ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Released

I jumped on the ASP.NET AJAX bandwagon when the Release Candidate came out. I've heard a lot about it ever since it was called 'ATLAS', but I had never played around with it until recently.

The Official 1.0 Release version came out on January 23, 2005 and the Full Source Code became available today.

Along with the framework, you can download the AJAX Control Toolkit. You can demonstrate the controls from this toolkit on their test website.

I am quite impressed at the easy, speed, stability, and breadth of the framework and controls. If you haven't played around with this yet, then you are missing out on some excitement!

Firebug 1.0 Beta

For those of you who use Firefox, you should check out the Firebug 1.0 beta extension! I had used the old version for quite some time, but I was blown away with the great enhancments in the 1.0 beta version.

Here are some of its features...

• Just the way you like it


• Inspect and edit HTML


• Tweak CSS to perfection


• Visualize CSS metrics


• Monitor network activity


• Debug and profile JavaScript


• Quickly find errors


• Explore the DOM


• Execute JavaScript on the fly


• Logging for JavaScript

Here is what Rich Strahl had to say about it...

"I’ve been using Visual Studio’s JavaScript debugging most of the time, but with Firebug in this state I’ve been able to move most of my debugging – except for IE specific issues which are unfortunately quite common – into Firebug.

Highly recommended."

ASP.NET AJAX Cheet Sheets

For those of you who are using ASP.NET AJAX, Milan Negovan has created some FREE Cheat Sheets for the client JavaScript libraries.

He has compiled sheets for the Array, Boolean, Date, Error, Number, Object, and String JavaScript Base Type Extensions.

These ASP.NET AJAX cheet sheets are available on Milan Negovan's Website.

Thank you Milan, and keep up the great work!

IE Developer Toolbar Beta 3

There is a new version of the IE Developer Toolbar from Microsoft!

"This Beta 3 version of the toolbar contains functionality and stability enhancements over previous versions, including:

• Style Tracer: Right mouse click on a style value for an element and select Style Tracer to find the style rule that is effecting that value.


• CSS Selector Matches: View a report of all style rules set and how many times they are used on the current page.


• View Source: View the formatted and syntax colored source of the original page, currently rendered page, element or element with the styles that are effecting it."

To view some screenshots of these new features check out the Microsoft IE Blog.

Resource Refactoring Tool

By default, Visual Studio has a way to localize the text in a ASP.NET page, but there is no tool for extracting the text from the code behind or app_code files, until now!

There is a great new program, The Resource Refactoring Tool, that helps you localize your .NET applictions.

Most recently, they have added support for localizing the code behind files in a Web Applications... which is what I have been waiting for.

I installed and tested the tool and it is has been very handy.