I have looked briefly at ASP.NET AJAX now that it has been released and I am trying to come up with techniques to make it easier to develop AJAX features for a website. I am finding the Firebug extension for Firefox is invaluable. As I was working with the Collapsible Panel I found that as I toggle the panel to hide and show itself the style values change in Firebug as the height and other values change. It is pretty instructive on what is exactly happening.
I created a video to show what this looks like. And you can try it yourself at LinkMindr.com.
I have been building a simple website with some of the web 2.0 signature features like AJAX, RSS, OPML and tagging. It even has an moniker at the bottom indicating it is currently an alpha release. Soon I hope to have it ready for the Beta moniker.
The website works as a social bookmarking system to allow the user to save links from any computer to their LinkMindr account. The focus is on the timeliness of the links with features to give the user access to recently added links. As a part of that focus, RSS feeds are available to access the 20 latest links and links added in the last 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days. These feeds work well as Live Bookmarks in Firefox. They also work with IE7 but accessing the feeds is a bit clumsy. Below the videos show how LinkMindr works with Firefox.
I would like to get more feedback. To get you started I have created a video demo on YouTube which is shown below. You can also use the other video alternatives: SWF, WMV for higher quality.
I had several tasks I wanted to complete on several of my personal projects which I had on hold while I was busy with other work the past few months. Over the break I was able to squeeze in time between driving around the state for family visits to knock of few of these tasks off my list.
I occasionally use Meebo.com for chat. It is a website interface which works with MSN, Yahoo!, AOL IM, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber. Today I found that they have a little widget you can add to your own website to allow people to chat with you. That is insanely cool! You can find it on the main page of my blog on the right sidebar.
The best part is that it is completely free. If someone wants to discuss something I posted to my blog they can just start a chat session right away. There is no need to drop me an email and wait for a response. Naturally I still want worthwhile submissions to be added as comments at the end of each blog entry so that everyone can benefit from the information, especially if it is about a technique or tool my blog entry did not cover. But when I do have a good chat with someone I can post a follow up blog entry to add the additional information.
[ Update: I have changed the sidebar to use a launch link instead to take up less space and allow people to move from page to page without losing the chat session. ]
In ASP.NET you can access a database of browsers which will tell you their capabilities. It is called BrowserCaps. It is a hierarchical structure which general breaks down between Internet Explorer and Mozilla. Given that IE7 will soon be out, I questioned whether the BrowserCaps database needed to be adjusted. I got a response back from Shanku Niyogi that it should not need to be updated just yet. In fact, it is configured to recognize IE7 as the same as IE6 with the range of versions going from 5 to 9. You can see it for yourself in the following file.
What is an "up level" browser now anyway? When ASP.NET was first unleashed it was done at the time when Netscape and Internet Explorer were fiercely competing by adding features at every turn. To cope with the changes, ASP.NET included the browser capabilities database and generally labeled browsers as "up level" or "down level". This generally took into account whether the browser supported Cookies, Javascript and CSS. It was largely applied in Microsoft web products like Outlook Web Access and Sharepoint which do not attempt to work well in "down level" browsers. Years later this distinction still remains in ASP.NET, but you would be challenged to identify a modern browser which is not considered an "up level" browser by those standards.
We are now in a sort of generational shift from "up level" to Web 2.0 where browsers are assumed and required to have baseline support for Cookies, Javascript and CSS and now rich AJAX functionality. So it seems there is now another generalized classification available to ASP.NET.
downlevel
uplevel
web2.0
Going forward you may be tempted to only support Web 2.0 capable browsers, and you may get your wish. It is also getting harder to identify a current browser release which does not have the basic support necessary for AJAX. The question left is, how do you handle those old "up level" browsers?
One of my favorite writers for ASP.NET, Dino Esposito, has finished his book on ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions. He announced it on his blog. It was nearly ready to be published just as the name was changed from the Atlas codename to the final production name so the book cover and contents may still reference Atlas in a few places. The content should still be very helpful. Esposito has written such great documentation for ASP.NET the past few years. I just wish I knew how he has been able to keep up with the latest changes so quickly.
Identity management has been coming into vogue lately. The push is going towards distributed single sign-on and I believe this trend is largely due to the rise of web services, AJAX and the real world application of mashups. And as existing web powerhouses like Yahoo! have acquired other web properties, such as Flickr.com there has been a real need to integrate the identity systems.
One of my favorite writers for ASP.NET, 
