For over a year now, I’ve been using a 13” MacBook Air as my only laptop. Though it’s a bit underpowered and I prefer Windows to OS X, I was ultimately unable to resist Apple’s build quality compared to the Dell I had used previously.

However, I never fully resigned myself to accepting a dichotomy between quality construction and operating system. Thankfully, the recent proliferation of Windows-based Ultrabook™ machines seems to be rapidly bridging that divide.

Given my already-growing desire to find an alternative, when I was contacted about reviewing the ASUS’ Zenbook UX31 Ultrabook™, I decided to give it a go. I know I’m not alone in having been frustrated with a choice between machines that run Windows well and quality hardware, so I hope that you’ll find my experience of trying to move back from the MacBook hardware useful.

Disclaimer: Up front, I want you to know that I’m receiving a complementary UX31 in return for evaluating it and writing a few posts about that experience. I’ll give you my honest assessment of it and only recommend it if it meets my own standards, but I also think it’s important to be transparent and not potentially abuse your trust.

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Hey Dave, is there a way to create an event handler so when .tmpl() is done it will fire a function? I’m trying to make it global, so I was hoping I could say, when ANY template gets done, do this…

The question of how to retroactively add hooks before and/or after a pre-existing JavaScript function executes is one that comes up from time to time. Whether it’s a simple method like tmpl(), a server-generated script artifact, or a function in a third-party script, sometimes it’s desirable to alter a JavaScript function without access to change the original declaration of the function.

One of the handy things about JavaScript is that you can combine its functional and dynamic aspects to make surprisingly quick work of tasks like this one. Doing so is fairly straightforward, but it involves an approach you might not consider if you’re more familiar with languages that lack JavaScript’s unique features.

In this post, I’ll briefly cover a few examples of how to “patch” existing JavaScript functions with callbacks. We’ll begin with simple examples, then address an issue that stems from applying this approach to jQuery plugins, and finish with a more elegant way to handle the problem of patching functions that accept parameters.

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As I ponder the title of this post, I’m conflicted.

I clearly remember writing last year’s post and thinking that it didn’t seem like four years could have possibly passed since I started publishing here. As I write this one, I find myself feeling like it’s surely been much longer than five years.

I guess you could say 2011 has been a long year?

Relativity aside, this week saw the fifth anniversary of the night that I hastily threw this site together and published my first post. So, I guess it’s that time again.

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Work on client-side applications long enough and it’s just about inevitable that you’ll eventually want to make an AJAX request that breaches the browser’s XMLHttpRequest security restrictions. Limitations on cross-domain requests are great when they’re preventing malicious sites from malfeasing, but are a thorn in the side when they complicate your legitimate applications.

Traditionally, direct communication across the same-origin boundary required using a rickety (though clever) workaround called JSONP. JSONP is a reasonable compromise if all you need to do is make blind requests to a third-party API like Twitter, but comes up short if you need to use any HTTP verb other than GET. Of course, that’s a deal-breaking issue when you’re working with ASMX ScriptServices or ASPX page methods.

Luckily, a relatively new feature has been making its way into browsers which provides a robust solution to the cross-domain AJAX problem: CORS.

In this post, I’m going to show you how to recognize exactly which requests are cross-origin, how to enable CORS for your ASP.NET site, and the extra configuration necessary when you’re working with ASP.NET’s JSON-enabled services.

Before we get started, I want to emphasize that this approach won’t work with any version of IE prior to IE10. If supporting older versions of IE is a requirement in your target environment, you’re stuck with something like JSONP or a server-side proxy. This will work in any version of IE if Chrome Frame is installed and enabled by your site/server though.

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One of the longest running themes here has been the compelling intersection between ASP.NET and jQuery. Beginning with my post about using jQuery to circumvent ASP.NET AJAX’s client-side apparatus for calling ASMX services, I’ve been writing about using ASP.NET and jQuery since the Spring of 2008.

As these related posts have accumulated over the years, I’ve made an effort to weave a thread of cross-links between them posts where appropriate. However, it’s nearly impossible to anticipate every possible entry point and subsequent path that someone might find themselves following here.

So, I’ve decided to finally do what I should have done a year or two ago: Create a top-level index to organize and improve the accessibility of my content for ASP.NET developers interested in integrating jQuery into their sites.

You can see my first draft of that here: jQuery for the ASP.NET Developer

Unlike the other content here, I’m publishing this one long before it’s “finished”. My hope is that I can solicit early feedback to help better construct a useful narrative while the document is still in its formative stages. So, if you have any feedback on the current page or what you think should ultimately be there, please leave me a comment on either this post or that page, contact me directly, or even @mention it my way on Twitter.

If you’re like me, HTTP status code 200 Object] unknown probably doesn’t ring any bells. Of course, that’s mainly because it doesn’t exist.

So, how did I end up with the screenshot above? I’ve been running with scissors again. It was one of the more popular web frameworks for Node.js that I cut myself with this time: Express.js

Unfortunately, a malformed status code like 200 Object] will cause some browsers (including the version of Chrome I was using at the time) to refuse loading the page at all. That quickly elevated the importance of my strange status code from a trivial oddity to an annoying thorn in the side.

As it turns out, my code was running up against a documented Express feature and the remedy was simple enough.

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For the past week, I’ve been neck-deep in a challenging project that combines jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap to do some relatively heavy lifting. Though I’ve used both jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap in the past, this recent exercise left me with a few morsels of newly-hard-earned knowledge. Among that education was learning that PhoneGap 1.1.0 breaks jQuery Mobile’s back button on Android devices.

Being able to use a web-based framework like jQuery Mobile to create a “native” mobile app is one of PhoneGap’s most appealing propositions. So, you can imagine my dismay when wrapping this latest project in PhoneGap broke its navigation. Worse yet, even closing jQuery Mobile’s dialog windows stopped working under PhoneGap 1.1.0.

Luckily, the problem ended up being a minor one with a simple fix. In this post, I’ll briefly show you why PhoneGap 1.1.0 caused jQuery Mobile’s back buttons to stop working and how you can fix that problem in your own app.

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I’ve been experimenting with Tomasz Janczuk’s awesome iisnode project lately, in hopes of hosting some of my Node.js sites on IIS. Those sites are running well enough on an Ubuntu VPS currently, but the features that iisnode offers are compelling (and I have unused capacity on one of my Windows servers).

Along the way, I ran into one issue that isn’t addressed in the current iisnode documentation or examples very well. If you try to set up a standalone Node.js website in IIS you’re likely to be greeted with this error when you load it up for the first time:

Remotely, you’ll see the dreaded “The service is unavailable.” error:

Those nondescript errors don’t exactly make resolving the problem very straightforward. So, I want to recap what I found to be the underlying problem in my case and a few solutions, in hopes of helping anyone else that ends up with the same issue.

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Over the past several months, I’ve been participating as an adviser to an interesting Microsoft patterns & practices effort named Project Silk. I don’t publish posts here about every project I’m tangentially involved in, but I think Project Silk is worth a look if you’re building modern, JavaScript-heavy web applications.

The project itself is comprised of a complete reference application and an extensive set of documentation describing how the app works and the process behind the design decisions that the team made along the way. Think of it as the NerdDinner sample (and accompanying book chatper), but focused almost entirely on client-side development rather than the server-side MVC component.

One of the most valuable aspects of the project is that it takes aim at the almost intractable topic of building large, maintainable JavaScript applications. You can see how seriously they took that goal by the time you get to just the second paragraph of the project summary:

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One of the most persistent misconceptions about ASP.NET’s page methods is the notion that they have some intrinsic protection against requests that don’t originate from the page where they’re defined. Since a page method’s code resides within a page’s code-behind file, it’s intuitive to assume that those methods benefit from some form of inherent security.

Unfortunately, that is not the case.

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