Having used JavaScript for over a decade, I’ve read many books covering the language. Some focused primarily on syntax. Others recounted and solved specific real-world problems.

Learning a language as a set of tasks is one way to get up to speed quickly, but it’s not a very good way to thoroughly learn a language’s nuances and idioms.

While those sorts of books certainly have their place, it’s disappointingly rare to find a book which presents JavaScript as the first-class programming language that it truly is.

After reading no more than the first page of this book’s preface, I knew that I had finally found the antidote to those trite examples of compound interest calculators and the tedious minutiae of books that spend pages on alert()’s syntax. No, this book is different than the rest…

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When working directly with JSON serialized ASMX services, be it via jQuery, pure XmlHttpRequest calls, or anything else other than the ScriptManager, one question inevitably arises. That question is of the inexplicable .d attribute that appeared in ASP.NET 3.5.

What is it? Why is it there?

In this post, I’ll use both a 2.0 and a 3.5 example ASMX web service to illustrate exactly what’s going on. I’ll also show you why it’s a good change.

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The time for this is long past due. The current logo does not make the sort of first impression that it needs to. It’s a good reminder that we should usually stick to our core competencies (i.e. I shouldn’t pretend to be a graphic designer).

I know at least a handful of you are design focused. So, if you want to take a shot at the contest, head on over to the contest page at Logo Tournament and show me what you’ve got.

Update: The contest is over. I want to thank everyone who participated, especially the winner: Anica Soleva.

A common question that I find myself fielding lately is how to handle the problem of rotating JavaScript based advertisements. As AJAX becomes ubiquitous on ad supported sites, we must take care that decreasing page views don’t also mean proportionally decreasing revenues.

Many find their way to ScriptManager.RegisterStartupScript, use that to re-inject the script during a partial postback, and expect that doing so will refresh the ad. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work when dealing with JavaScript based ads such as Google’s AdSense.

In this post, I’m going to show you why RegisterStartupScript does not solve the problem, the alternative that I suggest, and how to use that method to also defer loading of advertisements until after your content.

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Reviewing my stats for the year, you might think the only topic I write about is jQuery. Of the posts I’ve written in 2008, 80% of the most popular posts have been jQuery related.

That’s okay with me though. I’m happy to see so many of you embracing jQuery in your ASP.NET applications.

With Microsoft’s surprise announcement that jQuery will be bundled with future versions of Visual Studio, I think the jQuery tangent that ASP.NET developers such as myself, Rick Strahl, and Matt Berseth have explored this year has definitely proven worthwhile.

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All too often, I find code similar to this when inspecting the source for public websites that use jQuery:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/jQuery.min.js"></script>

If you’re doing this on a public facing website, you are doing it wrong.

Instead, I urge you to use the Google AJAX Libraries content delivery network to serve jQuery to your users directly from Google’s network of datacenters. Doing so has several advantages over hosting jQuery on your server(s): decreased latency, increased parallelism, and better caching.

In this post, I will expand upon those three benefits of Google’s CDN and show you a couple examples of how you can make use of the service.

Update: Since you’re reading this post, you may also be interested to know that Google also hosts full jQuery UI themes on the AJAX APIs CDN.