Comments on: Microsoft announces the ASP.NET Ajax 1.0 Release

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 20:37:14 +0000

mikael bergkvist is wrong, and he always will be. The more responsibility you take a away from the programmer the better. Rely on automated tools and behind the scenes translation. That way the automated tools can get better, a eventually replace us. This post was not written by a robot.

By: mike wolf

mike wolf — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 20:19:11 +0000

people need to not look at the toolkit… yah alot of it is not so good, and as a .net developer id more likely be using prorotype/scriptaculous etc… but the built in ajax functionality to asp.net is very nice… and quick… and integrated… compared to my experiance w/ libraries added onto existing web app layers… and honestly some of the things these guys did w/ the pure javascript layer is pretty slick

By: Chris Ash

Chris Ash — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 14:33:02 +0000

Really, with something like Ajax 1.0… isn’t it more about “what will you do with it?” This seems more in tune with a team already familiar with ASP.NET and/or has a pre-existing setup (or perhaps has influence to have a setup done for them) that supports ASP.NET. To me it seems each toolkit or framework has its own strength and weakness for a given type of project. No real silver bullet so to speak. Full scale, where the infrastructure is more at your command, or perhaps a team or web dev fully steeped in the .NET/C# world, it might be better to use Ajax 1.0. That way it would allow rapid ramp up time on a project. But, if that isn’t the case… Ajax 1.0 might seem a lot of trouble to go through to accomplish a goal that could be accomplished faster with Prototype, Dojo, Moki or some combination thereof.

By: Alex Ries

Alex Ries — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 13:40:02 +0000

Honestly I’m not sure why people are always thinking about them selves (developers); actually these people –and I’m also a developer– are at the very bottom of the corporate foodchain. You really think that microsoft branding has anything to do with actually improving our lives? Sure we want some good integration with the environment and technology we are working with, but that won’t persuade the average boss. The “management” will start to think when their clients starts using the word AJAX and what great things he/she/they want(s) for his/her/their product. Anyway that’s when looking for something to create this stuff in will need to have AJAX integration so now Microsoft can say that their ASP.net has easy AJAX integration and that in turn will make the choice for ASP.net much easier. Also most companies will know what they’ll get from a giant like Microsoft where smaller open-source products will probably be looked at last. Anyway, I think it’s a good thing as personally I’m planning to completely dump PHP and just focus on JSP and ASP for web-development so this is something welcome for me as well –even though there are more products out there that may indeed do things better– although I will probably try reinventing the wheel a few times now I’m still a student thus not wasting my boss’ time

By: stuart

stuart — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 12:15:09 +0000

So do MS refer to their implentation of ECMAScript as JavaScript now? I thought they called it JScript!!… a never mind…

By: Andy Kant

Andy Kant — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 22:45:00 +0000

Excellent news, I will probably put this to work in my ASP.NET projects right away. The library itself actually looks pretty slick, other than that I don’t plan on using any of the built-in widgets. I’d rather make my own.

By: Cody Swann

Cody Swann — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 21:26:11 +0000

Sorry, I won’t ever use a MS JS Lib. If the company can’t even implement JS correctly in its browser, why should I rely on a lib it develops?

By: rodrigo

rodrigo — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 12:39:55 +0000

I am making a wrapper around yui-ext for asp.net ajax.
For now there are two controls the Grid and the TabPanel.
With the wrapper both controls can be used with 0 lines of Javascript.
The project is at codeplex and anyone is welcome to join me.
http://www.codeplex.com/GridExtender

By: mikael bergkvist

mikael bergkvist — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 10:24:47 +0000

“and you can accomplish a lot without knowing Javascript at all”

That’s a really wierd argument – what webdeveloper doesn’t know javascript?
It’s like working in the USA and not knowing english.
If the argument is to mean anything, this is a BAD thing, helping developers to avoid learning something they really SHOULD learn.

By: Shaun

Shaun — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 10:19:40 +0000

I agree with other comments here. I think the strength of ASP.Net Ajax is it’s Ajax/JSON support. ASP.Net applications can be quickly, cleanly and relatively easily updated and improved using this. The controls themselves will give many companies a boost despite not being the best available, but that said, I do think they open the door to better apps developed on the ASP.Net platform, with the SDK hopefully we’ll see more improved controls as people develop them.

By: Andy

Andy — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 08:54:18 +0000

I think people should be focussing less on the Ajax Control Toolkit (which is open source) and more on the great Ajax/JSON support Microsoft have baked into ASP.NET – as other posters point out – allowing easy declarative Ajax, like the UpdatePanel. The Control Toolkit, using Extenders, can be modified and made prettier for custom apps. I can now begin to scoff at Ruby Rails and other frameworks for lacking the features of the end-to-end RIA platform that .NET now provides. It’s nothing to do with “Microsoft-sanctioned” it’s about quality and productivity.

By: Honey

Honey — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 08:23:17 +0000

I relly like Microsoft into ajax

By: Jeffrey McManus

Jeffrey McManus — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 07:48:48 +0000

ASP.NET Ajax isn’t an intellectual exercise, it has a real benefit over other libraries which is integration with the server-side development paradigm. In the case of ASP.NET that means you get a lot of Ajax functionality using declarative server-side markup, which is a huge productivity boost, and you can accomplish a lot without knowing Javascript at all.

By: Keith

Keith — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 05:51:16 +0000

Adam, not sure if you were being sarcastic, but I think that was the point: to show that the kit is NOT specific to IE. Releasing something browser-agnostic like this is, you must admit, unusual for Microsoft, or at least unexpected by some.

By: Leland Scott

Leland Scott — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 04:00:42 +0000

It’s nice to see that the Microsoft developers finally got their javascript working in Safari/WebKit. However, as one of the earlier commenters pointed out, some of these are inferior to existing library tools… for example, these are the lamest drop shadows and rounded corners I’ve yet seen. All of which raises the question, Why? Was it just to provide a challenge to Microsoft’s developer staff? There are so many great javascript libraries already written, it seems totally redundant to try to rewrite the manual just so you can say it’s a Microsoft product. Oh well, I guess there are those developers who feel more comfortable using a Microsoft-sanctioned library. But any developer with half a brain is going to look for the best and most flexible library… particularly one with no strings attached. And it’s not going to be the one from Microsoft.

By: Martin

Martin — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 01:26:40 +0000

I like the method the calendar provides for changing month and year. Very nice idea, very clean. Although the implementation could drop some of the gratious animations, e.g. the side scrolling on “next month” is too much, IMHO. And I think discoverability for changing year / month could be enhanced.

I also noticed that some of the controls are really slugish in reporting back the selected value (I use Opeera BTW). For example 3 seconds for the “popup control”.

By: Dougal Matthews

Dougal Matthews — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 01:22:45 +0000

i love microsoft adopting the AJAX name! Almost like just deciding thats now ours! but they didnt even need to buy it this time.

By: Simon Lim

Simon Lim — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 01:21:42 +0000

Not to offend the great developers in Microsoft, I think some of the ajax controls offered there is not so good. The date picker.. for instance, seems to have some minor problems rendering in ie6: sometimes part of the buttons are cut off. The animation for that too, is not visually stunning enough and seems pointless.

Meanwhile, I’m currently developing a real date picker that works like the one in Vista :D

By: Steve Marx

Steve Marx — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 00:35:29 +0000

Not just for ASP.NET! Admittedly still in Alpha, check out my “PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library” project on codeplex: http://codeplex.com/phpmsajax.

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 23:44:17 +0000

I started off with Rico, then I discovered Dojo, but I’ve been using ASP.NET AJAX for a while now. I won’t say it’s better than other frameworks, but it’s got decent documentation and it’s easy to work with. They’ve also made an effort to make the library play nice with others. I’m enjoying it.