewContext.RequestContext); return MvcHtmlString.Create(urlHelper.Content(url)); }With this method in place you can resolve a URL in a partial view like so:' /Or you could use Stephen's Html.Image extension method (althoughmy more generic Html.ResolveUrl method could be used in non-image related scenarios where you needed to get a relative URL from a virtual one in a partial view). Thanks for the helpful tip, Stephen!Happy Programming!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Resolve a URL from a Partial View (ASP.NET MVC)

    Working on an ASP.NET MVC application and needed the ability to resolve a URL from a partial view. For example, I have an image I want to display, but I need to resolve the virtual path (say, ~/Content/Images/New.png) into a relative path that the browser can use, such as ../../Content/Images/New.png or /MyAppName/Content/Images/New.png. Astandard view derives from the System.Web.UI.Page class, meaning you have access to the ResolveUrl and ResolveClientUrl methods. Consequently, you can write markup/code like the following:' /The problem is that the above code does not work as expected in a partial view. What's a little confusing is that while the above code compiles and the page, when visited through a browser, renders, the call to Page.ResolveClientUrl returns precisely what you pass in, ~/Content/Images/New.png, in this instance. The browser doesn't know what to do with ~, it presumes it's part of the URL, so it sends the request to the server for the image with the ~ in the URL, which results in a broken image.I did a bit of searching online and found this handy tip from Stephen Walther - Using ResolveUrl in an HTML Helper. In a nutshell, Stephen shows how to create an extension method for the HtmlHelper class that uses the UrlHelper class to resolve a URL. Specifically, Stephen shows how to add an Image extension method to HtmlHelper. I incorporated Stephen's code into my codebase and also created a more generic extension method, which I named ResolveUrl.public static MvcHtmlString ResolveUrl(this HtmlHelper htmlHelper, string url) { var urlHelper = new UrlHelper(htmlHelper.ViewContext.RequestContext); return MvcHtmlString.Create(urlHelper.Content(url)); }With this method in place you can resolve a URL in a partial view like so:' /Or you could use Stephen's Html.Image extension method (althoughmy more generic Html.ResolveUrl method could be used in non-image related scenarios where you needed to get a relative URL from a virtual one in a partial view). Thanks for the helpful tip, Stephen!Happy Programming!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Wireless doesn't work on a Lenovo V570

    - by Stephen
    I've had Ubuntu installed on my HD for about 3 months but ever since I ran into this wireless issue I kinda lost my lust of Ubuntu. I have zero experience getting around with/ using the console command. I have a Lenovo V570. I got the driver update for the broadcom networking card via the Additional Drivers application but that did nothing. I love the look and feel of using Ubuntu but I have no technological experience for the matter. Any help would be awesome. When I scan for wireless connections while in Ubuntu, my computer picks up nothing, while on Win7 it will pick up the handful of wireless networks around my area. My wired connection is fine, but the use of not having wireless on a laptop is rather contradictory to it as a feature. Cheers! Also, I just installed 11.10, if that helps any. Yes, I used the search before I posted this, but again I have ZERO understanding of the command stuff and need a meat and potatoes answer(s). stephen@ubuntu:~$ sudo lshw -class network [sudo] password for stephen: *-network UNCLAIMED description: Network controller product: BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0 version: 01 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list configuration: latency=0 resources: memory:f1900000-f1903fff *-network description: Ethernet interface product: RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:04:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: 06 serial: f0:de:f1:63:98:14 size: 100Mbit/s capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress msix vpd bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=r8169 driverversion=2.3LK-NAPI duplex=full firmware=rtl_nic/rtl8168e-2.fw ip=192.168.1.78 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=MII speed=100Mbit/s resources: irq:41 ioport:2000(size=256) memory:f1804000-f1804fff memory:f1800000-f1803fff stephen@ubuntu:~$ rfkill list all 0: ideapad_wlan: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: yes Hard blocked: no 1: acer-wireless: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: yes Hard blocked: no

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  • Show Notes: Architects in the Cloud

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Stephen G. Bennett and Archie Reed, the authors of Silver Clouds, Dark Linings: A Concise Guide to Cloud Computing,  discuss what’s new and what’s not so new about cloud computing, talk about how marketing hype has muddied understanding of what cloud is and what it can do, and explore other issues in the latest ArchBeat interview series. Listen to Part 1 Listen to Part 2 (December 22) Listen to Part 3 (December 29) Listen to Part 4 (January 5) Connect If you have questions, comments, or would otherwise like to interact directly with Steve or Archie, you can so through the following channels: Stephen G. Bennett Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn Archie Reed Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn Steve and Archie have also set up a Twitter account and blog specifically for their book: Twitter: @concisecloud Blog: concisecloud.com Of course, the book is available on Amazon: http://amzn.to/silverclouddarklinings Stay tuned: RSS Technorati Tags: oracle,otn,archbeat,cloud computing,podcast,. stephen bennett,archie reed del.icio.us Tags: oracle,otn,archbeat,cloud computing,podcast,. stephen bennett,archie reed

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  • SQLAuthority News – Pluralsight Course Review – Practices for Software Startups – Part 2 of 2

    - by pinaldave
    This is the second part of the two part series of Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. Please read the first part of this series over here. The course is written by Stephen Forte (Blog | Twitter). Stephen Forte is the Chief Strategy Officer of the venture backed company, Telerik. Personal Learning Schedule After these three sessions it was 6:30 am and time to do my own blog.  But for the rest of the day, I kept thinking about the course, and wanted to go back and finish.  I was wishing that I had woken up at 3 am so I could finish all at one go.  All day long I was digesting what I had learned.  At 10 pm, after my daughter had gone to bed, I sighed on again.  I was not disappointed by the long wait.  As I mentioned before, Stephen has started four to six companies, and all of them are very successful today. Here is the video I promised yesterday – it discusses the importance of Right Sizing Your Startup. The Heartbeat of Startup – Technology Stephen has combined all technology knowledge into one 30 minute session.  He discussed  how to start your project, how to deal with opinions, and how to deal with multiple ideas – every start up has multiple directions it can go. He spent a lot of time emphasized deciding which direction to go and how to decide which will be the best for you.  He called it a continuous development cycle. One of the biggest hazards for a start-up company is one person deciding the direction the company will go, until down the road another team member announces that there is a glitch in their part of the work and that everyone will have to start over.  Even though a team of two or five people can move quickly, often the decision has gone too long and cannot be easily fixed.   Stephen used an example from his own life:  he was biased for one type of technology, and his teammate for another.  In the end they opted for his teammate’s  choice , and in the end it was a good decision, even though he was unfamiliar with that particular program.  He argues that technology should not be a barrier to progress, that you cannot rely on your experience only.  This really spoke to me because I am a big fan of SQL, but I know there is more out there, and I should be more open to it.  I give my thanks to Stephen, I learned something in this module besides startups. Money, Success and Epic Win! The longest, but most interesting, the module was funding your start-up.  You need to fund the start-up right at the very beginning, if not done right you will run into trouble.  The good news is that a few years ago start-ups required a lot more money – think millions of dollars – but now start-ups can get off the ground for thousands.  Stephen used an example of a company that years ago would have needed a million dollars, but today could be started for $600.  It is true that things have changed, but you still need money.  For $600 you can start small and add dynamically, as needed.  But the truth is that if you have $600, $6000, or $6 million, it will be spent.  Don’t think of it as trying to save money, think of it as investing in your future.   You will need money, and you will need to (quickly) decide what you do with the money: shares, stakeholders, investing in a team, hiring a CEO.  This is so important because once you have money and start the company, the company IS your money.  It is your biggest currency – having a percentage of ownership in the company.  Investors will want percentages as repayment for their investment, and they will want a say in the business as well.  You will have to decide how far you will dilute your shares, and how the company will be divided, if at all.  If you don’t plan in advance, you will find that after gaining three or four investors, suddenly you are the minority owner in your own dream.  You need to understand funding carefully.  This single module is worth all the money you would have spent on the whole course alone.  I encourage everyone to listen to this single module even if they don’t watch any of the others.     Press End to Start the Game – Exists! The final module is exit strategies.  You did all this work, dealt with all political and legal issues.  What are you going to get out of it? The answer is simple: money.  Maybe you want your company to be bought out, for you talent to bring you a profit.  You can sell the company to someone and still head it.  Many options are available.  You could sell and still work as an employee but no longer own the company.  There are many exit strategies.  This is where all your hard work comes into play.  It is important not to feel fooled at any step.  There are so many good ideas that end up in the garbage because of poor planning, so that if you find yourself successful, you don’t want to blow it at this step!  The exit is important.  I thought that this aspect of the course was completely unique, and I loved Stephen’s point of view.  I was lost deep in thought after this module ended.  I actually took two hours worth of notes on this section alone – and it was only a three hour course.  I am planning on attending this course one more time next week, just to catch up on all the small bits of wisdom I’m sure I missed. Thank you Stephen for bringing your real world experience with us!  I recommend that everyone attends this course, even if they don’t want to begin their own start-up company. It was indeed a long day for me. Do not forget to read part 1 of this story and attend course Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • ASP.NET Connections Fall 2011 Slides and Code

    - by Stephen Walther
    Thanks everyone who came to my talks at ASP.NET Connections in Las Vegas!  There was a definite theme to my talks this year…taking advantage of JavaScript to build a rich presentation layer. I gave the following three talks: JsRender Templates – Originally, I was scheduled to give a talk on jQuery Templates.  However, jQuery Templates has been deprecated and JsRender is the new technology which replaces jQuery Templates. In the talk, I give plenty of code samples of using JsRender.  You can download the slides and code samples RIGHT HERE   HTML5 – In this talk, I focused on the features of HTML5 which are the most interesting to developers building database-driven Web applications. In particular, I discussed Web Sockets,  Web workers, Web Storage, Indexed DB, and the Offline Application Cache. All of these features are supported by Safari, Chrome, and Firefox today and they will be supported by Internet Explorer 10. You can download the slides and code samples RIGHT HERE   Ajax Control Toolkit – My company, Superexpert, is responsible for developing and maintaining the Ajax Control Toolkit. In this talk, I discuss all of the bug fixes and new features which the developers on the Superexpert team have added to the Ajax Control Toolkit over the previous six months. We also had a good discussion of the features which people want in future releases of the Ajax Control Toolkit. The slides and code samples for this talk can be downloaded RIGHT HERE   I had a great time in Las Vegas!  Good questions, friendly audience, and lots of opportunities for me to learn new things!      -- Stephen

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  • 15 Oracle customers are 'Winners' at Progressive Mfgs 100 Awards

    - by [email protected]
    This year, 15 Oracle customers will receive awards at the Managing Automation's PM100 Event  for their outstanding accomplishments in a number of supply chain applications innovation categories. The event will be held at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach Fl from May 3-6, 2010. Award winners include: Arvin Meritor, Ball Aerospace, US Dept. of Treasury/Engraving, Doosan Infracore, Freescale Semi, Ingersoll-Rand, JDS Uniphase, L&L Products, Masco Builders, Mercury Marine Sanmina-SCI, Siemens Water TEch, US Concrete, VirTex Assy Services. Details of the event and Oracle's sponsorship can be found at: http://www.managingautomation.com/awards/ or contact Stephen Slade at stephen[email protected]      

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  • Microsoft Templates included in jQuery 1.5!

    - by Stephen Walther
    When I joined the ASP.NET team as the Program Manager for Ajax, the ASP.NET team was working on releasing a new version of the Microsoft Ajax Library. This new version of the Microsoft Ajax Library had several really innovative and unique features such as support for client templates, client data-binding, script dependency management, and globalization. However, we kept hearing the message that our customers wanted to use jQuery when building ASP.NET applications. Therefore, about ten months ago, we decided to pursue a risky strategy. Scott Guthrie sent me to Cambridge to meet with John Resig – the creator of jQuery and leader of the jQuery project – to find out whether Microsoft and jQuery could work together. We wanted to find out whether the jQuery project would be open to allowing Microsoft to contribute the innovative features that we were developing for the Microsoft Ajax Library -- such as client templates and client data-binding -- to the jQuery library. Fortunately, the Cambridge meeting with Resig went well. John Resig was very open to accepting contributions to the jQuery library. Over the next few months, we worked out a process for Microsoft to contribute new features to the open-source jQuery project. Resig and Guthrie appeared on stage at the MIX10 conference to announce that Microsoft would be contributing features to jQuery. It has been a long journey, but I am happy to report success. Today, Microsoft and the jQuery project have announced that three plugins developed by developers on the ASP.NET team – the jQuery Templates, jQuery Data Link, and jQuery Globalization plugins – have been accepted as official jQuery plugins. In addition, the jQuery Templates plugin will be integrated into jQuery 1.5 which is the next major release of jQuery. You can learn more about the plugins by watching the following Web Camps TV episode hosted by James Senior with Stephen Walther: Web Camps TV #5 - Microsoft Commits Code to jQuery! You can read Scott Guthrie’s blog announcement here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/10/04/jquery-templates-data-link-and-globalization-accepted-as-official-jquery-plugins.aspx You can read the jQuery team’s announcement here: http://blog.jquery.com/2010/10/04/new-official-jquery-plugins-provide-templating-data-linking-and-globalization/ I wrote the original proposal for the jQuery Templates plugin. Dave Reed and Boris Moore were the ASP.NET developers responsible for actually writing the plugin (with lots of input from the jQuery team and the jQuery community). Boris has written a great set of tutorials on the Templates plugin. The first tutorial in his series is located here: http://www.borismoore.com/2010/09/introducing-jquery-templates-1-first.html I want to thank John Resig, Richard Worth, Scott Gonzalez, Rey Bango, Jorn Zaefferer, Karl Swedberg and all of the other members of the jQuery team for working with the ASP.NET team and accepting our contributions to the jQuery project.

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  • Announcing SonicAgile – An Agile Project Management Solution

    - by Stephen.Walther
    I’m happy to announce the public release of SonicAgile – an online tool for managing software projects. You can register for SonicAgile at www.SonicAgile.com and start using it with your team today. SonicAgile is an agile project management solution which is designed to help teams of developers coordinate their work on software projects. SonicAgile supports creating backlogs, scrumboards, and burndown charts. It includes support for acceptance criteria, story estimation, calculating team velocity, and email integration. In short, SonicAgile includes all of the tools that you need to coordinate work on a software project, get stuff done, and build great software. Let me discuss each of the features of SonicAgile in more detail. SonicAgile Backlog You use the backlog to create a prioritized list of user stories such as features, bugs, and change requests. Basically, all future work planned for a product should be captured in the backlog. We focused our attention on designing the user interface for the backlog. Because the main function of the backlog is to prioritize stories, we made it easy to prioritize a story by just drag and dropping the story from one location to another. We also wanted to make it easy to add stories from the product backlog to a sprint backlog. A sprint backlog contains the stories that you plan to complete during a particular sprint. To add a story to a sprint, you just drag the story from the product backlog to the sprint backlog. Finally, we made it easy to track team velocity — the average amount of work that your team completes in each sprint. Your team’s average velocity is displayed in the backlog. When you add too many stories to a sprint – in other words, you attempt to take on too much work – you are warned automatically: SonicAgile Scrumboard Every workday, your team meets to have their daily scrum. During the daily scrum, you can use the SonicAgile Scrumboard to see (at a glance) what everyone on the team is working on. For example, the following scrumboard shows that Stephen is working on the Fix Gravatar Bug story and Pete and Jane have finished working on the Product Details Page story: Every story can be broken into tasks. For example, to create the Product Details Page, you might need to create database objects, do page design, and create an MVC controller. You can use the Scrumboard to track the state of each task. A story can have acceptance criteria which clarify the requirements for the story to be done. For example, here is how you can specify the acceptance criteria for the Product Details Page story: You cannot close a story — and remove the story from the list of active stories on the scrumboard — until all tasks and acceptance criteria associated with the story are done. SonicAgile Burndown Charts You can use Burndown charts to track your team’s progress. SonicAgile supports Release Burndown, Sprint Burndown by Task Estimates, and Sprint Burndown by Story Points charts. For example, here’s a sample of a Sprint Burndown by Story Points chart: The downward slope shows the progress of the team when closing stories. The vertical axis represents story points and the horizontal axis represents time. Email Integration SonicAgile was designed to improve your team’s communication and collaboration. Most stories and tasks require discussion to nail down exactly what work needs to be done. The most natural way to discuss stories and tasks is through email. However, you don’t want these discussions to get lost. When you use SonicAgile, all email discussions concerning a story or a task (including all email attachments) are captured automatically. At any time in the future, you can view all of the email discussion concerning a story or a task by opening the Story Details dialog: Why We Built SonicAgile We built SonicAgile because we needed it for our team. Our consulting company, Superexpert, builds websites for financial services, startups, and large corporations. We have multiple teams working on multiple projects. Keeping on top of all of the work that needs to be done to complete a software project is challenging. You need a good sense of what needs to be done, who is doing it, and when the work will be done. We built SonicAgile because we wanted a lightweight project management tool which we could use to coordinate the work that our team performs on software projects. How We Built SonicAgile We wanted SonicAgile to be easy to use, highly scalable, and have a highly interactive client interface. SonicAgile is very close to being a pure Ajax application. We built SonicAgile using ASP.NET MVC 3, jQuery, and Knockout. We would not have been able to build such a complex Ajax application without these technologies. Almost all of our MVC controller actions return JSON results (While developing SonicAgile, I would have given my left arm to be able to use the new ASP.NET Web API). The controller actions are invoked from jQuery Ajax calls from the browser. We built SonicAgile on Windows Azure. We are taking advantage of SQL Azure, Table Storage, and Blob Storage. Windows Azure enables us to scale very quickly to handle whatever demand is thrown at us. Summary I hope that you will try SonicAgile. You can register at www.SonicAgile.com (there’s a free 30-day trial). The goal of SonicAgile is to make it easier for teams to get more stuff done, work better together, and build amazing software. Let us know what you think!

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  • Building an HTML5 App with ASP.NET

    - by Stephen Walther
    I’m teaching several JavaScript and ASP.NET workshops over the next couple of months (thanks everyone!) and I thought it would be useful for my students to have a really easy to use JavaScript reference. I wanted a simple interactive JavaScript reference and I could not find one so I decided to put together one of my own. I decided to use the latest features of JavaScript, HTML5 and jQuery such as local storage, offline manifests, and jQuery templates. What could be more appropriate than building a JavaScript Reference with JavaScript? You can try out the application by visiting: http://Superexpert.com/JavaScriptReference Because the app takes advantage of several advanced features of HTML5, it won’t work with Internet Explorer 6 (but really, you should stop using that browser). I have tested it with IE 8, Chrome 8, Firefox 3.6, and Safari 5. You can download the source for the JavaScript Reference application at the end of this article. Superexpert JavaScript Reference Let me provide you with a brief walkthrough of the app. When you first open the application, you see the following lookup screen: As you type the name of something from the JavaScript language, matching results are displayed: You can click the details link for any entry to view details for an entry in a modal dialog: Alternatively, you can click on any of the tabs -- Objects, Functions, Properties, Statements, Operators, Comments, or Directives -- to filter results by type of syntax. For example, you might want to see a list of all JavaScript built-in objects: You can login to the application to make modification to the application: After you login, you can add, update, or delete entries in the reference database: HTML5 Local Storage The application takes advantage of HTML5 local storage to store all of the reference entries on the local browser. IE 8, Chrome 8, Firefox 3.6, and Safari 5 all support local storage. When you open the application for the first time, all of the reference entries are transferred to the browser. The data is stored persistently. Even if you shutdown your computer and return to the application many days later, the data does not need to be transferred again. Whenever you open the application, the app checks with the server to see if any of the entries have been updated on the server. If there have been updates, then only the updates are transferred to the browser and the updates are merged with the existing entries in local storage. After the reference database has been transferred to your browser once, only changes are transferred in the future. You get two benefits from using local storage. First, the application loads very fast and works very fast after the data has been loaded once. The application does not query the server whenever you filter or view entries. All of the data is persisted in the browser. Second, you can browse the JavaScript reference even when you are not connected to the Internet (when you are on the proverbial airplane). The JavaScript Reference works as an offline application for browsers that support offline applications (unfortunately, not IE). When using Google Chrome, you can easily view the contents of local storage by selecting Tools, Developer Tools (CTRL-SHIFT I) and selecting Storage, Local Storage: The JavaScript Reference app stores two items in local storage: entriesLastUpdated and entries. HTML5 Offline App For browsers that support HTML5 offline applications – Chrome 8 and Firefox 3.6 but not Internet Explorer – you do not need to be connected to the Internet to use the JavaScript Reference. The JavaScript Reference can execute entirely on your machine just like any other desktop application. When you first open the application with Firefox, you are presented with the following warning: Notice the notification bar that asks whether you want to accept offline content. If you click the Allow button then all of the files (generated ASPX, images, CSS, JavaScript) needed for the JavaScript Reference will be stored on your local computer. Automatic Script Minification and Combination All of the custom JavaScript files are combined and minified automatically whenever the application is built with Visual Studio. All of the custom scripts are contained in a folder named App_Scripts: When you perform a build, the combine.js and combine.debug.js files are generated. The Combine.config file contains the list of files that should be combined (importantly, it specifies the order in which the files should be combined). Here’s the contents of the Combine.config file:   <?xml version="1.0"?> <combine> <scripts> <file path="compat.js" /> <file path="storage.js" /> <file path="serverData.js" /> <file path="entriesHelper.js" /> <file path="authentication.js" /> <file path="default.js" /> </scripts> </combine>   jQuery and jQuery UI The JavaScript Reference application takes heavy advantage of jQuery and jQuery UI. In particular, the application uses jQuery templates to format and display the reference entries. Each of the separate templates is stored in a separate ASP.NET user control in a folder named Templates: The contents of the user controls (and therefore the templates) are combined in the default.aspx page: <!-- Templates --> <user:EntryTemplate runat="server" /> <user:EntryDetailsTemplate runat="server" /> <user:BrowsersTemplate runat="server" /> <user:EditEntryTemplate runat="server" /> <user:EntryDetailsCloudTemplate runat="server" /> When the default.aspx page is requested, all of the templates are retrieved in a single page. WCF Data Services The JavaScript Reference application uses WCF Data Services to retrieve and modify database data. The application exposes a server-side WCF Data Service named EntryService.svc that supports querying, adding, updating, and deleting entries. jQuery Ajax calls are made against the WCF Data Service to perform the database operations from the browser. The OData protocol makes this easy. Authentication is handled on the server with a ChangeInterceptor. Only authenticated users are allowed to update the JavaScript Reference entry database. JavaScript Unit Tests In order to build the JavaScript Reference application, I depended on JavaScript unit tests. I needed the unit tests, in particular, to write the JavaScript merge functions which merge entry change sets from the server with existing entries in browser local storage. In order for unit tests to be useful, they need to run fast. I ran my unit tests after each build. For this reason, I did not want to run the unit tests within the context of a browser. Instead, I ran the unit tests using server-side JavaScript (the Microsoft Script Control). The source code that you can download at the end of this blog entry includes a project named JavaScriptReference.UnitTests that contains all of the JavaScripts unit tests. JavaScript Integration Tests Because not every feature of an application can be tested by unit tests, the JavaScript Reference application also includes integration tests. I wrote the integration tests using Selenium RC in combination with ASP.NET Unit Tests. The Selenium tests run against all of the target browsers for the JavaScript Reference application: IE 8, Chrome 8, Firefox 3.6, and Safari 5. For example, here is the Selenium test that checks whether authenticating with a valid user name and password correctly switches the application to Admin Mode: [TestMethod] [HostType("ASP.NET")] [UrlToTest("http://localhost:26303/JavaScriptReference")] [AspNetDevelopmentServerHost(@"C:\Users\Stephen\Documents\Repos\JavaScriptReference\JavaScriptReference\JavaScriptReference", "/JavaScriptReference")] public void TestValidLogin() { // Run test for each controller foreach (var controller in this.Controllers) { var selenium = controller.Value; var browserName = controller.Key; // Open reference page. selenium.Open("http://localhost:26303/JavaScriptReference/default.aspx"); // Click login button displays login form selenium.Click("btnLogin"); Assert.IsTrue(selenium.IsVisible("loginForm"), "Login form appears after clicking btnLogin"); // Enter user name and password selenium.Type("userName", "Admin"); selenium.Type("password", "secret"); selenium.Click("btnDoLogin"); // Should set adminMode == true selenium.WaitForCondition("selenium.browserbot.getCurrentWindow().adminMode==true", "30000"); } }   The results for running the Selenium tests appear in the Test Results window just like the unit tests: The Selenium tests take much longer to execute than the unit tests. However, they provide test coverage for actual browsers. Furthermore, if you are using Visual Studio ALM, you can run the tests automatically every night as part of your standard nightly build. You can view the Selenium tests by opening the JavaScriptReference.QATests project. Summary I plan to write more detailed blog entries about this application over the next week. I want to discuss each of the features – HTML5 local storage, HTML5 offline apps, jQuery templates, automatic script combining and minification, JavaScript unit tests, Selenium tests -- in more detail. You can download the source control for the JavaScript Reference Application by clicking the following link: Download You need Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4 to build the application. Before running the JavaScript unit tests, install the Microsoft Script Control. Before running the Selenium tests, start the Selenium server by running the StartSeleniumServer.bat file located in the JavaScriptReference.QATests project.

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  • Metro: Declarative Data Binding

    - by Stephen.Walther
    The goal of this blog post is to describe how declarative data binding works in the WinJS library. In particular, you learn how to use both the data-win-bind and data-win-bindsource attributes. You also learn how to use calculated properties and converters to format the value of a property automatically when performing data binding. By taking advantage of WinJS data binding, you can use the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern when building Metro style applications with JavaScript. By using the MVVM pattern, you can prevent your JavaScript code from spinning into chaos. The MVVM pattern provides you with a standard pattern for organizing your JavaScript code which results in a more maintainable application. Using Declarative Bindings You can use the data-win-bind attribute with any HTML element in a page. The data-win-bind attribute enables you to bind (associate) an attribute of an HTML element to the value of a property. Imagine, for example, that you want to create a product details page. You want to show a product object in a page. In that case, you can create the following HTML page to display the product details: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Application1</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- Application1 references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> </head> <body> <h1>Product Details</h1> <div class="field"> Product Name: <span data-win-bind="innerText:name"></span> </div> <div class="field"> Product Price: <span data-win-bind="innerText:price"></span> </div> <div class="field"> Product Picture: <br /> <img data-win-bind="src:photo;alt:name" /> </div> </body> </html> The HTML page above contains three data-win-bind attributes – one attribute for each product property displayed. You use the data-win-bind attribute to set properties of the HTML element associated with the data-win-attribute. The data-win-bind attribute takes a semicolon delimited list of element property names and data source property names: data-win-bind=”elementPropertyName:datasourcePropertyName; elementPropertyName:datasourcePropertyName;…” In the HTML page above, the first two data-win-bind attributes are used to set the values of the innerText property of the SPAN elements. The last data-win-bind attribute is used to set the values of the IMG element’s src and alt attributes. By the way, using data-win-bind attributes is perfectly valid HTML5. The HTML5 standard enables you to add custom attributes to an HTML document just as long as the custom attributes start with the prefix data-. So you can add custom attributes to an HTML5 document with names like data-stephen, data-funky, or data-rover-dog-is-hungry and your document will validate. The product object displayed in the page above with the data-win-bind attributes is created in the default.js file: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { var product = { name: "Tesla", price: 80000, photo: "/images/TeslaPhoto.png" }; WinJS.Binding.processAll(null, product); } }; app.start(); })(); In the code above, a product object is created with a name, price, and photo property. The WinJS.Binding.processAll() method is called to perform the actual binding (Don’t confuse WinJS.Binding.processAll() and WinJS.UI.processAll() – these are different methods). The first parameter passed to the processAll() method represents the root element for the binding. In other words, binding happens on this element and its child elements. If you provide the value null, then binding happens on the entire body of the document (document.body). The second parameter represents the data context. This is the object that has the properties which are displayed with the data-win-bind attributes. In the code above, the product object is passed as the data context parameter. Another word for data context is view model.  Creating Complex View Models In the previous section, we used the data-win-bind attribute to display the properties of a simple object: a single product. However, you can use binding with more complex view models including view models which represent multiple objects. For example, the view model in the following default.js file represents both a customer and a product object. Furthermore, the customer object has a nested address object: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { var viewModel = { customer: { firstName: "Fred", lastName: "Flintstone", address: { street: "1 Rocky Way", city: "Bedrock", country: "USA" } }, product: { name: "Bowling Ball", price: 34.55 } }; WinJS.Binding.processAll(null, viewModel); } }; app.start(); })(); The following page displays the customer (including the customer address) and the product. Notice that you can use dot notation to refer to child objects in a view model such as customer.address.street. <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Application1</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- Application1 references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> </head> <body> <h1>Customer Details</h1> <div class="field"> First Name: <span data-win-bind="innerText:customer.firstName"></span> </div> <div class="field"> Last Name: <span data-win-bind="innerText:customer.lastName"></span> </div> <div class="field"> Address: <address> <span data-win-bind="innerText:customer.address.street"></span> <br /> <span data-win-bind="innerText:customer.address.city"></span> <br /> <span data-win-bind="innerText:customer.address.country"></span> </address> </div> <h1>Product</h1> <div class="field"> Name: <span data-win-bind="innerText:product.name"></span> </div> <div class="field"> Price: <span data-win-bind="innerText:product.price"></span> </div> </body> </html> A view model can be as complicated as you need and you can bind the view model to a view (an HTML document) by using declarative bindings. Creating Calculated Properties You might want to modify a property before displaying the property. For example, you might want to format the product price property before displaying the property. You don’t want to display the raw product price “80000”. Instead, you want to display the formatted price “$80,000”. You also might need to combine multiple properties. For example, you might need to display the customer full name by combining the values of the customer first and last name properties. In these situations, it is tempting to call a function when performing binding. For example, you could create a function named fullName() which concatenates the customer first and last name. Unfortunately, the WinJS library does not support the following syntax: <span data-win-bind=”innerText:fullName()”></span> Instead, in these situations, you should create a new property in your view model that has a getter. For example, the customer object in the following default.js file includes a property named fullName which combines the values of the firstName and lastName properties: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { var customer = { firstName: "Fred", lastName: "Flintstone", get fullName() { return this.firstName + " " + this.lastName; } }; WinJS.Binding.processAll(null, customer); } }; app.start(); })(); The customer object has a firstName, lastName, and fullName property. Notice that the fullName property is defined with a getter function. When you read the fullName property, the values of the firstName and lastName properties are concatenated and returned. The following HTML page displays the fullName property in an H1 element. You can use the fullName property in a data-win-bind attribute in exactly the same way as any other property. <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Application1</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- Application1 references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> </head> <body> <h1 data-win-bind="innerText:fullName"></h1> <div class="field"> First Name: <span data-win-bind="innerText:firstName"></span> </div> <div class="field"> Last Name: <span data-win-bind="innerText:lastName"></span> </div> </body> </html> Creating a Converter In the previous section, you learned how to format the value of a property by creating a property with a getter. This approach makes sense when the formatting logic is specific to a particular view model. If, on the other hand, you need to perform the same type of formatting for multiple view models then it makes more sense to create a converter function. A converter function is a function which you can apply whenever you are using the data-win-bind attribute. Imagine, for example, that you want to create a general function for displaying dates. You always want to display dates using a short format such as 12/25/1988. The following JavaScript file – named converters.js – contains a shortDate() converter: (function (WinJS) { var shortDate = WinJS.Binding.converter(function (date) { return date.getMonth() + 1 + "/" + date.getDate() + "/" + date.getFullYear(); }); // Export shortDate WinJS.Namespace.define("MyApp.Converters", { shortDate: shortDate }); })(WinJS); The file above uses the Module Pattern, a pattern which is used through the WinJS library. To learn more about the Module Pattern, see my blog entry on namespaces and modules: http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2012/02/22/windows-web-applications-namespaces-and-modules.aspx The file contains the definition for a converter function named shortDate(). This function converts a JavaScript date object into a short date string such as 12/1/1988. The converter function is created with the help of the WinJS.Binding.converter() method. This method takes a normal function and converts it into a converter function. Finally, the shortDate() converter is added to the MyApp.Converters namespace. You can call the shortDate() function by calling MyApp.Converters.shortDate(). The default.js file contains the customer object that we want to bind. Notice that the customer object has a firstName, lastName, and birthday property. We will use our new shortDate() converter when displaying the customer birthday property: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { var customer = { firstName: "Fred", lastName: "Flintstone", birthday: new Date("12/1/1988") }; WinJS.Binding.processAll(null, customer); } }; app.start(); })(); We actually use our shortDate converter in the HTML document. The following HTML document displays all of the customer properties: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Application1</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- Application1 references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/converters.js"></script> </head> <body> <h1>Customer Details</h1> <div class="field"> First Name: <span data-win-bind="innerText:firstName"></span> </div> <div class="field"> Last Name: <span data-win-bind="innerText:lastName"></span> </div> <div class="field"> Birthday: <span data-win-bind="innerText:birthday MyApp.Converters.shortDate"></span> </div> </body> </html> Notice the data-win-bind attribute used to display the birthday property. It looks like this: <span data-win-bind="innerText:birthday MyApp.Converters.shortDate"></span> The shortDate converter is applied to the birthday property when the birthday property is bound to the SPAN element’s innerText property. Using data-win-bindsource Normally, you pass the view model (the data context) which you want to use with the data-win-bind attributes in a page by passing the view model to the WinJS.Binding.processAll() method like this: WinJS.Binding.processAll(null, viewModel); As an alternative, you can specify the view model declaratively in your markup by using the data-win-datasource attribute. For example, the following default.js script exposes a view model with the fully-qualified name of MyWinWebApp.viewModel: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { // Create view model var viewModel = { customer: { firstName: "Fred", lastName: "Flintstone" }, product: { name: "Bowling Ball", price: 12.99 } }; // Export view model to be seen by universe WinJS.Namespace.define("MyWinWebApp", { viewModel: viewModel }); // Process data-win-bind attributes WinJS.Binding.processAll(); } }; app.start(); })(); In the code above, a view model which represents a customer and a product is exposed as MyWinWebApp.viewModel. The following HTML page illustrates how you can use the data-win-bindsource attribute to bind to this view model: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Application1</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- Application1 references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> </head> <body> <h1>Customer Details</h1> <div data-win-bindsource="MyWinWebApp.viewModel.customer"> <div class="field"> First Name: <span data-win-bind="innerText:firstName"></span> </div> <div class="field"> Last Name: <span data-win-bind="innerText:lastName"></span> </div> </div> <h1>Product</h1> <div data-win-bindsource="MyWinWebApp.viewModel.product"> <div class="field"> Name: <span data-win-bind="innerText:name"></span> </div> <div class="field"> Price: <span data-win-bind="innerText:price"></span> </div> </div> </body> </html> The data-win-bindsource attribute is used twice in the page above: it is used with the DIV element which contains the customer details and it is used with the DIV element which contains the product details. If an element has a data-win-bindsource attribute then all of the child elements of that element are affected. The data-win-bind attributes of all of the child elements are bound to the data source represented by the data-win-bindsource attribute. Summary The focus of this blog entry was data binding using the WinJS library. You learned how to use the data-win-bind attribute to bind the properties of an HTML element to a view model. We also discussed several advanced features of data binding. We examined how to create calculated properties by including a property with a getter in your view model. We also discussed how you can create a converter function to format the value of a view model property when binding the property. Finally, you learned how to use the data-win-bindsource attribute to specify a view model declaratively.

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  • Agile PLM on Developing Agile PLM: Software Lifecycle Management

    - by Kerrie Foy
    Change is constant.  That saying couldn’t be truer when applied to software development.   And with all that change comes extensive product complexity.  How do you manage it all?  As software developers ourselves, we can certainly empathize with the challenge. On April 3, 2012 Stephen Van Lare, VP of PLM Product Development, hosted a webcast to share how Oracle uses Agile to develop Agile – a PLM solution for managing a PLM solution!   Stephen passionately shared his unique insight based on 10 years of using Agile PLM to manage the development process, as well as customer use cases.  He shared our time-proven view of the software’s relationship to the product record, while pointing out that PLM is not source control.  He began with the challenges of software development, which boiled down to the deduction that “despite many great tools in the software development industry, it takes a lot more than good source control, more than good bug tracking, to get to an on-time, on-budget and quality release in your marketplace.   It requires defining the right things you want to do, managing the scope, managing your schedule, and, most importantly, managing the change to all those things over the lifecycle of the process. And this is the definition of PLM.”   Stephen then defined the relationship of PLM to the software development process by detailing the two main use cases –  Product Lifecycle and Mechatronics – which can be used simultaneously and in fact are already used in most industries today.  The Product Lifecycle use case is used to manage artifacts and change throughout product development, while the Mechatronics use case involves the software, hardware and electrical design in the BOM.  In essence, PLM is just as relevant to software as the rest of the BOM when trying to maximize profits during any phase of the lifecycle. Please take the opportunity to watch Stephen Van Lare as he details how and why based on his own experience developing Agile with Agile, as well as a lively Q&A session, in the Software PLM Webcast Replay.

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  • Integrating JavaScript Unit Tests with Visual Studio

    - by Stephen Walther
    Modern ASP.NET web applications take full advantage of client-side JavaScript to provide better interactivity and responsiveness. If you are building an ASP.NET application in the right way, you quickly end up with lots and lots of JavaScript code. When writing server code, you should be writing unit tests. One big advantage of unit tests is that they provide you with a safety net that enable you to safely modify your existing code – for example, fix bugs, add new features, and make performance enhancements -- without breaking your existing code. Every time you modify your code, you can execute your unit tests to verify that you have not broken anything. For the same reason that you should write unit tests for your server code, you should write unit tests for your client code. JavaScript is just as susceptible to bugs as C#. There is no shortage of unit testing frameworks for JavaScript. Each of the major JavaScript libraries has its own unit testing framework. For example, jQuery has QUnit, Prototype has UnitTestJS, YUI has YUI Test, and Dojo has Dojo Objective Harness (DOH). The challenge is integrating a JavaScript unit testing framework with Visual Studio. Visual Studio and Visual Studio ALM provide fantastic support for server-side unit tests. You can easily view the results of running your unit tests in the Visual Studio Test Results window. You can set up a check-in policy which requires that all unit tests pass before your source code can be committed to the source code repository. In addition, you can set up Team Build to execute your unit tests automatically. Unfortunately, Visual Studio does not provide “out-of-the-box” support for JavaScript unit tests. MS Test, the unit testing framework included in Visual Studio, does not support JavaScript unit tests. As soon as you leave the server world, you are left on your own. The goal of this blog entry is to describe one approach to integrating JavaScript unit tests with MS Test so that you can execute your JavaScript unit tests side-by-side with your C# unit tests. The goal is to enable you to execute JavaScript unit tests in exactly the same way as server-side unit tests. You can download the source code described by this project by scrolling to the end of this blog entry. Rejected Approach: Browser Launchers One popular approach to executing JavaScript unit tests is to use a browser as a test-driver. When you use a browser as a test-driver, you open up a browser window to execute and view the results of executing your JavaScript unit tests. For example, QUnit – the unit testing framework for jQuery – takes this approach. The following HTML page illustrates how you can use QUnit to create a unit test for a function named addNumbers(). <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <html> <head> <title>Using QUnit</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://github.com/jquery/qunit/raw/master/qunit/qunit.css" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <h1 id="qunit-header">QUnit example</h1> <h2 id="qunit-banner"></h2> <div id="qunit-testrunner-toolbar"></div> <h2 id="qunit-userAgent"></h2> <ol id="qunit-tests"></ol> <div id="qunit-fixture">test markup, will be hidden</div> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://github.com/jquery/qunit/raw/master/qunit/qunit.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> // The function to test function addNumbers(a, b) { return a+b; } // The unit test test("Test of addNumbers", function () { equals(4, addNumbers(1,3), "1+3 should be 4"); }); </script> </body> </html> This test verifies that calling addNumbers(1,3) returns the expected value 4. When you open this page in a browser, you can see that this test does, in fact, pass. The idea is that you can quickly refresh this QUnit HTML JavaScript test driver page in your browser whenever you modify your JavaScript code. In other words, you can keep a browser window open and keep refreshing it over and over while you are developing your application. That way, you can know very quickly whenever you have broken your JavaScript code. While easy to setup, there are several big disadvantages to this approach to executing JavaScript unit tests: You must view your JavaScript unit test results in a different location than your server unit test results. The JavaScript unit test results appear in the browser and the server unit test results appear in the Visual Studio Test Results window. Because all of your unit test results don’t appear in a single location, you are more likely to introduce bugs into your code without noticing it. Because your unit tests are not integrated with Visual Studio – in particular, MS Test -- you cannot easily include your JavaScript unit tests when setting up check-in policies or when performing automated builds with Team Build. A more sophisticated approach to using a browser as a test-driver is to automate the web browser. Instead of launching the browser and loading the test code yourself, you use a framework to automate this process. There are several different testing frameworks that support this approach: · Selenium – Selenium is a very powerful framework for automating browser tests. You can create your tests by recording a Firefox session or by writing the test driver code in server code such as C#. You can learn more about Selenium at http://seleniumhq.org/. LTAF – The ASP.NET team uses the Lightweight Test Automation Framework to test JavaScript code in the ASP.NET framework. You can learn more about LTAF by visiting the project home at CodePlex: http://aspnet.codeplex.com/releases/view/35501 jsTestDriver – This framework uses Java to automate the browser. jsTestDriver creates a server which can be used to automate multiple browsers simultaneously. This project is located at http://code.google.com/p/js-test-driver/ TestSwam – This framework, created by John Resig, uses PHP to automate the browser. Like jsTestDriver, the framework creates a test server. You can open multiple browsers that are automated by the test server. Learn more about TestSwarm by visiting the following address: https://github.com/jeresig/testswarm/wiki Yeti – This is the framework introduced by Yahoo for automating browser tests. Yeti uses server-side JavaScript and depends on Node.js. Learn more about Yeti at http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2010/08/25/introducing-yeti-the-yui-easy-testing-interface/ All of these frameworks are great for integration tests – however, they are not the best frameworks to use for unit tests. In one way or another, all of these frameworks depend on executing tests within the context of a “living and breathing” browser. If you create an ASP.NET Unit Test then Visual Studio will launch a web server before executing the unit test. Why is launching a web server so bad? It is not the worst thing in the world. However, it does introduce dependencies that prevent your code from being tested in isolation. One of the defining features of a unit test -- versus an integration test – is that a unit test tests code in isolation. Another problem with launching a web server when performing unit tests is that launching a web server can be slow. If you cannot execute your unit tests quickly, you are less likely to execute your unit tests each and every time you make a code change. You are much more likely to fall into the pit of failure. Launching a browser when performing a JavaScript unit test has all of the same disadvantages as launching a web server when performing an ASP.NET unit test. Instead of testing a unit of JavaScript code in isolation, you are testing JavaScript code within the context of a particular browser. Using the frameworks listed above for integration tests makes perfect sense. However, I want to consider a different approach for creating unit tests for JavaScript code. Using Server-Side JavaScript for JavaScript Unit Tests A completely different approach to executing JavaScript unit tests is to perform the tests outside of any browser. If you really want to test JavaScript then you should test JavaScript and leave the browser out of the testing process. There are several ways that you can execute JavaScript on the server outside the context of any browser: Rhino – Rhino is an implementation of JavaScript written in Java. The Rhino project is maintained by the Mozilla project. Learn more about Rhino at http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/ V8 – V8 is the open-source Google JavaScript engine written in C++. This is the JavaScript engine used by the Chrome web browser. You can download V8 and embed it in your project by visiting http://code.google.com/p/v8/ JScript – JScript is the JavaScript Script Engine used by Internet Explorer (up to but not including Internet Explorer 9), Windows Script Host, and Active Server Pages. Internet Explorer is still the most popular web browser. Therefore, I decided to focus on using the JScript Script Engine to execute JavaScript unit tests. Using the Microsoft Script Control There are two basic ways that you can pass JavaScript to the JScript Script Engine and execute the code: use the Microsoft Windows Script Interfaces or use the Microsoft Script Control. The difficult and proper way to execute JavaScript using the JScript Script Engine is to use the Microsoft Windows Script Interfaces. You can learn more about the Script Interfaces by visiting http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/t9d4xf28(VS.85).aspx The main disadvantage of using the Script Interfaces is that they are difficult to use from .NET. There is a great series of articles on using the Script Interfaces from C# located at http://www.drdobbs.com/184406028. I picked the easier alternative and used the Microsoft Script Control. The Microsoft Script Control is an ActiveX control that provides a higher level abstraction over the Window Script Interfaces. You can download the Microsoft Script Control from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=d7e31492-2595-49e6-8c02-1426fec693ac After you download the Microsoft Script Control, you need to add a reference to it to your project. Select the Visual Studio menu option Project, Add Reference to open the Add Reference dialog. Select the COM tab and add the Microsoft Script Control 1.0. Using the Script Control is easy. You call the Script Control AddCode() method to add JavaScript code to the Script Engine. Next, you call the Script Control Run() method to run a particular JavaScript function. The reference documentation for the Microsoft Script Control is located at the MSDN website: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa227633%28v=vs.60%29.aspx Creating the JavaScript Code to Test To keep things simple, let’s imagine that you want to test the following JavaScript function named addNumbers() which simply adds two numbers together: MvcApplication1\Scripts\Math.js function addNumbers(a, b) { return 5; } Notice that the addNumbers() method always returns the value 5. Right-now, it will not pass a good unit test. Create this file and save it in your project with the name Math.js in your MVC project’s Scripts folder (Save the file in your actual MVC application and not your MVC test application). Creating the JavaScript Test Helper Class To make it easier to use the Microsoft Script Control in unit tests, we can create a helper class. This class contains two methods: LoadFile() – Loads a JavaScript file. Use this method to load the JavaScript file being tested or the JavaScript file containing the unit tests. ExecuteTest() – Executes the JavaScript code. Use this method to execute a JavaScript unit test. Here’s the code for the JavaScriptTestHelper class: JavaScriptTestHelper.cs   using System; using System.IO; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting; using MSScriptControl; namespace MvcApplication1.Tests { public class JavaScriptTestHelper : IDisposable { private ScriptControl _sc; private TestContext _context; /// <summary> /// You need to use this helper with Unit Tests and not /// Basic Unit Tests because you need a Test Context /// </summary> /// <param name="testContext">Unit Test Test Context</param> public JavaScriptTestHelper(TestContext testContext) { if (testContext == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("TestContext"); } _context = testContext; _sc = new ScriptControl(); _sc.Language = "JScript"; _sc.AllowUI = false; } /// <summary> /// Load the contents of a JavaScript file into the /// Script Engine. /// </summary> /// <param name="path">Path to JavaScript file</param> public void LoadFile(string path) { var fileContents = File.ReadAllText(path); _sc.AddCode(fileContents); } /// <summary> /// Pass the path of the test that you want to execute. /// </summary> /// <param name="testMethodName">JavaScript function name</param> public void ExecuteTest(string testMethodName) { dynamic result = null; try { result = _sc.Run(testMethodName, new object[] { }); } catch { var error = ((IScriptControl)_sc).Error; if (error != null) { var description = error.Description; var line = error.Line; var column = error.Column; var text = error.Text; var source = error.Source; if (_context != null) { var details = String.Format("{0} \r\nLine: {1} Column: {2}", source, line, column); _context.WriteLine(details); } } throw new AssertFailedException(error.Description); } } public void Dispose() { _sc = null; } } }     Notice that the JavaScriptTestHelper class requires a Test Context to be instantiated. For this reason, you can use the JavaScriptTestHelper only with a Visual Studio Unit Test and not a Basic Unit Test (These are two different types of Visual Studio project items). Add the JavaScriptTestHelper file to your MVC test application (for example, MvcApplication1.Tests). Creating the JavaScript Unit Test Next, we need to create the JavaScript unit test function that we will use to test the addNumbers() function. Create a folder in your MVC test project named JavaScriptTests and add the following JavaScript file to this folder: MvcApplication1.Tests\JavaScriptTests\MathTest.js /// <reference path="JavaScriptUnitTestFramework.js"/> function testAddNumbers() { // Act var result = addNumbers(1, 3); // Assert assert.areEqual(4, result, "addNumbers did not return right value!"); }   The testAddNumbers() function takes advantage of another JavaScript library named JavaScriptUnitTestFramework.js. This library contains all of the code necessary to make assertions. Add the following JavaScriptnitTestFramework.js to the same folder as the MathTest.js file: MvcApplication1.Tests\JavaScriptTests\JavaScriptUnitTestFramework.js var assert = { areEqual: function (expected, actual, message) { if (expected !== actual) { throw new Error("Expected value " + expected + " is not equal to " + actual + ". " + message); } } }; There is only one type of assertion supported by this file: the areEqual() assertion. Most likely, you would want to add additional types of assertions to this file to make it easier to write your JavaScript unit tests. Deploying the JavaScript Test Files This step is non-intuitive. When you use Visual Studio to run unit tests, Visual Studio creates a new folder and executes a copy of the files in your project. After you run your unit tests, your Visual Studio Solution will contain a new folder named TestResults that includes a subfolder for each test run. You need to configure Visual Studio to deploy your JavaScript files to the test run folder or Visual Studio won’t be able to find your JavaScript files when you execute your unit tests. You will get an error that looks something like this when you attempt to execute your unit tests: You can configure Visual Studio to deploy your JavaScript files by adding a Test Settings file to your Visual Studio Solution. It is important to understand that you need to add this file to your Visual Studio Solution and not a particular Visual Studio project. Right-click your Solution in the Solution Explorer window and select the menu option Add, New Item. Select the Test Settings item and click the Add button. After you create a Test Settings file for your solution, you can indicate that you want a particular folder to be deployed whenever you perform a test run. Select the menu option Test, Edit Test Settings to edit your test configuration file. Select the Deployment tab and select your MVC test project’s JavaScriptTest folder to deploy. Click the Apply button and the Close button to save the changes and close the dialog. Creating the Visual Studio Unit Test The very last step is to create the Visual Studio unit test (the MS Test unit test). Add a new unit test to your MVC test project by selecting the menu option Add New Item and selecting the Unit Test project item (Do not select the Basic Unit Test project item): The difference between a Basic Unit Test and a Unit Test is that a Unit Test includes a Test Context. We need this Test Context to use the JavaScriptTestHelper class that we created earlier. Enter the following test method for the new unit test: [TestMethod] public void TestAddNumbers() { var jsHelper = new JavaScriptTestHelper(this.TestContext); // Load JavaScript files jsHelper.LoadFile("JavaScriptUnitTestFramework.js"); jsHelper.LoadFile(@"..\..\..\MvcApplication1\Scripts\Math.js"); jsHelper.LoadFile("MathTest.js"); // Execute JavaScript Test jsHelper.ExecuteTest("testAddNumbers"); } This code uses the JavaScriptTestHelper to load three files: JavaScripUnitTestFramework.js – Contains the assert functions. Math.js – Contains the addNumbers() function from your MVC application which is being tested. MathTest.js – Contains the JavaScript unit test function. Next, the test method calls the JavaScriptTestHelper ExecuteTest() method to execute the testAddNumbers() JavaScript function. Running the Visual Studio JavaScript Unit Test After you complete all of the steps described above, you can execute the JavaScript unit test just like any other unit test. You can use the keyboard combination CTRL-R, CTRL-A to run all of the tests in the current Visual Studio Solution. Alternatively, you can use the buttons in the Visual Studio toolbar to run the tests: (Unfortunately, the Run All Impacted Tests button won’t work correctly because Visual Studio won’t detect that your JavaScript code has changed. Therefore, you should use either the Run Tests in Current Context or Run All Tests in Solution options instead.) The results of running the JavaScript tests appear side-by-side with the results of running the server tests in the Test Results window. For example, if you Run All Tests in Solution then you will get the following results: Notice that the TestAddNumbers() JavaScript test has failed. That is good because our addNumbers() function is hard-coded to always return the value 5. If you double-click the failing JavaScript test, you can view additional details such as the JavaScript error message and the line number of the JavaScript code that failed: Summary The goal of this blog entry was to explain an approach to creating JavaScript unit tests that can be easily integrated with Visual Studio and Visual Studio ALM. I described how you can use the Microsoft Script Control to execute JavaScript on the server. By taking advantage of the Microsoft Script Control, we were able to execute our JavaScript unit tests side-by-side with all of our other unit tests and view the results in the standard Visual Studio Test Results window. You can download the code discussed in this blog entry from here: http://StephenWalther.com/downloads/Blog/JavaScriptUnitTesting/JavaScriptUnitTests.zip Before running this code, you need to first install the Microsoft Script Control which you can download from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=d7e31492-2595-49e6-8c02-1426fec693ac

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  • An Introduction to jQuery Templates

    - by Stephen Walther
    The goal of this blog entry is to provide you with enough information to start working with jQuery Templates. jQuery Templates enable you to display and manipulate data in the browser. For example, you can use jQuery Templates to format and display a set of database records that you have retrieved with an Ajax call. jQuery Templates supports a number of powerful features such as template tags, template composition, and wrapped templates. I’ll concentrate on the features that I think that you will find most useful. In order to focus on the jQuery Templates feature itself, this blog entry is server technology agnostic. All the samples use HTML pages instead of ASP.NET pages. In a future blog entry, I’ll focus on using jQuery Templates with ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC (You can do some pretty powerful things when jQuery Templates are used on the client and ASP.NET is used on the server). Introduction to jQuery Templates The jQuery Templates plugin was developed by the Microsoft ASP.NET team in collaboration with the open-source jQuery team. While working at Microsoft, I wrote the original proposal for jQuery Templates, Dave Reed wrote the original code, and Boris Moore wrote the final code. The jQuery team – especially John Resig – was very involved in each step of the process. Both the jQuery community and ASP.NET communities were very active in providing feedback. jQuery Templates will be included in the jQuery core library (the jQuery.js library) when jQuery 1.5 is released. Until jQuery 1.5 is released, you can download the jQuery Templates plugin from the jQuery Source Code Repository or you can use jQuery Templates directly from the ASP.NET CDN. The documentation for jQuery Templates is already included with the official jQuery documentation at http://api.jQuery.com. The main entry for jQuery templates is located under the topic plugins/templates. A Basic Sample of jQuery Templates Let’s start with a really simple sample of using jQuery Templates. We’ll use the plugin to display a list of books stored in a JavaScript array. Here’s the complete code: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html > <head> <title>Intro</title> <link href="0_Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id="pageContent"> <h1>ASP.NET Bookstore</h1> <div id="bookContainer"></div> </div> <script id="bookTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <div> <img src="BookPictures/${picture}" alt="" /> <h2>${title}</h2> price: ${formatPrice(price)} </div> </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> // Create an array of books var books = [ { title: "ASP.NET 4 Unleashed", price: 37.79, picture: "AspNet4Unleashed.jpg" }, { title: "ASP.NET MVC Unleashed", price: 44.99, picture: "AspNetMvcUnleashed.jpg" }, { title: "ASP.NET Kick Start", price: 4.00, picture: "AspNetKickStart.jpg" }, { title: "ASP.NET MVC Unleashed iPhone", price: 44.99, picture: "AspNetMvcUnleashedIPhone.jpg" }, ]; // Render the books using the template $("#bookTemplate").tmpl(books).appendTo("#bookContainer"); function formatPrice(price) { return "$" + price.toFixed(2); } </script> </body> </html> When you open this page in a browser, a list of books is displayed: There are several things going on in this page which require explanation. First, notice that the page uses both the jQuery 1.4.4 and jQuery Templates libraries. Both libraries are retrieved from the ASP.NET CDN: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js"></script> You can use the ASP.NET CDN for free (even for production websites). You can learn more about the files included on the ASP.NET CDN by visiting the ASP.NET CDN documentation page. Second, you should notice that the actual template is included in a script tag with a special MIME type: <script id="bookTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <div> <img src="BookPictures/${picture}" alt="" /> <h2>${title}</h2> price: ${formatPrice(price)} </div> </script> This template is displayed for each of the books rendered by the template. The template displays a book picture, title, and price. Notice that the SCRIPT tag which wraps the template has a MIME type of text/x-jQuery-tmpl. Why is the template wrapped in a SCRIPT tag and why the strange MIME type? When a browser encounters a SCRIPT tag with an unknown MIME type, it ignores the content of the tag. This is the behavior that you want with a template. You don’t want a browser to attempt to parse the contents of a template because this might cause side effects. For example, the template above includes an <img> tag with a src attribute that points at “BookPictures/${picture}”. You don’t want the browser to attempt to load an image at the URL “BookPictures/${picture}”. Instead, you want to prevent the browser from processing the IMG tag until the ${picture} expression is replaced by with the actual name of an image by the jQuery Templates plugin. If you are not worried about browser side-effects then you can wrap a template inside any HTML tag that you please. For example, the following DIV tag would also work with the jQuery Templates plugin: <div id="bookTemplate" style="display:none"> <div> <h2>${title}</h2> price: ${formatPrice(price)} </div> </div> Notice that the DIV tag includes a style=”display:none” attribute to prevent the template from being displayed until the template is parsed by the jQuery Templates plugin. Third, notice that the expression ${…} is used to display the value of a JavaScript expression within a template. For example, the expression ${title} is used to display the value of the book title property. You can use any JavaScript function that you please within the ${…} expression. For example, in the template above, the book price is formatted with the help of the custom JavaScript formatPrice() function which is defined lower in the page. Fourth, and finally, the template is rendered with the help of the tmpl() method. The following statement selects the bookTemplate and renders an array of books using the bookTemplate. The results are appended to a DIV element named bookContainer by using the standard jQuery appendTo() method. $("#bookTemplate").tmpl(books).appendTo("#bookContainer"); Using Template Tags Within a template, you can use any of the following template tags. {{tmpl}} – Used for template composition. See the section below. {{wrap}} – Used for wrapped templates. See the section below. {{each}} – Used to iterate through a collection. {{if}} – Used to conditionally display template content. {{else}} – Used with {{if}} to conditionally display template content. {{html}} – Used to display the value of an HTML expression without encoding the value. Using ${…} or {{= }} performs HTML encoding automatically. {{= }}-- Used in exactly the same way as ${…}. {{! }} – Used for displaying comments. The contents of a {{!...}} tag are ignored. For example, imagine that you want to display a list of blog entries. Each blog entry could, possibly, have an associated list of categories. The following page illustrates how you can use the { if}} and {{each}} template tags to conditionally display categories for each blog entry:   <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>each</title> <link href="1_Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id="blogPostContainer"></div> <script id="blogPostTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <h1>${postTitle}</h1> <p> ${postEntry} </p> {{if categories}} Categories: {{each categories}} <i>${$value}</i> {{/each}} {{else}} Uncategorized {{/if}} </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> var blogPosts = [ { postTitle: "How to fix a sink plunger in 5 minutes", postEntry: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna.", categories: ["HowTo", "Sinks", "Plumbing"] }, { postTitle: "How to remove a broken lightbulb", postEntry: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna.", categories: ["HowTo", "Lightbulbs", "Electricity"] }, { postTitle: "New associate website", postEntry: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna." } ]; // Render the blog posts $("#blogPostTemplate").tmpl(blogPosts).appendTo("#blogPostContainer"); </script> </body> </html> When this page is opened in a web browser, the following list of blog posts and categories is displayed: Notice that the first and second blog entries have associated categories but the third blog entry does not. The third blog entry is “Uncategorized”. The template used to render the blog entries and categories looks like this: <script id="blogPostTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <h1>${postTitle}</h1> <p> ${postEntry} </p> {{if categories}} Categories: {{each categories}} <i>${$value}</i> {{/each}} {{else}} Uncategorized {{/if}} </script> Notice the special expression $value used within the {{each}} template tag. You can use $value to display the value of the current template item. In this case, $value is used to display the value of each category in the collection of categories. Template Composition When building a fancy page, you might want to build a template out of multiple templates. In other words, you might want to take advantage of template composition. For example, imagine that you want to display a list of products. Some of the products are being sold at their normal price and some of the products are on sale. In that case, you might want to use two different templates for displaying a product: a productTemplate and a productOnSaleTemplate. The following page illustrates how you can use the {{tmpl}} tag to build a template from multiple templates:   <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Composition</title> <link href="2_Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id="pageContainer"> <h1>Products</h1> <div id="productListContainer"></div> <!-- Show list of products using composition --> <script id="productListTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <div> {{if onSale}} {{tmpl "#productOnSaleTemplate"}} {{else}} {{tmpl "#productTemplate"}} {{/if}} </div> </script> <!-- Show product --> <script id="productTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> ${name} </script> <!-- Show product on sale --> <script id="productOnSaleTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <b>${name}</b> <img src="images/on_sale.png" alt="On Sale" /> </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> var products = [ { name: "Laptop", onSale: false }, { name: "Apples", onSale: true }, { name: "Comb", onSale: false } ]; $("#productListTemplate").tmpl(products).appendTo("#productListContainer"); </script> </div> </body> </html>   In the page above, the main template used to display the list of products looks like this: <script id="productListTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <div> {{if onSale}} {{tmpl "#productOnSaleTemplate"}} {{else}} {{tmpl "#productTemplate"}} {{/if}} </div> </script>   If a product is on sale then the product is displayed with the productOnSaleTemplate (which includes an on sale image): <script id="productOnSaleTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <b>${name}</b> <img src="images/on_sale.png" alt="On Sale" /> </script>   Otherwise, the product is displayed with the normal productTemplate (which does not include the on sale image): <script id="productTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> ${name} </script>   You can pass a parameter to the {{tmpl}} tag. The parameter becomes the data passed to the template rendered by the {{tmpl}} tag. For example, in the previous section, we used the {{each}} template tag to display a list of categories for each blog entry like this: <script id="blogPostTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <h1>${postTitle}</h1> <p> ${postEntry} </p> {{if categories}} Categories: {{each categories}} <i>${$value}</i> {{/each}} {{else}} Uncategorized {{/if}} </script>   Another way to create this template is to use template composition like this: <script id="blogPostTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <h1>${postTitle}</h1> <p> ${postEntry} </p> {{if categories}} Categories: {{tmpl(categories) "#categoryTemplate"}} {{else}} Uncategorized {{/if}} </script> <script id="categoryTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <i>${$data}</i> &nbsp; </script>   Using the {{each}} tag or {{tmpl}} tag is largely a matter of personal preference. Wrapped Templates The {{wrap}} template tag enables you to take a chunk of HTML and transform the HTML into another chunk of HTML (think easy XSLT). When you use the {{wrap}} tag, you work with two templates. The first template contains the HTML being transformed and the second template includes the filter expressions for transforming the HTML. For example, you can use the {{wrap}} template tag to transform a chunk of HTML into an interactive tab strip: When you click any of the tabs, you see the corresponding content. This tab strip was created with the following page: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Wrapped Templates</title> <style type="text/css"> body { font-family: Arial; background-color:black; } .tabs div { display:inline-block; border-bottom: 1px solid black; padding:4px; background-color:gray; cursor:pointer; } .tabs div.tabState_true { background-color:white; border-bottom:1px solid white; } .tabBody { border-top:1px solid white; padding:10px; background-color:white; min-height:400px; width:400px; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="tabsView"></div> <script id="tabsContent" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> {{wrap "#tabsWrap"}} <h3>Tab 1</h3> <div> Content of tab 1. Lorem ipsum dolor <b>sit</b> amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. </div> <h3>Tab 2</h3> <div> Content of tab 2. Lorem ipsum dolor <b>sit</b> amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. </div> <h3>Tab 3</h3> <div> Content of tab 3. Lorem ipsum dolor <b>sit</b> amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. </div> {{/wrap}} </script> <script id="tabsWrap" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> <div class="tabs"> {{each $item.html("h3", true)}} <div class="tabState_${$index === selectedTabIndex}"> ${$value} </div> {{/each}} </div> <div class="tabBody"> {{html $item.html("div")[selectedTabIndex]}} </div> </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> // Global for tracking selected tab var selectedTabIndex = 0; // Render the tab strip $("#tabsContent").tmpl().appendTo("#tabsView"); // When a tab is clicked, update the tab strip $("#tabsView") .delegate(".tabState_false", "click", function () { var templateItem = $.tmplItem(this); selectedTabIndex = $(this).index(); templateItem.update(); }); </script> </body> </html>   The “source” for the tab strip is contained in the following template: <script id="tabsContent" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> {{wrap "#tabsWrap"}} <h3>Tab 1</h3> <div> Content of tab 1. Lorem ipsum dolor <b>sit</b> amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. </div> <h3>Tab 2</h3> <div> Content of tab 2. Lorem ipsum dolor <b>sit</b> amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. </div> <h3>Tab 3</h3> <div> Content of tab 3. Lorem ipsum dolor <b>sit</b> amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. </div> {{/wrap}} </script>   The tab strip is created with a list of H3 elements (which represent each tab) and DIV elements (which represent the body of each tab). Notice that the HTML content is wrapped in the {{wrap}} template tag. This template tag points at the following tabsWrap template: <script id="tabsWrap" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> <div class="tabs"> {{each $item.html("h3", true)}} <div class="tabState_${$index === selectedTabIndex}"> ${$value} </div> {{/each}} </div> <div class="tabBody"> {{html $item.html("div")[selectedTabIndex]}} </div> </script> The tabs DIV contains all of the tabs. The {{each}} template tag is used to loop through each of the H3 elements from the source template and render a DIV tag that represents a particular tab. The template item html() method is used to filter content from the “source” HTML template. The html() method accepts a jQuery selector for its first parameter. The tabs are retrieved from the source template by using an h3 filter. The second parameter passed to the html() method – the textOnly parameter -- causes the filter to return the inner text of each h3 element. You can learn more about the html() method at the jQuery website (see the section on $item.html()). The tabBody DIV renders the body of the selected tab. Notice that the {{html}} template tag is used to display the tab body so that HTML content in the body won’t be HTML encoded. The html() method is used, once again, to grab all of the DIV elements from the source HTML template. The selectedTabIndex global variable is used to display the contents of the selected tab. Remote Templates A common feature request for jQuery templates is support for remote templates. Developers want to be able to separate templates into different files. Adding support for remote templates requires only a few lines of extra code (Dave Ward has a nice blog entry on this). For example, the following page uses a remote template from a file named BookTemplate.htm: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Remote Templates</title> <link href="0_Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id="pageContent"> <h1>ASP.NET Bookstore</h1> <div id="bookContainer"></div> </div> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> // Create an array of books var books = [ { title: "ASP.NET 4 Unleashed", price: 37.79, picture: "AspNet4Unleashed.jpg" }, { title: "ASP.NET MVC Unleashed", price: 44.99, picture: "AspNetMvcUnleashed.jpg" }, { title: "ASP.NET Kick Start", price: 4.00, picture: "AspNetKickStart.jpg" }, { title: "ASP.NET MVC Unleashed iPhone", price: 44.99, picture: "AspNetMvcUnleashedIPhone.jpg" }, ]; // Get the remote template $.get("BookTemplate.htm", null, function (bookTemplate) { // Render the books using the remote template $.tmpl(bookTemplate, books).appendTo("#bookContainer"); }); function formatPrice(price) { return "$" + price.toFixed(2); } </script> </body> </html>   The remote template is retrieved (and rendered) with the following code: // Get the remote template $.get("BookTemplate.htm", null, function (bookTemplate) { // Render the books using the remote template $.tmpl(bookTemplate, books).appendTo("#bookContainer"); });   This code uses the standard jQuery $.get() method to get the BookTemplate.htm file from the server with an Ajax request. After the BookTemplate.htm file is successfully retrieved, the $.tmpl() method is used to render an array of books with the template. Here’s what the BookTemplate.htm file looks like: <div> <img src="BookPictures/${picture}" alt="" /> <h2>${title}</h2> price: ${formatPrice(price)} </div> Notice that the template in the BooksTemplate.htm file is not wrapped by a SCRIPT element. There is no need to wrap the template in this case because there is no possibility that the template will get interpreted before you want it to be interpreted. If you plan to use the bookTemplate multiple times – for example, you are paging or sorting the books -- then you should compile the template into a function and cache the compiled template function. For example, the following page can be used to page through a list of 100 products (using iPhone style More paging). <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Template Caching</title> <link href="6_Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <h1>Products</h1> <div id="productContainer"></div> <button id="more">More</button> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> // Globals var pageIndex = 0; // Create an array of products var products = []; for (var i = 0; i < 100; i++) { products.push({ name: "Product " + (i + 1) }); } // Get the remote template $.get("ProductTemplate.htm", null, function (productTemplate) { // Compile and cache the template $.template("productTemplate", productTemplate); // Render the products renderProducts(0); }); $("#more").click(function () { pageIndex++; renderProducts(); }); function renderProducts() { // Get page of products var pageOfProducts = products.slice(pageIndex * 5, pageIndex * 5 + 5); // Used cached productTemplate to render products $.tmpl("productTemplate", pageOfProducts).appendTo("#productContainer"); } function formatPrice(price) { return "$" + price.toFixed(2); } </script> </body> </html>   The ProductTemplate is retrieved from an external file named ProductTemplate.htm. This template is retrieved only once. Furthermore, it is compiled and cached with the help of the $.template() method: // Get the remote template $.get("ProductTemplate.htm", null, function (productTemplate) { // Compile and cache the template $.template("productTemplate", productTemplate); // Render the products renderProducts(0); });   The $.template() method compiles the HTML representation of the template into a JavaScript function and caches the template function with the name productTemplate. The cached template can be used by calling the $.tmp() method. The productTemplate is used in the renderProducts() method: function renderProducts() { // Get page of products var pageOfProducts = products.slice(pageIndex * 5, pageIndex * 5 + 5); // Used cached productTemplate to render products $.tmpl("productTemplate", pageOfProducts).appendTo("#productContainer"); } In the code above, the first parameter passed to the $.tmpl() method is the name of a cached template. Working with Template Items In this final section, I want to devote some space to discussing Template Items. A new Template Item is created for each rendered instance of a template. For example, if you are displaying a list of 100 products with a template, then 100 Template Items are created. A Template Item has the following properties and methods: data – The data associated with the Template Instance. For example, a product. tmpl – The template associated with the Template Instance. parent – The parent template item if the template is nested. nodes – The HTML content of the template. calls – Used by {{wrap}} template tag. nest – Used by {{tmpl}} template tag. wrap – Used to imperatively enable wrapped templates. html – Used to filter content from a wrapped template. See the above section on wrapped templates. update – Used to re-render a template item. The last method – the update() method -- is especially interesting because it enables you to re-render a template item with new data or even a new template. For example, the following page displays a list of books. When you hover your mouse over any of the books, additional book details are displayed. In the following screenshot, details for ASP.NET Kick Start are displayed. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Template Item</title> <link href="0_Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id="pageContent"> <h1>ASP.NET Bookstore</h1> <div id="bookContainer"></div> </div> <script id="bookTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <div class="bookItem"> <img src="BookPictures/${picture}" alt="" /> <h2>${title}</h2> price: ${formatPrice(price)} </div> </script> <script id="bookDetailsTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <div class="bookItem"> <img src="BookPictures/${picture}" alt="" /> <h2>${title}</h2> price: ${formatPrice(price)} <p> ${description} </p> </div> </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> // Create an array of books var books = [ { title: "ASP.NET 4 Unleashed", price: 37.79, picture: "AspNet4Unleashed.jpg", description: "The most comprehensive book on Microsoft’s new ASP.NET 4.. " }, { title: "ASP.NET MVC Unleashed", price: 44.99, picture: "AspNetMvcUnleashed.jpg", description: "Writing for professional programmers, Walther explains the crucial concepts that make the Model-View-Controller (MVC) development paradigm work…" }, { title: "ASP.NET Kick Start", price: 4.00, picture: "AspNetKickStart.jpg", description: "Visual Studio .NET is the premier development environment for creating .NET applications…." }, { title: "ASP.NET MVC Unleashed iPhone", price: 44.99, picture: "AspNetMvcUnleashedIPhone.jpg", description: "ASP.NET MVC Unleashed for the iPhone…" }, ]; // Render the books using the template $("#bookTemplate").tmpl(books).appendTo("#bookContainer"); // Get compiled details template var bookDetailsTemplate = $("#bookDetailsTemplate").template(); // Add hover handler $(".bookItem").mouseenter(function () { // Get template item associated with DIV var templateItem = $(this).tmplItem(); // Change template to compiled template templateItem.tmpl = bookDetailsTemplate; // Re-render template templateItem.update(); }); function formatPrice(price) { return "$" + price.toFixed(2); } </script> </body> </html>   There are two templates used to display a book: bookTemplate and bookDetailsTemplate. When you hover your mouse over a template item, the standard bookTemplate is swapped out for the bookDetailsTemplate. The bookDetailsTemplate displays a book description. The books are rendered with the bookTemplate with the following line of code: // Render the books using the template $("#bookTemplate").tmpl(books).appendTo("#bookContainer");   The following code is used to swap the bookTemplate and the bookDetailsTemplate to show details for a book: // Get compiled details template var bookDetailsTemplate = $("#bookDetailsTemplate").template(); // Add hover handler $(".bookItem").mouseenter(function () { // Get template item associated with DIV var templateItem = $(this).tmplItem(); // Change template to compiled template templateItem.tmpl = bookDetailsTemplate; // Re-render template templateItem.update(); });   When you hover your mouse over a DIV element rendered by the bookTemplate, the mouseenter handler executes. First, this handler retrieves the Template Item associated with the DIV element by calling the tmplItem() method. The tmplItem() method returns a Template Item. Next, a new template is assigned to the Template Item. Notice that a compiled version of the bookDetailsTemplate is assigned to the Template Item’s tmpl property. The template is compiled earlier in the code by calling the template() method. Finally, the Template Item update() method is called to re-render the Template Item with the bookDetailsTemplate instead of the original bookTemplate. Summary This is a long blog entry and I still have not managed to cover all of the features of jQuery Templates J However, I’ve tried to cover the most important features of jQuery Templates such as template composition, template wrapping, and template items. To learn more about jQuery Templates, I recommend that you look at the documentation for jQuery Templates at the official jQuery website. Another great way to learn more about jQuery Templates is to look at the (unminified) source code.

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  • Ajax Control Toolkit December 2013 Release

    - by Stephen.Walther
    Today, we released a new version of the Ajax Control Toolkit that contains several important bug fixes and new features. The new release contains a new Tabs control that has been entirely rewritten in jQuery. You can download the December 2013 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit at http://Ajax.CodePlex.com. Alternatively, you can install the latest version directly from NuGet: The Ajax Control Toolkit and jQuery The Ajax Control Toolkit now contains two controls written with jQuery: the ToggleButton control and the Tabs control.  The goal is to rewrite the Ajax Control Toolkit to use jQuery instead of the Microsoft Ajax Library gradually over time. The motivation for rewriting the controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit to use jQuery is to modernize the toolkit. We want to continue to accept new controls written for the Ajax Control Toolkit contributed by the community. The community wants to use jQuery. We want to make it easy for the community to submit bug fixes. The community understands jQuery. Using the Ajax Control Toolkit with a Website that Already uses jQuery But what if you are already using jQuery in your website?  Will adding the Ajax Control Toolkit to your website break your existing website?  No, and here is why. The Ajax Control Toolkit uses jQuery.noConflict() to avoid conflicting with an existing version of jQuery in a page.  The version of jQuery that the Ajax Control Toolkit uses is represented by a variable named actJQuery.  You can use actJQuery side-by-side with an existing version of jQuery in a page without conflict.Imagine, for example, that you add jQuery to an ASP.NET page using a <script> tag like this: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="WebForm1.aspx.cs" Inherits="TestACTDec2013.WebForm1" %> <!DOCTYPE html> <html > <head runat="server"> <title></title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <script src="Scripts/jquery-2.0.3.min.js"></script> <ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager runat="server" /> <ajaxToolkit:TabContainer runat="server"> <ajaxToolkit:TabPanel runat="server"> <HeaderTemplate> Tab 1 </HeaderTemplate> <ContentTemplate> <h1>First Tab</h1> </ContentTemplate> </ajaxToolkit:TabPanel> <ajaxToolkit:TabPanel runat="server"> <HeaderTemplate> Tab 2 </HeaderTemplate> <ContentTemplate> <h1>Second Tab</h1> </ContentTemplate> </ajaxToolkit:TabPanel> </ajaxToolkit:TabContainer> </div> </form> </body> </html> The page above uses the Ajax Control Toolkit Tabs control (TabContainer and TabPanel controls).  The Tabs control uses the version of jQuery that is currently bundled with the Ajax Control Toolkit (jQuery version 1.9.1). The page above also includes a <script> tag that references jQuery version 2.0.3.  You might need that particular version of jQuery, for example, to use a particular jQuery plugin. The two versions of jQuery in the page do not create a conflict. This fact can be demonstrated by entering the following two commands in the JavaScript console window: actJQuery.fn.jquery $.fn.jquery Typing actJQuery.fn.jquery will display the version of jQuery used by the Ajax Control Toolkit and typing $.fn.jquery (or jQuery.fn.jquery) will show the version of jQuery used by other jQuery plugins in the page.      Preventing jQuery from Loading Twice So by default, the Ajax Control Toolkit will not conflict with any existing version of jQuery used in your application. However, this does mean that if you are already using jQuery in your application then jQuery will be loaded twice. For performance reasons, you might want to avoid loading the jQuery library twice. By taking advantage of the <remove> element in the AjaxControlToolkit.config file, you can prevent the Ajax Control Toolkit from loading its version of jQuery. <ajaxControlToolkit> <scripts> <remove name="jQuery.jQuery.js" /> </scripts> <controlBundles> <controlBundle> <control name="TabContainer" /> <control name="TabPanel" /> </controlBundle> </controlBundles> </ajaxControlToolkit> Be careful here:  the name of the script being removed – jQuery.jQuery.js – is case-sensitive. If you remove jQuery then it is your responsibility to add the exact same version of jQuery back into your application.  You can add jQuery back using a <script> tag like this: <script src="Scripts/jquery-1.9.1.min.js"></script>     Make sure that you add the <script> tag before the server-side <form> tag or the Ajax Control Toolkit won’t detect the presence of jQuery. Alternatively, you can use the ToolkitScriptManager like this: <ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager runat="server"> <Scripts> <asp:ScriptReference Name="jQuery.jQuery.js" /> </Scripts> </ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager> The Ajax Control Toolkit is tested against the particular version of jQuery that is bundled with the Ajax Control Toolkit. Currently, the Ajax Control Toolkit uses jQuery version 1.9.1. If you attempt to use a different version of jQuery with the Ajax Control Toolkit then you will get the exception jQuery 1.9.1 is required in your JavaScript console window: If you need to use a different version of jQuery in the same page as the Ajax Control Toolkit then you should not use the <remove> element. Instead, allow the Ajax Control Toolkit to load its version of jQuery side-by-side with the other version of jQuery. Lots of Bug Fixes As usual, we implemented several important bug fixes with this release. The bug fixes concerned the following three controls: Tabs control – In the course of rewriting the Tabs control to use jQuery, we fixed several bugs related to the Tabs control. AjaxFileUpload control – We resolved an issue concerning the AjaxFileUpload and the TMP directory. HTMLEditor control – We updated the HTMLEditor control to use the new Ajax Control Toolkit bundling and minification framework. Summary I would like to thank the Superexpert team for their hard work on this release. Many long hours of coding and testing went into making this release possible.

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  • Ajax Control Toolkit July 2011 Release and the New HTML Editor Extender

    - by Stephen Walther
    I’m happy to announce the July 2011 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit which includes important bug fixes and a completely new HTML Editor Extender control. You can download the July 2011 Release by visiting the Ajax Control Toolkit CodePlex site at: http://AjaxControlToolkit.CodePlex.com Using the New HTML Editor Extender Control You can use the new HTML Editor Extender to extend any standard ASP.NET TextBox control so that it supports rich formatting such as bold, italics, bulleted lists, numbered lists, typefaces and different foreground and background colors. The following code illustrates how you can extend a standard ASP.NET TextBox control with the HtmlEditorExtender: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Simple.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.Simple" %> <%@ Register TagPrefix="asp" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" %> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head runat="server"> <title>Simple</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <asp:ToolkitScriptManager runat="Server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtComments" TextMode="MultiLine" Columns="60" Rows="8" runat="server" /> <asp:HtmlEditorExtender TargetControlID="txtComments" runat="server" /> </form> </body> </html> This page has the following three controls: ToolkitScriptManager – The ToolkitScriptManager renders all of the scripts required by the Ajax Control Toolkit. TextBox – The TextBox control is a standard ASP.NET TextBox which is set to display multiple lines (a TextArea instead of an Input element). HtmlEditorExtender – The HtmlEditorExtender is set to extend the TextBox control. You can use the standard TextBox Text property to read the rich text entered into the TextBox control on the server. Lightweight and HTML5 The HTML Editor Extender works on all modern browsers including the most recent versions of Mozilla Firefox (Firefox 5), Google Chrome (Chrome 12), and Apple Safari (Safari 5). Furthermore, the HTML Editor Extender is compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and newer. The HTML Editor Extender is very lightweight. It takes advantage of the HTML5 ContentEditable attribute so it does not require an iframe or complex browser workarounds. If you select View Source in your browser while using the HTML Editor Extender, we hope that you will be pleasantly surprised by how little markup and script is generated by the HTML Editor Extender. Customizable Toolbar Buttons Depending on the web application that you are building, you will want to display different toolbar buttons with the HTML Editor Extender. One of the design goals of the HTML Editor Extender was to make it very easy for you to customize the toolbar buttons. Imagine, for example, that you want to use the HTML Editor Extender when accepting comments on blog posts. In that case, you might want to restrict the type of formatting that a user can display. You might want to enable a user to format text as bold or italic but you do not want the user to make any other formatting changes. The following page illustrates how you can customize the HTML Editor Extender toolbar: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="CustomToolbar.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.CustomToolbar" %> <%@ Register TagPrefix="asp" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" %> <html> <head runat="server"> <title>Custom Toolbar</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <asp:ToolkitScriptManager Runat="server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtComments" TextMode="MultiLine" Columns="50" Rows="10" Text="Hello <b>world!</b>" Runat="server" /> <asp:HtmlEditorExtender TargetControlID="txtComments" runat="server"> <Toolbar> <asp:Bold /> <asp:Italic /> </Toolbar> </asp:HtmlEditorExtender> </form> </body> </html> Notice that the HTML Editor Extender in the page above has a Toolbar subtag. You can list the toolbar buttons which you want to appear within the subtag. In the case above, only Bold and Italic buttons are displayed. Here is a complete list of the Toolbar buttons currently supported by the HTML Editor Extender: Undo Redo Bold Italic Underline StrikeThrough Subscript Superscript JustifyLeft JustifyCenter JustifyRight JustifyFull InsertOrderedList InsertUnorderedList CreateLink UnLink RemoveFormat SelectAll UnSelect Delete Cut Copy Paste BackgroundColorSelector ForeColorSelector FontNameSelector FontSizeSelector Indent Outdent InsertHorizontalRule HorizontalSeparator Of course the HTML Editor Extender was designed to be extensible. You can create your own buttons and add them to the control. Compatible with the AntiXSS Library When using the HTML Editor Extender on a public facing website, we strongly recommend that you use the HTML Editor Extender with the AntiXSS Library. If you allow users to submit arbitrary HTML, and you don’t take any action to strip out malicious markup, then you are opening your website to Cross-Site Scripting Attacks (XSS attacks). The HTML Editor Extender uses the Provider Model to support different Sanitizer Providers. The July 2011 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit ships with a single Sanitizer Provider which uses the AntiXSS library (see http://AntiXss.CodePlex.com ). A Sanitizer Provider is responsible for sanitizing HTML markup by removing any malicious elements, attributes, and attribute values. For example, the AntiXss Sanitizer Provider will take the following block of HTML: <b><a href=""javascript:doEvil()"">Visit Grandma</a></b> <script>doEvil()</script> And return the following sanitized block of HTML: <b><a href="">Visit Grandma</a></b> Notice that the JavaScript href and <SCRIPT> tag are both stripped out. Be aware that there are a depressingly large number of ways to sneak evil markup into your HTML. You definitely want a Sanitizer as a safety net. Before you can use the AntiXSS Sanitizer Provider, you must add three assemblies to your web application: AntiXSSLibrary.dll, HtmlSanitizationLibrary.dll, and SanitizerProviders.dll. All three assemblies are included with the CodePlex download of the Ajax Control Toolkit in the SanitizerProviders folder. Here’s how you modify your web.config file to use the AntiXSS Sanitizer Provider: <configuration> <configSections> <sectionGroup name="system.web"> <section name="sanitizer" requirePermission="false" type="AjaxControlToolkit.Sanitizer.ProviderSanitizerSection, AjaxControlToolkit"/> </sectionGroup> </configSections> <system.web> <compilation targetFramework="4.0" debug="true"/> <sanitizer defaultProvider="AntiXssSanitizerProvider"> <providers> <add name="AntiXssSanitizerProvider" type="AjaxControlToolkit.Sanitizer.AntiXssSanitizerProvider"></add> </providers> </sanitizer> </system.web> </configuration> You can detect whether the HTML Editor Extender is using the AntiXSS Sanitizer Provider by checking the HtmlEditorExtender SanitizerProvider property like this: if (MyHtmlEditorExtender.SanitizerProvider == null) { throw new Exception("Please enable the AntiXss Sanitizer!"); } When the SanitizerProvider property has the value null, you know that a Sanitizer Provider has not been configured in the web.config file. Because the AntiXSS library requires Full Trust, you cannot use the AntiXSS Sanitizer Provider with most shared website hosting providers. Because most shared hosting providers only support Medium Trust and not Full Trust, we do not recommend using the HTML Editor Extender with a public website hosted with a shared hosting provider. Why a New HTML Editor Control? The Ajax Control Toolkit now includes two HTML Editor controls. Why did we introduce a new HTML Editor control when there was already an existing HTML Editor? We think you will like the new HTML Editor much more than the previous one. We had several goals with the new HTML Editor Extender: Lightweight – We wanted to leverage HTML5 to create a lightweight HTML Editor. The new HTML Editor generates much less markup and script than the previous HTML Editor. Secure – We wanted to make it easy to integrate the AntiXSS library with the HTML Editor. If you are creating a public facing website, we strongly recommend that you use the AntiXSS Provider. Customizable – We wanted to make it easy for users to customize the toolbar buttons displayed by the HTML Editor. Compatibility – We wanted to ensure that the HTML Editor will work with the latest versions of the most popular browsers (including Internet Explorer 6 and higher). The old HTML Editor control is still included in the Ajax Control Toolkit and continues to live in the AjaxControlToolkit.HTMLEditor namespace. We have not modified the control and you can continue to use the control in the same way as you have used it in the past. However, we hope that you will consider migrating to the new HTML Editor Extender for the reasons listed above. Summary We’ve introduced a new Ajax Control Toolkit control with this release. I want to thank the developers and testers on the Superexpert team for the huge amount of work which they put into this control. It was a non-trivial task to build an entirely new control which has the complexity of the HTML Editor in less than 6 weeks. Please let us know what you think! We want to hear your feedback. If you discover issues with the new HTML Editor Extender control, or you have questions about the control, or you have ideas for how it can be improved, then please post them to this blog. Tomorrow starts a new sprint

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  • September 2011 Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit

    - by Stephen Walther
    I’m happy to announce the release of the September 2011 Ajax Control Toolkit. This release has several important new features including: Date ranges – When using the Calendar extender, you can specify a start and end date and a user can pick only those dates which fall within the specified range. This was the fourth top-voted feature request for the Ajax Control Toolkit at CodePlex. Twitter Control – You can use the new Twitter control to display recent tweets associated with a particular Twitter user or tweets which match a search query. Gravatar Control – You can use the new Gravatar control to display a unique image for each user of your website. Users can upload custom images to the Gravatar.com website or the Gravatar control can display a unique, auto-generated, image for a user. You can download this release this very minute by visiting CodePlex: http://AjaxControlToolkit.CodePlex.com Alternatively, you can execute the following command from the Visual Studio NuGet console: Improvements to the Ajax Control Toolkit Calendar Control The Ajax Control Toolkit Calendar extender control is one of the most heavily used controls from the Ajax Control Toolkit. The developers on the Superexpert team spent the last sprint focusing on improving this control. There are three important changes that we made to the Calendar control: we added support for date ranges, we added support for highlighting today’s date, and we made fixes to several bugs related to time zones and daylight savings. Using Calendar Date Ranges One of the top-voted feature requests for the Ajax Control Toolkit was a request to add support for date ranges to the Calendar control (this was the fourth most voted feature request at CodePlex). With the latest release of the Ajax Control Toolkit, the Calendar extender now supports date ranges. For example, the following page illustrates how you can create a popup calendar which allows a user only to pick dates between March 2, 2009 and May 16, 2009. <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="CalendarDateRange.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.CalendarDateRange" %> <%@ Register TagPrefix="asp" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" %> <html> <head runat="server"> <title>Calendar Date Range</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <asp:ToolkitScriptManager ID="tsm" runat="server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtHotelReservationDate" runat="server" /> <asp:CalendarExtender ID="Calendar1" TargetControlID="txtHotelReservationDate" StartDate="3/2/2009" EndDate="5/16/2009" SelectedDate="3/2/2009" runat="server" /> </form> </body> </html> This page contains three controls: an Ajax Control Toolkit ToolkitScriptManager control, a standard ASP.NET TextBox control, and an Ajax Control Toolkit CalendarExtender control. Notice that the Calendar control includes StartDate and EndDate properties which restrict the range of valid dates. The Calendar control shows days, months, and years outside of the valid range as struck out. You cannot select days, months, or years which fall outside of the range. The following video illustrates interacting with the new date range feature: If you want to experiment with a live version of the Ajax Control Toolkit Calendar extender control then you can visit the Calendar Sample Page at the Ajax Control Toolkit Sample Site. Highlighted Today’s Date Another highly requested feature for the Calendar control was support for highlighting today’s date. The Calendar control now highlights the user’s current date regardless of the user’s time zone. Fixes to Time Zone and Daylight Savings Time Bugs We fixed several significant Calendar extender bugs related to time zones and daylight savings time. For example, previously, when you set the Calendar control’s SelectedDate property to the value 1/1/2007 then the selected data would appear as 12/31/2006 or 1/1/2007 or 1/2/2007 depending on the server time zone. For example, if your server time zone was set to Samoa (UTC-11:00), then setting SelectedDate=”1/1/2007” would result in “12/31/2006” being selected in the Calendar. Users of the Calendar extender control found this behavior confusing. After careful consideration, we decided to change the Calendar extender so that it interprets all dates as UTC dates. In other words, if you set StartDate=”1/1/2007” then the Calendar extender parses the date as 1/1/2007 UTC instead of parsing the date according to the server time zone. By interpreting all dates as UTC dates, we avoid all of the reported issues with the SelectedDate property showing the wrong date. Furthermore, when you set the StartDate and EndDate properties, you know that the same StartDate and EndDate will be selected regardless of the time zone associated with the server or associated with the browser. The date 1/1/2007 will always be the date 1/1/2007. The New Twitter Control This release of the Ajax Control Toolkit introduces a new twitter control. You can use the Twitter control to display recent tweets associated with a particular twitter user. You also can use this control to show the results of a twitter search. The following page illustrates how you can use the Twitter control to display recent tweets made by Scott Hanselman: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="TwitterProfile.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.TwitterProfile" %> <%@ Register TagPrefix="asp" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" %> <html > <head runat="server"> <title>Twitter Profile</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <asp:ToolkitScriptManager ID="tsm" runat="server" /> <asp:Twitter ID="Twitter1" ScreenName="shanselman" runat="server" /> </form> </body> </html> This page includes two Ajax Control Toolkit controls: the ToolkitScriptManager control and the Twitter control. The Twitter control is set to display tweets from Scott Hanselman (shanselman): You also can use the Twitter control to display the results of a search query. For example, the following page displays all recent tweets related to the Ajax Control Toolkit: Twitter limits the number of times that you can interact with their API in an hour. Twitter recommends that you cache results on the server (https://dev.twitter.com/docs/rate-limiting). By default, the Twitter control caches results on the server for a duration of 5 minutes. You can modify the cache duration by assigning a value (in seconds) to the Twitter control's CacheDuration property. The Twitter control wraps a standard ASP.NET ListView control. You can customize the appearance of the Twitter control by modifying its LayoutTemplate, StatusTemplate, AlternatingStatusTemplate, and EmptyDataTemplate. To learn more about the new Twitter control, visit the live Twitter Sample Page. The New Gravatar Control The September 2011 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit also includes a new Gravatar control. This control makes it easy to display a unique image for each user of your website. A Gravatar is associated with an email address. You can visit Gravatar.com and upload an image and associate the image with your email address. That way, every website which uses Gravatars (such as the www.ASP.NET website) will display your image next to your name. For example, I visited the Gravatar.com website and associated an image of a Koala Bear with the email address [email protected]. The following page illustrates how you can use the Gravatar control to display the Gravatar image associated with the [email protected] email address: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="GravatarDemo.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.GravatarDemo" %> <%@ Register TagPrefix="asp" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" %> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head id="Head1" runat="server"> <title>Gravatar Demo</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <asp:ToolkitScriptManager ID="tsm" runat="server" /> <asp:Gravatar ID="Gravatar1" Email="[email protected]" runat="server" /> </form> </body> </html> The page above simply displays the Gravatar image associated with the [email protected] email address: If a user has not uploaded an image to Gravatar.com then you can auto-generate a unique image for the user from the user email address. The Gravatar control supports four types of auto-generated images: Identicon -- A different geometric pattern is generated for each unrecognized email. MonsterId -- A different image of a monster is generated for each unrecognized email. Wavatar -- A different image of a face is generated for each unrecognized email. Retro -- A different 8-bit arcade-style face is generated for each unrecognized email. For example, there is no Gravatar image associated with the email address [email protected]. The following page displays an auto-generated MonsterId for this email address: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="GravatarMonster.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.GravatarMonster" %> <%@ Register TagPrefix="asp" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" %> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head id="Head1" runat="server"> <title>Gravatar Monster</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <asp:ToolkitScriptManager ID="tsm" runat="server" /> <asp:Gravatar ID="Gravatar1" Email="[email protected]" DefaultImageBehavior="MonsterId" runat="server" /> </form> </body> </html> The page above generates the following image automatically from the supplied email address: To learn more about the properties of the new Gravatar control, visit the live Gravatar Sample Page. ASP.NET Connections Talk on the Ajax Control Toolkit If you are interested in learning more about the changes that we are making to the Ajax Control Toolkit then please come to my talk on the Ajax Control Toolkit at the upcoming ASP.NET Connections conference. In the talk, I will present a summary of the changes that we have made to the Ajax Control Toolkit over the last several months and discuss our future plans. Do you have ideas for new Ajax Control Toolkit controls? Ideas for improving the toolkit? Come to my talk – I would love to hear from you. You can register for the ASP.NET Connections conference by visiting the following website: Register for ASP.NET Connections   Summary The previous release of the Ajax Control Toolkit – the July 2011 Release – has had over 100,000 downloads. That is a huge number of developers who are working with the Ajax Control Toolkit. We are really excited about the new features which we added to the Ajax Control Toolkit in the latest September sprint. We hope that you find the updated Calender control, the new Twitter control, and the new Gravatar control valuable when building your ASP.NET Web Forms applications.

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  • Netflix, jQuery, JSONP, and OData

    - by Stephen Walther
    At the last MIX conference, Netflix announced that they are exposing their catalog of movie information using the OData protocol. This is great news! This means that you can take advantage of all of the advanced OData querying features against a live database of Netflix movies. In this blog entry, I’ll demonstrate how you can use Netflix, jQuery, JSONP, and OData to create a simple movie lookup form. The form enables you to enter a movie title, or part of a movie title, and display a list of matching movies. For example, Figure 1 illustrates the movies displayed when you enter the value robot into the lookup form.   Using the Netflix OData Catalog API You can learn about the Netflix OData Catalog API at the following website: http://developer.netflix.com/docs/oData_Catalog The nice thing about this website is that it provides plenty of samples. It also has a good general reference for OData. For example, the website includes a list of OData filter operators and functions. The Netflix Catalog API exposes 4 top-level resources: Titles – A database of Movie information including interesting movie properties such as synopsis, BoxArt, and Cast. People – A database of people information including interesting information such as Awards, TitlesDirected, and TitlesActedIn. Languages – Enables you to get title information in different languages. Genres – Enables you to get title information for specific movie genres. OData is REST based. This means that you can perform queries by putting together the right URL. For example, if you want to get a list of the movies that were released after 2010 and that had an average rating greater than 4 then you can enter the following URL in the address bar of your browser: http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=ReleaseYear gt 2010&AverageRating gt 4 Entering this URL returns the movies in Figure 2. Creating the Movie Lookup Form The complete code for the Movie Lookup form is contained in Listing 1. Listing 1 – MovieLookup.htm <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Netflix with jQuery</title> <style type="text/css"> #movieTemplateContainer div { width:400px; padding: 10px; margin: 10px; border: black solid 1px; } </style> <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="App_Scripts/Microtemplates.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <label>Search Movies:</label> <input id="movieName" size="50" /> <button id="btnLookup">Lookup</button> <div id="movieTemplateContainer"></div> <script id="movieTemplate" type="text/html"> <div> <img src="<%=BoxArtSmallUrl %>" /> <strong><%=Name%></strong> <p> <%=Synopsis %> </p> </div> </script> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnLookup").click(function () { // Build OData query var movieName = $("#movieName").val(); var query = "http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog" // netflix base url + "/Titles" // top-level resource + "?$filter=substringof('" + escape(movieName) + "',Name)" // filter by movie name + "&$callback=callback" // jsonp request + "&$format=json"; // json request // Make JSONP call to Netflix $.ajax({ dataType: "jsonp", url: query, jsonpCallback: "callback", success: callback }); }); function callback(result) { // unwrap result var movies = result["d"]["results"]; // show movies in template var showMovie = tmpl("movieTemplate"); var html = ""; for (var i = 0; i < movies.length; i++) { // flatten movie movies[i].BoxArtSmallUrl = movies[i].BoxArt.SmallUrl; // render with template html += showMovie(movies[i]); } $("#movieTemplateContainer").html(html); } </script> </body> </html> The HTML page in Listing 1 includes two JavaScript libraries: <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="App_Scripts/Microtemplates.js" type="text/javascript"></script> The first script tag retrieves jQuery from the Microsoft Ajax CDN. You can learn more about the Microsoft Ajax CDN by visiting the following website: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/cdn.ashx The second script tag is used to reference Resig’s micro-templating library. Because I want to use a template to display each movie, I need this library: http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating/ When you enter a value into the Search Movies input field and click the button, the following JavaScript code is executed: // Build OData query var movieName = $("#movieName").val(); var query = "http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog" // netflix base url + "/Titles" // top-level resource + "?$filter=substringof('" + escape(movieName) + "',Name)" // filter by movie name + "&$callback=callback" // jsonp request + "&$format=json"; // json request // Make JSONP call to Netflix $.ajax({ dataType: "jsonp", url: query, jsonpCallback: "callback", success: callback }); This code Is used to build a query that will be executed against the Netflix Catalog API. For example, if you enter the search phrase King Kong then the following URL is created: http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=substringof(‘King%20Kong’,Name)&$callback=callback&$format=json This query includes the following parameters: $filter – You assign a filter expression to this parameter to filter the movie results. $callback – You assign the name of a JavaScript callback method to this parameter. OData calls this method to return the movie results. $format – you assign either the value json or xml to this parameter to specify how the format of the movie results. Notice that all of the OData parameters -- $filter, $callback, $format -- start with a dollar sign $. The Movie Lookup form uses JSONP to retrieve data across the Internet. Because WCF Data Services supports JSONP, and Netflix uses WCF Data Services to expose movies using the OData protocol, you can use JSONP when interacting with the Netflix Catalog API. To learn more about using JSONP with OData, see Pablo Castro’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/pablo/archive/2009/02/25/adding-support-for-jsonp-and-url-controlled-format-to-ado-net-data-services.aspx The actual JSONP call is performed by calling the $.ajax() method. When this call successfully completes, the JavaScript callback() method is called. The callback() method looks like this: function callback(result) { // unwrap result var movies = result["d"]["results"]; // show movies in template var showMovie = tmpl("movieTemplate"); var html = ""; for (var i = 0; i < movies.length; i++) { // flatten movie movies[i].BoxArtSmallUrl = movies[i].BoxArt.SmallUrl; // render with template html += showMovie(movies[i]); } $("#movieTemplateContainer").html(html); } The movie results from Netflix are passed to the callback method. The callback method takes advantage of Resig’s micro-templating library to display each of the movie results. A template used to display each movie is passed to the tmpl() method. The movie template looks like this: <script id="movieTemplate" type="text/html"> <div> <img src="<%=BoxArtSmallUrl %>" /> <strong><%=Name%></strong> <p> <%=Synopsis %> </p> </div> </script>   This template looks like a server-side ASP.NET template. However, the template is rendered in the client (browser) instead of the server. Summary The goal of this blog entry was to demonstrate how well jQuery works with OData. We managed to use a number of interesting open-source libraries and open protocols while building the Movie Lookup form including jQuery, JSONP, JSON, and OData.

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  • Using jQuery to Insert a New Database Record

    - by Stephen Walther
    The goal of this blog entry is to explore the easiest way of inserting a new record into a database using jQuery and .NET. I’m going to explore two approaches: using Generic Handlers and using a WCF service (In a future blog entry I’ll take a look at OData and WCF Data Services). Create the ASP.NET Project I’ll start by creating a new empty ASP.NET application with Visual Studio 2010. Select the menu option File, New Project and select the ASP.NET Empty Web Application project template. Setup the Database and Data Model I’ll use my standard MoviesDB.mdf movies database. This database contains one table named Movies that looks like this: I’ll use the ADO.NET Entity Framework to represent my database data: Select the menu option Project, Add New Item and select the ADO.NET Entity Data Model project item. Name the data model MoviesDB.edmx and click the Add button. In the Choose Model Contents step, select Generate from database and click the Next button. In the Choose Your Data Connection step, leave all of the defaults and click the Next button. In the Choose Your Data Objects step, select the Movies table and click the Finish button. Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2010 cannot spell movie correctly :) You need to click on Movy and change the name of the class to Movie. In the Properties window, change the Entity Set Name to Movies. Using a Generic Handler In this section, we’ll use jQuery with an ASP.NET generic handler to insert a new record into the database. A generic handler is similar to an ASP.NET page, but it does not have any of the overhead. It consists of one method named ProcessRequest(). Select the menu option Project, Add New Item and select the Generic Handler project item. Name your new generic handler InsertMovie.ashx and click the Add button. Modify your handler so it looks like Listing 1: Listing 1 – InsertMovie.ashx using System.Web; namespace WebApplication1 { /// <summary> /// Inserts a new movie into the database /// </summary> public class InsertMovie : IHttpHandler { private MoviesDBEntities _dataContext = new MoviesDBEntities(); public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; // Extract form fields var title = context.Request["title"]; var director = context.Request["director"]; // Create movie to insert var movieToInsert = new Movie { Title = title, Director = director }; // Save new movie to DB _dataContext.AddToMovies(movieToInsert); _dataContext.SaveChanges(); // Return success context.Response.Write("success"); } public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } } } } In Listing 1, the ProcessRequest() method is used to retrieve a title and director from form parameters. Next, a new Movie is created with the form values. Finally, the new movie is saved to the database and the string “success” is returned. Using jQuery with the Generic Handler We can call the InsertMovie.ashx generic handler from jQuery by using the standard jQuery post() method. The following HTML page illustrates how you can retrieve form field values and post the values to the generic handler: Listing 2 – Default.htm <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Add Movie</title> <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <form> <label>Title:</label> <input name="title" /> <br /> <label>Director:</label> <input name="director" /> </form> <button id="btnAdd">Add Movie</button> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnAdd").click(function () { $.post("InsertMovie.ashx", $("form").serialize(), insertCallback); }); function insertCallback(result) { if (result == "success") { alert("Movie added!"); } else { alert("Could not add movie!"); } } </script> </body> </html>     When you open the page in Listing 2 in a web browser, you get a simple HTML form: Notice that the page in Listing 2 includes the jQuery library. The jQuery library is included with the following SCRIPT tag: <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> The jQuery library is included on the Microsoft Ajax CDN so you can always easily include the jQuery library in your applications. You can learn more about the CDN at this website: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/cdn.ashx When you click the Add Movie button, the jQuery post() method is called to post the form data to the InsertMovie.ashx generic handler. Notice that the form values are serialized into a URL encoded string by calling the jQuery serialize() method. The serialize() method uses the name attribute of form fields and not the id attribute. Notes on this Approach This is a very low-level approach to interacting with .NET through jQuery – but it is simple and it works! And, you don’t need to use any JavaScript libraries in addition to the jQuery library to use this approach. The signature for the jQuery post() callback method looks like this: callback(data, textStatus, XmlHttpRequest) The second parameter, textStatus, returns the HTTP status code from the server. I tried returning different status codes from the generic handler with an eye towards implementing server validation by returning a status code such as 400 Bad Request when validation fails (see http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html ). I finally figured out that the callback is not invoked when the textStatus has any value other than “success”. Using a WCF Service As an alternative to posting to a generic handler, you can create a WCF service. You create a new WCF service by selecting the menu option Project, Add New Item and selecting the Ajax-enabled WCF Service project item. Name your WCF service InsertMovie.svc and click the Add button. Modify the WCF service so that it looks like Listing 3: Listing 3 – InsertMovie.svc using System.ServiceModel; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; namespace WebApplication1 { [ServiceBehavior(IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults=true)] [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class MovieService { private MoviesDBEntities _dataContext = new MoviesDBEntities(); [OperationContract] public bool Insert(string title, string director) { // Create movie to insert var movieToInsert = new Movie { Title = title, Director = director }; // Save new movie to DB _dataContext.AddToMovies(movieToInsert); _dataContext.SaveChanges(); // Return movie (with primary key) return true; } } }   The WCF service in Listing 3 uses the Entity Framework to insert a record into the Movies database table. The service always returns the value true. Notice that the service in Listing 3 includes the following attribute: [ServiceBehavior(IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults=true)] You need to include this attribute if you want to get detailed error information back to the client. When you are building an application, you should always include this attribute. When you are ready to release your application, you should remove this attribute for security reasons. Using jQuery with the WCF Service Calling a WCF service from jQuery requires a little more work than calling a generic handler from jQuery. Here are some good blog posts on some of the issues with using jQuery with WCF: http://encosia.com/2008/06/05/3-mistakes-to-avoid-when-using-jquery-with-aspnet-ajax/ http://encosia.com/2008/03/27/using-jquery-to-consume-aspnet-json-web-services/ http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/04/04/json-hijacking-and-how-asp-net-ajax-1-0-mitigates-these-attacks.aspx http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/896411.aspx http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/324917.aspx http://professionalaspnet.com/archive/tags/WCF/default.aspx The primary requirement when calling WCF from jQuery is that the request use JSON: The request must include a content-type:application/json header. Any parameters included with the request must be JSON encoded. Unfortunately, jQuery does not include a method for serializing JSON (Although, oddly, jQuery does include a parseJSON() method for deserializing JSON). Therefore, we need to use an additional library to handle the JSON serialization. The page in Listing 4 illustrates how you can call a WCF service from jQuery. Listing 4 – Default2.aspx <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Add Movie</title> <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="Scripts/json2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <form> <label>Title:</label> <input id="title" /> <br /> <label>Director:</label> <input id="director" /> </form> <button id="btnAdd">Add Movie</button> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnAdd").click(function () { // Convert the form into an object var data = { title: $("#title").val(), director: $("#director").val() }; // JSONify the data data = JSON.stringify(data); // Post it $.ajax({ type: "POST", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", url: "MovieService.svc/Insert", data: data, dataType: "json", success: insertCallback }); }); function insertCallback(result) { // unwrap result result = result["d"]; if (result === true) { alert("Movie added!"); } else { alert("Could not add movie!"); } } </script> </body> </html> There are several things to notice about Listing 4. First, notice that the page includes both the jQuery library and Douglas Crockford’s JSON2 library: <script src="Scripts/json2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> You need to include the JSON2 library to serialize the form values into JSON. You can download the JSON2 library from the following location: http://www.json.org/js.html When you click the button to submit the form, the form data is converted into a JavaScript object: // Convert the form into an object var data = { title: $("#title").val(), director: $("#director").val() }; Next, the data is serialized into JSON using the JSON2 library: // JSONify the data var data = JSON.stringify(data); Finally, the form data is posted to the WCF service by calling the jQuery ajax() method: // Post it $.ajax({   type: "POST",   contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",   url: "MovieService.svc/Insert",   data: data,   dataType: "json",   success: insertCallback }); You can’t use the standard jQuery post() method because you must set the content-type of the request to be application/json. Otherwise, the WCF service will reject the request for security reasons. For details, see the Scott Guthrie blog post: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/04/04/json-hijacking-and-how-asp-net-ajax-1-0-mitigates-these-attacks.aspx The insertCallback() method is called when the WCF service returns a response. This method looks like this: function insertCallback(result) {   // unwrap result   result = result["d"];   if (result === true) {       alert("Movie added!");   } else {     alert("Could not add movie!");   } } When we called the jQuery ajax() method, we set the dataType to JSON. That causes the jQuery ajax() method to deserialize the response from the WCF service from JSON into a JavaScript object automatically. The following value is passed to the insertCallback method: {"d":true} For security reasons, a WCF service always returns a response with a “d” wrapper. The following line of code removes the “d” wrapper: // unwrap result result = result["d"]; To learn more about the “d” wrapper, I recommend that you read the following blog posts: http://encosia.com/2009/02/10/a-breaking-change-between-versions-of-aspnet-ajax/ http://encosia.com/2009/06/29/never-worry-about-asp-net-ajaxs-d-again/ Summary In this blog entry, I explored two methods of inserting a database record using jQuery and .NET. First, we created a generic handler and called the handler from jQuery. This is a very low-level approach. However, it is a simple approach that works. Next, we looked at how you can call a WCF service using jQuery. This approach required a little more work because you need to serialize objects into JSON. We used the JSON2 library to perform the serialization. In the next blog post, I want to explore how you can use jQuery with OData and WCF Data Services.

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