ThumNet

This post is about the session called ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 given by Fritz Onion

A preview of the new version of ASP.NET AJAX is avaible on codeplex since the 28th of May. And it can be used within Visual Studio 2008.

This version mainly focuses on new client side features, some of these are be discussed below.

Live data binding
Gives the developer an easy way to bind multiple controls to a single datasource, if a value changes all controls are automatically updated client side.

Observer pattern
This provides observer functionality to ordinary JavaScript objects, when a change occurs for an observed object a notification is caused, which can be handled accordingly

Client templates
In an asp.net web application a list of data can be shown using a Repeater control, which is server sided. In 4.0 this can be done client sided as well. The way to define this is by using a XHTML compliant template, as shown below.

	<table id="resultTable" class="sys-template">
		<tr>
			<td>{{Name}}</td>
			<td>{{Id}}</td>
		</tr>
	</table>
	

This type of databinding notation is similar to Silverlight/WPF.

Inclusion of and support for jQuery library
The development team at Microsoft has acknowledged the use of the jQuery library and it will be included in the next release

Web service invocation
It is now easy to invoke a method of a WCF service. A downside is that the service must support JSON serialization and AJAX proxy generation, by default this is possible with WCF services.

Some nice new features the development team is working on are:

• Client sided sorting, pagination and filtering
• Sending changes to the server
• AJAX Control Toolkit will get rolled into the core release (previously this was a separate download)

Today we’re going to the deydays in the hague.

Here we will be attending seminars about:

• Azure Services Platform, Microsoft in the cloud.
• C# 4.0, the future of the C# language.
• Silverlight 3.0, the new version of the Silverlight framework
• ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, the new AJAX framework by microsoft.
• Parallel programming, the new way for using multiple cores in .NET 4.0.

We will keep you informed about these and other subjects of the devdays.

On the 28st and 29nd of May 2009 (upcomming thursday and friday), Laurens ‘t Hardt and me (Jeffrey Tummers) are going to the Microsoft DevDays ’09.

The trip is sponsored by our employee QNH, on the days of the event we will be posting several blogposts on this site. Be sure to check the new posts here.