Firebug 1.0 final released

Ooooh! I just went to download Firebug for my laptop and I moticed that it’s out of Beta. So what are you waiting for Go get Firebug now and set your Javascript debugging in Firefox alight… go on… scoot!

Great practical CSS Links

Thanks to Rick Strahl for blogging this.

There are some excellent articles in the list. These articles show that CSS is more than a tool to ‘make your site look pretty’ nosiree CSS can set you web application or website alight, the only thing stopping you is your imagination. Oh! and the skills these articles will teach you

E.R. Gilmore posted a link to this on my message board today, and I thought I’d repost it. This link is a collection of ton of nice, relatively low impact solution to common CSS implementations. In fact as I was going through the list there nearly a dozen links that I had previous visited and bookmarked.

Check it out:

53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without

[Via Rick Strahl's Web Log]

Nikhil Kothari ~ ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Released

I know I have already blogged on the release of ASP.Net Ajax 1.0 but I felt I should also pass on this blog entry from Nikhil Kothari. Nikhil gives us a lot of insight into the early days of ASP.Net 2.0, who knew it was originally codenamed Comet? There is also a mention of the ‘Atlas Client Application Services..’ which sounds interesting, keep an eye out for posts on ‘ASP.Net Ajax Client Application Services’ ACAS for short maybe? I’m sure they will start popping up as soon as WPF/E gets some traction.

Undoubtably this will be a hot topic for the day… ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, formerly known as Atlas, is finally out! Check it out, download it, and check out the extensive documentation as well.

I was just looking at the past blog posts on ASP.NET AJAX and Atlas, and one nice thing about a blog is being able to trace through some of the history and evolution of the product…

• Over a year back, Atlas was first announced… still remember the evening at TechEd 2005, after a long day of presentations, when ScottGu and I were talking about seriously looking into this once we got back to Redmond (wow that feels quite a while back now). As reported here, we called it Comet at first, before settling on the Atlas code name.
• Between then and the first public unveiling of Atlas at PDC05, we basically learnt the wonders (and the pain points) of JavaScript, building a type system, prototyping all sorts of things, really using the capabilities of the browser… we had just scratched the surface with ASP.NET 2.0.
• I posted my architecture slide and writeup… it is interesting to see how a lot of it has carried forward into the shipping product. By the way we if you look at the slide carefully, you’ll notice something called “Atlas Client Application Services” … that idea hasn’t gone away, its still in the works… in my own personal vision, I see WPF/E as the first step in building that out. Stay tuned for more on that … working on that… and in due time, this will be blogged about as well.
• Over the following months, we released multiple CTPs, and continually got great response and feedback from the community. I think the super-popular UpdatePanel and Partial Rendering first released in the M1 build of Atlas are perhaps the best example of great feedback, resulting in features that not only demo well, but are truly an effective way to quickly ajaxify a broad range of ASP.NET applications.
• Since then we’ve come a long way, having introduced the notion of Extender controls, and a whole swath of them along with source in the form of the AJAX Control Toolkit

So once again, check out the bits, and keep the feedback coming… we’re on our way to more cool stuff in this area!

If you have suggestions for what you’d like to hear about in terms of more in-depth details, please do suggest via comments below. Also stay tuned for some additional controls I’ll be posting in the next couple of days… first and foremost will be a new version of UpdateHistory (the server control that allows you to fix the back button problem) sync’d to the v1.0 release… that so many of you have emailed me about. And for being so patient, I’ve got another new control that goes along with the whole UpdatePanel paradigm.

[ Tags: ajax | asp.net | javascript | announcement ]

[Via Nikhil Kothari's Weblog]

ASP.Net Ajax 1.0 RTM

January 2007 is fast going down as the month of key releases.

Today is no different as we see the RTM (final) version of Microsoft ASP.Net Ajax 1.0. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that I have been using the CTP’s and Beta’s since last April and I have seen many improvements. The 1.0 final release promises to be a fundamental release that will see many ASP.Net applications update to include more AJAX capabilities as development departments realize just how easy it is with ASP.Net Ajax.

I’m still not convinced that the bugs are all out, but I do think that you should invest some of your time downloading and using this if only for the ease of hooking up Web services and server-side code to your client-side scripts etc…
ASp.Net Ajax 1.0 allows you to use your existing investment in Visual Studio 2005 to build richer more client friendly ASP.Net applications with less effort. And if that wasn’t enough then make note: it’s from Microsoft and it’s free…

There is also a control toolkit containing over 30 controls for you to make use of including Accordion, AutoComplete, Masked Edit, Tabs. This part is a community shared-source project and there is plenty of documentation, samples and an SDK so you can create your own controls, why not have a go and submit them for inclusion in the toolkit’s future releases.

Then if you are still feeling adventurous you could download the ASP.Net Ajax Futures January CTP which extends the Core ASp.Net Ajax 1.0 platform with extra stuff not yet in the released version. If you used the CTP versions of ASP.Net Ajax then you will possibly need this as some stuff didn’t make it into the release version for one reason or another and you may find your projects break without it.

Aptana updates now more informative…

When I blogged about the new Milestone 8 inclusions for Aptana the other day I hadn’t noticed that the Automatic update panel now gives a lot more information regarding the update. (maybe it did this before and I wasn’t paying attention?) for example build 0.2.8.13195 has 80 features added and 38 bugs fixed I am currently on build 0.2.8.13109. Scrolling down the Auto update window I get a categorised list of the bugs fixed in each area so I can easily see if an issue I am seeing is fixed. I like this form of updating as I can see clearly whether or not I want to take this build, what improvements I am getting and I generally feel much more comfortable about it.

I think Microsoft could learn from this, as well as many other big name brands. Often it feels like you have to squeeze blood from stone in order to see just what changes have been made to your system. Visual Studio 2005 SP1 is my case in point. It was only after much bugging and moaning that information slowly trickled through. I am very grateful to those who did release the information, but I recon we deserve to have it much sooner.

Hats off to the Aptana dev team this whole development process is great, you are a good example to us all.

Pirillo posts Top 10 Tweaks, Tips, and Tricks for Windows Vista

Chris Pirillo has recently posted a cool list of his top 10 Tweaks, Tips and Tricks for windows Vista. There’s some great stuff in there, including a great tip to get multiple timezones reporting from your taskbar clock. Handy if you are a business user or have friends or family living in another time zone and you want to be sure you are about to wake them up when you call!

He’s also got some sound advice if you are considering upgrading your Windows XP installation to Vista.

mir.aculo.us Blog ~ script.aculo.us 1.7

January 2007 is starting to be the begning of what I hope is a very exciting year for web developers. We’ve recently seen the release of Prototype 1.5 and the superb new site that goes with it, Aptana updates that include an embeded Firefox browser, and now we have the final release of Script.aculo.us 1.7 as well…

On the heels of the recent release galore here’s one more:

script.aculo.us 1.7 is final!download away!

So what’s new? Basically, the new stuff is all about Effect.Morph and all the goodness you can read about here and here.

Of course, we’re on Prototype 1.5 final now.

As always, get the fine print from the CHANGELOG.

Now, if script.aculo.us only had an API documentation like the new one for Prototype. The wiki is great, but a more complete, up-to-date and coherent resource would be even better. Well, let’s see about that…

Of course thanks to the contributors. And yeah, I know that there are quite a bunch of tickets and patches pending-let’s get this one out first and get all that love in the next version.

NOTE: This is not the version included in Rails 1.2.1.-. You can use this version with Rails 1.2.1, just download and overwrite the files provided by Rails! The next Rails release will include this, of course.

[Via mir.aculo.us - Home]