For several years now, I have been consistently impressed with how Microsoft’s developer division gathers feedback and proactively responds. Nearly every time that I’ve participated in a survey or otherwise provided feedback (solicited or not), someone has followed up with me about my specific concerns. In my experience with how other large companies gather feedback, that’s not common.

So, when I answered a recent survey about ASP.NET development in Visual Studio 2010, I wasn’t surprised when I received a follow-up email from a friendly fellow at Microsoft named Xinyang. In the optional comments section, I had mentioned my concern that CSS and JavaScript editing are becoming second class citizens in Visual Studio. In response, Xinyang asked me to provide more detail on that comment.

As I composed a lengthy email reply to him, it occurred to me that a post here would be a much more effective way to refine my feedback and potentially gather more responses from you at the same time.

So, here are a few of my ideas for improving client-side development in Visual Studio 2010, separated into CSS and JavaScript specific feedback. Xinyang and some of his colleagues will be reading this and your comments, so if you agree, disagree, or have other ideas yourself, be sure to chime in.

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By now, you probably already know that Google hosts jQuery on its AJAX APIs CDN, free of charge. As I’ve discussed here in the past, I’m a big fan of using their CDN to achieve decreased latency, increased parallelism, and better caching.

If you’ve explored the AJAX APIs documentation a bit, you may know that jQuery UI is also hosted on Google’s CDN. Unfortunately, since jQuery UI plugins depend on a ThemeRoller theme, using a CDN for jQuery UI isn’t as easy as with jQuery itself.

Or, is it?

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As an ASP.NET developer working on the client-side, one problem you’ll encounter is how to reference the HTML elements that ASP.NET web controls generate. All too often, you find yourself wasting time trying to reference TextBox1, when the element is actually rendered as ctl00_panel1_wizard1_TextBox1.

Much has been written about this, including a post of my own, so I won’t go into detail about many of the workarounds. Instead, I want to take a closer look at the performance drawbacks of one popular solution: the [attribute$=value] selector.

By specifying id as the attribute in this selector, you can avoid ASP.NET’s ClientID issues completely. No matter what the framework prefixes your rendered elements with, they still “end with” the ID you specify at design time. This makes the “ends with” selector a convenient alternative to injecting a control’s ClientID property via angle-brackets.

However, are we trading performance for this convenience? If so, how much?

When Craig Shoemaker asked that question while interviewing me for an upcoming episode of Polymorphic Podcast, I realized I didn’t know the answer as clearly as I’d like. So, I decided to do a bit of benchmarking.

In this post, I’ll share the results of that benchmarking, and show you one way to significantly improve the performance of this convenient selector.

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In two of my recent posts, I demonstrated using ASP.NET AJAX in conjunction with jQuery or ASP.NET AJAX 4.0′s templating features to generate client side tables from JSON data. However, what I neglected to show you was how to make them look even remotely presentable.

In this post, we’ll continue where those posts left off. I’m going to show you how you can improve the table’s presentation in three steps:

• Setting basic styles for the page and table.
• Improving the table header by using strong contrast.
• Adding subtle gridlines to the table body.

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Wrapping up my series on some of ASP.NET AJAX’s less utilized client side functionality, this post will take a closer look at some of ASP.NET AJAX’s JavaScript UI helper functions. These methods are great because they abstract away most of the tedious work that comes with supporting cross browser compatibility, leaving us with a nice, consistent API.

Specifically, I’m going to show you examples of using addCssClass, getBounds, getLocation, and setLocation to accomplish a few client side UI tasks.

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If you’ve done much ASP.NET AJAX development, you’re no doubt familiar with JavaScript alert errors similar to the one pictured above. This particular one occurs on the official ASP.NET forums in FireFox, if you try to navigate away from viewing a user profile before the Recommended Reading panels asynchronously load.

Not only is the error message of “…” completely meaningless, but it blocks your intended navigation away from the page until you’ve dismissed the alert window. Hopefully, someone at Telligent will read this, because the ASP.NET AJAX framework gives us an easy way to replace the annoying JavaScript alerts and vastly improve the usability of our applications.

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This is a follow-up post, building on the foundation laid in ASP.NET AJAX username availability check. In this post, I assume you’ve read and understood the first post.

After originally implementing AJAX username availability checking in my applications, I noticed an edge case scenario that replayed itself too often to ignore. The availability check could potentially take longer than a particularly fast user would need to complete the form. To avoid any trouble in that scenario, I wanted to add a progress indicator to the checking process and disable the submit button’s until an available username was selected.

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When you have a name as common as mine, you run across the entire gamut of schemes to deal with username availability in membership systems. By availability, of course I mean denial and rejection. Out of all of the ways that I’ve had “Dave” rejected, inline AJAX verification is definitely the least annoying. Wanting to be less-annoying myself, I’ve added the same functionality to my ASP.NET AJAX sites. Let me show you how I did it.

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Your wishes are my command. Highslide JS .NET now includes support for captioning. The captions can be specified using the Caption property of each HighslideImage control, and can be easily styled using CSS.

Also, ~ is now correctly replaced with the application path in path properties.

Visit the Highslide JS .NET project page for more details and the download link for the new version.

My initial .NET server control version of Torstein Honsi’s Highslide JS .NET is now available. You can find it and information on implementing it at the Highslide JS .NET page here on my site.

For a quick video introduction of what the Highslide JS library is capable of, take a look at this basic demonstration:

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