So as I’m sure you have guessed by my last bunch of posts, I’ve been hooked on Ruby and Rails development.  The more I use it, the more I love it.  I felt I was loving it a bit too much, so decided to divert my attention back to ASP.NET MVC for a while.  While developing with Rails, I was practicing BDD with Cucumber.   I felt that Cucumber scenarios (written Gherkin) were far more useful for the majority of my testing on a web application.  Sure unit tests are worthwhile for bits of code, but I’ve found that they don’t always make sense when testing a web application (like Steve Sanderson has mentioned).  Some may argue that these tests are brittle, but honestly, I feel it defines my application better and it definitely tests the actual interactions better.  I’m fully on board for unit tests for complex processes, but the majority of web work just isn’t that complex.

I’m not going to go fully into what BDD is here, but my goal was to use a similar process when developing ASP.NET MVC applications as I did in Rails.  With Rails, it’s simple, Rails, Cucumber, Pickle, ActiveRecord, Factory Girl, Webrat, etc. work perfectly together.   In the .NET world, there are options, but nothing that really fit together as nicely.  I started with just wanting to test my basic application (menus, breadcrumbs, etc) and didn’t venture into model work yet, so I figured it would be as simple and efficient as it is in Rails.  Not so much.  I tweeted about this exact thing a while ago.  More...

I’ve been using ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 quite a bit lately in ASP.NET 3.5 applications.  I encountered two issues tonight, and I hope this post saves someone some grief.

The first problem has to do with referencing the ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 library within an ASP.NET 3.5 application, and the second was a surprising data binding issue using the DataView. 

If you are looking for more information on ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, be sure check out my other articles on the site.

Issue 1 – The ScriptManagerProxy and CompositeScripts

The first issue I encountered was a client side error when using the DataView on a content page in my ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 application.  This site utilizes master pages, so I’m using a WebForm, otherwise I probably would have just gone with a plain old HTML page.  Regardless, since this is an ASP.NET application and the ScriptManager is declared in the Master page, I added the ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX scripts to a ScriptManagerProxy (instead of the ScriptManager itself). The code for the ScriptManagerProxy looks very similar to that for the ScriptManger.

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I have been using ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 quite a bit lately, as I’m sure most of you are aware from my recent posts.  In those posts, I used standard HTML script references to show that ASP.NET AJAX is not reliant upon ASP.NET.  I realize that many of you are in fact using ASP.NET, and today we will take a look at using the ScriptManager. 

First we’ll look at using the Preview 4 scripts within an ASP.NET 3.5 application (with the ScriptManager of course) as well as using client templates and ADO.NET Data Services with the ScriptManager in ASP.NET 4.0 (Beta 1).  After that, we’ll take a closer look at some of the new features of the ScriptManager in ASP.NET 4.0. 

Preview 4 and the ASP.NET 3.5 ScriptManager

In my posts on ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 so far, I used standard HTML script references (as stated earlier).  However, what if you wanted to incorporate the new ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 scripts with a ScriptManager.  I tried this in a recent ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 project, and ran into some issues getting it all to work out.  Thanks to this blog (and Bertrand LeRoy), I found the solution.

<asp:scriptmanager id="sm" runat="server">
    <scripts>
        <asp:scriptreference scriptmode="Inherit" name="MicrosoftAjax.js" path="~/scripts/MicrosoftAjax.js" />
        <asp:scriptreference scriptmode="Inherit" path="~/scripts/MicrosoftAjaxAdoNet.js" />
        <asp:scriptreference scriptmode="Inherit" path="~/scripts/MicrosoftAjaxTemplates.js" />                
    </scripts>
</asp:scriptmanager>

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Throughout the course of my introductory posts on ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, we looked at the new DataView control as well as the Sys.Observer class, which brings the Observer pattern to plain JavaScript objects.  The new ASP.NET AJAX release is very exciting offering powerful new features to take AJAX enabled applications to a new level.  In this post, we’ll look at another exciting feature of ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 known as “live bindings.” 

You may remember that we looked briefly at live bindings in the client templates post, but for those examples I used one-way / one-time bindings.  Today, we’ll take a closer look at live bindings and see how two-way live bindings removes the one-way / one-time binding restriction allowing us to update bound elements on our page automatically when the underlying data changes. 

Again, in this post, I’ll be using Preview 4 of the ASP.NET AJAX Library, which can be downloaded from CodePlex.  The Preview 4 version can be used in your applications today (e.g. ASP 3.5, HTML).  Keep in mind that these components are still in "preview" mode (meaning no Microsoft support), though they are usable at your own risk.  For more information, you can check out the license on CodePlex. More...

In my last post on ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, we took a look at the new DataView ASP.NET AJAX control.  We saw that by using a DataView, we could easily bind data with JavaScript or declaratively with a few attributes.  In this post, we’ll look at another feature of the ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX Library, the Observer design pattern for plain JavaScript objects.  The pattern is implemented in the client side Sys.Observer class.  This feature is used internally within the new version of ASP.NET AJAX for live-binding and the DataView control.  

Here we will be using Preview 4 of the ASP.NET AJAX Library, which can be downloaded from CodePlex.  Remember that these components are still in "preview" mode (meaning no Microsoft support), though they are usable at your own risk.  For more information, you can check out the license on CodePlex.  I highly recommend downloading the samples available for Preview 4, which are also available at CodePlex.  The samples give you a good look at what is coming. 

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the Sys.Observer class, witness the problems it solves, and take a look at a few examples.  More...