This piece of news has brought about great cheer in the Web Developers community. jQuery has been fast gaining reputation in the world of web-development as a light-weight, flexible and easy-to-use Javascript library. Integration of jQuery with Microsoft's development platform should provide web developers with new capabilities and opportunities.

This is very smart move by Microsoft given the fact they have always hesitated to incorporate open-source technologies into their products. It is planning to ship jQuery with the ASP .NET MVC very soon. Integration with Visual Studio is something that is going to happen later. There are plans to enable intellisense support for jQuery in Visual Studio which would be really cool I think.

Some of the high-points of jQuery integration with ASP .NET could be :

• JQuery provides an attractive alternative to conventional Javascript making client-side DOM and HTML manipulation much easier and quicker.
• It could complement ASP .NET Ajax and play with it really well
• The original jQuery libraries are going to be ported into ASP .NET without any change which would enable developers to leverage jQuery's true potential

 image-source : www.webmonkey.com

I have posted a few links below that discuss more about what the MS-jQuery marriage means for the web development community and how it can make life easier for developers out there.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/09/28/jquery-and-microsoft.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2008/09/28/jquery-now-officially-part-of-the-net-developer-s-toolbox.aspx

http://jquery.com/blog/2008/09/28/jquery-microsoft-nokia/

Ruby has been known work to well with Mac OS, Linux and Cygwin traditionally. I came to understand that it doesnt work very well with Windows. There are a number of pitfalls that are associated with Ruby or Rails running on Windows. Here, I going to talk about a couple that I hit when I was trying to get RoR to work on Windows :

• Most of the unit tests in my RoR project were failing throwing some weird database errors. I had done everything right from installing Ruby to installing the various gems needed for the project. After a quite a bit of googling, we learnt we could resolved these issues by making a simple change to the MySQL settings. The "Enable Strict mode" option had to be disabled using the MySQL interface config wizard. I ran the tests after this was done and voila!

• This problem was even more perplexing than the above one. A bunch of unit tests were still failing with a dreadful "Segmentation fault" error (I m sure "ROR on Windows" folks might have seen this before). Some research on this error led to the finding that MySQL versions greater than 5.0.18 might cause this problem. So I downgraded my version of MySQL to 5.0.18 to see if that fixed my problem. No luck as yet! This was followed by trying out a number of other potential fixes like using different versions of libmysql.dll (the MySQL library used in Ruby), making changes to database configuration in the project etc. None of these helped me. After a few days of frustration, I uninstalled the MySQL gem and reinstalled it upon the advice of my colleague. That finally did the trick!

I m still puzzled how these fixes worked but glad they did :).

Silverlight was designed to address these properties:

• Lightweight browser plug-in—Silverlight has Windows and Macintosh modules that are designed to enhance Internet Explorer (versions 6.0 and 7.0), Firefox 2.0, and Safari browsers.
• Native presentation runtime— Software-based browser enhancement that allows rendering of XAML-based interactive 2-D graphics, text, and media, in addition to the browser native rendering of HTML. XAML can be used inline, in a file, or in a package.
• Interactive video and audio—Cross-platform independent media runtime that can render Windows Media content (WMV and WMA) in addition to MP3. Video and audio are handled as a media element in XAML, enabling flexibility in their presentation. Furthermore, the media support leverages the huge infrastructure and ecosystem around Windows Media, enabling cost-effective delivery of top-quality media.
• Programming layer—In consistency with the Web architecture, Silverlight XAML is exposed using a DOM model to JavaScript. That way, AJAX programs can utilize the extended markup rendering capability using the same programming paradigms and practices (on the client and on the server).

The image below outlines Silverlight's architecture.

Silverlight applications can be written in any .NET programming language. As such, any development tools which can be used with .NET languages can work with Silverlight, provided they can target the Silverlight CoreCLR for hosting the application, instead of the .NET Framework CLR. Microsoft has positioned Microsoft Expression Blend versions 2.0 and 2.5 for designing the UI of Silverlight 1.0 and 2 applications respectively. Visual Studio 2008 can be used to develop and debug Silverlight applications. To create Silverlight projects and let the compiler target CoreCLR, Visual Studio 2008 requires the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio which is available as a beta release.

A Silverlight project contains the Silverlight.js and CreateSilverlight.js files which initializes the Silverlight plugin for use in HTML pages, a XAML file for the UI, and code-behind files for the application code. Silverlight applications are debugged in a manner similar to ASP.NET applications. Visual Studio's CLR Remote Cross Platform Debugging feature can be used to debug Silverlight applications running on a different platform as well.

I have listed below a bunch of links that can help one get started on Silverlight :

This tutorial starts you off on the customary "Hello World" application using vs-2008 and Silverlight 2

This tutorial talks about using Style Elements to better encapsulate look and feel

This video discusses binding a sample Silverlight control to n-tier application's business layer

This one's about how to consume WCF and ASP .NET web services in Silverlight

This provides information about different ASP .NET controls for Silverlight

I ll try to take a deeper dive into some of the specifics of Silverlight Implementation using the .NET framework in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

In one of my earlier jobs at a reputed insurance company's IT organization, We came across this problem that posed a big challenge. We were building a real-time policy servicing application. The problem was finding the right test data to test the application. The QA folks were spending so many man-hours trying to find the right test data or set-up test data. "Test Data Management" was becoming a big pain and was hurting the project badly in terms of time and costs. The solution?

"Test Data creation" was proposed a viable solution to this problem. The idea was to build reusable tools that would use the application to generate test data to suit the QA organisation's needs. These tools determined what the tester's test policy needs were, used the application services to generate test policies and provided them to the tester.  It was a great idea! The application that was to be tested was SOA driven which made it easier for this solution to work. I was a part of the team that worked on developing these tools. Some of the tangible benefits that everyone saw with this approach were:

• Life of QA became much much easier.
• Imagine the amount of time and money the company was going to save.
• The application was being tested repeatedly when it was used for creating the test data.
• Test Automation became easier.

The QA organization's mantra became "Forget about managing and reusing test data, create new test data the way you want it!"