Brennan’s Blog

A line has formed around building 42 at the Microsoft campus as anxious developers await the release of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. The word on the street is that it will be coming out any time this week so it could be a couple more wet, cold nights in Redmond. Microsoft appreciates the dedication and is hosting a Matrix trilogy projected onto the building tonight to help the fanboys pass the time. I wonder if they had Visual Studio in the Matrix. And what would Neo's code look like? I bet his color scheme would be hot. But I digress.

Ok, so there is no line, that I know of, but I am definitely anxious to start using it. I will just download it from MSDN once it is out. My main need at the moment is the Javascript support that it will provide. I have become accustom to Intellisense in C#, VB and even XML and not having it in while I work with Javascript has made me feel like I am back in a terminal window hacking Perl in vi. I try to get by with as little code as possible because I know it will not be easy to maintain.

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Developing an ASP.NET AJAX application can be a difficult when the Javascript source is dynamically included with the page. Embedding the Javascript within a page or a user control causes the location of the source to move around which makes it hard to set breakpoints. It also means the code cannot be reused in other pages as easily as an external source file. But the trick is giving the external source file the information it needs to instrument the page, such as defining a variable with the ID of a control. Within a page you could normally set the variable to the ClientID of the control.

<script type="text/javascript">
var contentPanelId = '<%= ContentPanel1.ClientID %>';
</script>

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Visual Studio 2008 already includes some basic support for Intellisense in Javascript. It is actually quite amazing what you can do with it but it apparently does not fully support Javascript source files that are embedded within an assembly. I use this technique with my SmallSharpTools.EmbeddedScripts project. You can see it in action with some of the demos I prepared. It includes a smart server control that manages the script dependencies with helpful design-time support. What would be extremely useful would be a way to have Visual Studio 2008 pick up the script references like normally referenced scripts.

If you agree, and I hope you do, please vote on the feedback item I opened.

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I read HTTP compression in ASP.NET 2.0 by Mads Kristensen the other day and tried it out on a website that is using ASP.NET AJAX. I found that while the development web server run by Visual Studio handles it all just fine, IIS 6 on the server does not. Somehow the process is corrupting the page state. So while I want to use the compression to get what I can for bandwidth savings I had to work around this problem.

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It won't be long before we can get our hands on the final release of Visual Studio "Orcas" and .NET 3.5. For those of us who did not attend MIX '07 you can still get a sneak peak. I watched Web Development Using Visual Studio "Orcas" by Omar Khan and I am quite impressed with the changes they are going to include.

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I have updated LinkMindr.com with a few improvements. The big change is limiting the tag cloud to just 35 of the most recently modified tags. At the bottom I have a drop down list for all of the tags so users can still access all of their tagged items. This conserves real estate on the page and makes the most used tags more accessible.

As a part of this change I also converted the page to use PostBack events as triggers for the UpdatePanel which is a features of the new ASP.NET AJAX control suite. Previously I had a clever jQuery call handle all of my AJAX functionality but with the latest changes it became easier to handle this functionality with event triggering.

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I recently fixed a bug in a widely used Javascript library and once I was done I needed to shrink the library to get it back to the previously reasonable size. To do so I planned to use Packer by Dean Edwards, a popular tool which uses a clever technique to eliminate duplicate strings in a library. Many times you will get some very good compression ratios. When a Javascript library grows beyond 100k it is helpful to make use a tool like Packer.

When I looked at using Packer I found a previous version for .NET which offered part of what I needed with a limitation due to the WinForm interface. I reused the classes which did all of the work with a newly created console application which took multiple filenames to compress all of the files into a single output which is commonly done with Packer. Once I added this functionality I packaged it with an installer and published it on SmallSharpTools.com.

• Packer 3.0 for .NET
• Download

This console application should come in handle in certain scenarios, such as a post build deployment. I have a few ideas for future releases once I have more time. Those ideas at listed on the project page.

I just came across an ad for Visual Studio which links over to Defy All Challenges. It features videos which seem like a twist of the popular show The Office but the clips are from video games with custom voiceovers. The clips show the characters doing various things that people do in an office. Some of them are pretty funny. They even have an application on the website which allows you to create your own video which others can vote on later.

I think we got a preview of this all when Scott Guthrie did a video about ASP.NET AJAX in a Red vs Blue clip. (requires WPF/e) It makes me wonder how long before they have a Sims theme for The Office if they do not have one in the works already.

Six months ago I wrote Web Development Tools for the Power Developer which covered the progress that has been made with tools for web development. It got picked up by a few popular websites and through the various comments I learned about a few additional tools I did not know about previously. The two most useful bits that I found were Firebug and jQuery.

You can see the power of Firebug and jQuery in a demo by John Resig which I have leveraged heavily since I have seen the video. I used his example to pick apart some effects used by the ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit as shown in my own video. And now my newest website, LinkMindr.com, is using jQuery as the main engine for the key functionality. Look at the source and you will be surprised that the Javascript running the website is under 40 lines of my own hand written Javascript especially for what it does.

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I have updated GPlotter to make use of the revised Google Maps API. I also completely restructured the Javascript to a much more object oriented coding style. I am using the latest release of Prototype, which recently moved to a new location as well as posted a great deal of new documentation. I am using Prototype for the object inheritance and AJAX functionality.

GPlotter still works as it did before but Google did change the zoom level. You will want to change the zoom level in your XML files. (see Zoom Level Order) The documentation explains the new zoom should be 17 minus the old zoom value.

Perhaps best of all, to change GPlotter for your own custom purposes you can use the Prototype inheritance mechanism to inherit and extend GPlotter. And if you do extend or customize GPlotter I would like to see your changes. I would be happy to consider incorporating your changes into GPlotter if the new features are helpful to others.

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