Topic Archive: ASP.NET

Even Microsoft Needs a New Development Approach with Ajax

Dietrich Kappe, Sunday, October 29, 2006 @ 8:00 am

I'm sure you've all heard from various sources that the new Beta of Atlas has been released and that it isn't called Atlas anymore but ASP.NET Ajax. Lots of changes have been introduced, including the renaming of the $() function to $get() to allow it to work with other Javascript libraries. Maybe it's not quite Beta quality, says Rick Strahl in his recent post entitled More MS Ajax Pain. I have a hard time feeling sorry for Mr. Stahl, since he blogs from Maui, Hawaii, but I'm sure lots of other .NET/Ajax developers share his pain:

I've had one hell of a frustrating day going through my code and moving it to Atlas Beta 1. I'll get into specific issues in a minute, but my overall feeling is that this build is REALLY BUGGY. The previous ATLAS CTPs were reasonably stable and handled errors gracefully forwarding them to the client code. This build just crashes hard in many cases deep inside of client framework code. I've been at it for the better part of the day and while I managed to port all of the samples, just about all of them have one or two issues that I cannot seem to resolve completely without removing functionality. In fact, I've been doing that alot - skipping using framework features instead resorting to lower level JavaScript because it works.

Ouch! Rick goes on to detail the various specific issues he's had using the Beta. In my view, this isn't a fatal flaw in ASP.NET Ajax, just an early misstep due to the pressures to release something during this mad scramble to grab Ajax mindshare. The product and development process are still a little green and .NET developers and MS are feeling their way forward.

The truth is we're all still learning how to build, debug, test and support Ajax applications. See the various development tips from Ajax framework developers on how to debug applications festooned with Ajax widgets. New abstraction, inderection and other plumbing will make it easier to develop, but harder to debug and productivity is bound to go down before it goes up. It's been a long time since I've had any direct insight into Microsoft's internal development practices, but I have to believe they are struggling to find qualified Javascript programmers just like everyone else, just as I'm sure they're struggling to extend their unit, system and regression testing processes to cover the far more intricate logic on the browser.

At the end of the day, it looks to me that MS's approach of incrementally improving ASP.NET will be just good enough to allow them to capture the biggest market share for .NET Ajax. But TibCo GI, Echo2 (when the .NET version comes out), etc., all look to have more interesting offerings, IMHO, even for big corporate players who want to stick to .NET, especially if the productivity of their developers goes up.

 
  Technorati : ajax, asp.net, atlas

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agile ajax

ASP.NET Ajax Reviews

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, March 31, 2006 @ 9:00 am

Daniel Zeiss has put together the and excellent review of Ajax frameworks for ASP.NET. He narrowed down his selection of frameworks as follows

First, let me explain why only these 11 Frameworks are included although there is a lot more AJAX stuff for ASP.NET out there. All the frameworks listed here have one unique AJAX feature: They allow updating page content without programming AJAX directly - i call it indirect AJAX programming - a comparable concept is called Hijax. To make it concrete: Direct AJAX programming would mean dealing with client scripts, DHTML, method proxies, client side rendering and so on... Another important property the framework must have is the ability to support non-AJAX controls and enhance them with AJAX features. Therefore, frameworks that supply only controls with built in AJAX-features (Buttons, Trees, Grids, Lists and so on...) are not included in the comparison.

He has done extensive work in road testing and comparing. Well worth a look.

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agile ajax