Ajaxus place on the net

MonoDevelop 0.13 has been released This version features: Version Control support (Subversion only currently), supports adding, removing, moving, check-out, check-in, ChangeLogs and patch review. Much improved Code Completion, Visual Studio like templates. Task View. Support for Web References (Generate stubds from WSDL contracts from the IDE). Gtk# Designer improvements: Use of partial classes to separate user code from generated code, this means that it is no longer necessary…
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Never a man to walk away from a challenge, Phil Factor set himself the task of automating the production of Word reports from SQL Server, armed only with OLE automation and a couple of stored procedures….

“Having helped Robyn with her Excel Workbench, I couldn’t get out of my head the idea of achieving the same effect with MS Word. After all, from the data viewpoint, MS Word documents are just a series of paragraphs and tables aren’t they? Surely, it should be easy to read and write data between SQL Server and Word.“
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Joe Walker is talking about the safety of JSON. He has talked about CSRF in the past, and this time he delves into the Array/JSON hack.

“I saw some discussion recently about using JSON for secured data, and I’m not sure that everyone understands the risks.

I believe that JSON is unsafe for anything but public data unless you are using unpredictable URLs.“

How safe is your JSON?
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Presented by the Silicon Valley WebBuilder, this event brought together Mike Shaver from Mozilla, Chris Wilson from Microsoft’s IE team, Håkon Lie from Opera, and expertly moderator Douglas Crockford from Yahoo! to talk about the current state of the browser landscape.

At first, each person got a chance to say their peace. Here are some core items that each person said:

Chris Wilson

We are not about to enter another browser war. This isn’t about destroying each other. This time it is about building the standards based web future, which means we need to work together. This isn’t 1995, so let’s not build that platform. The problem that we have is that as soon as you improve something, you break the web. This is especially hard since Microsoft has ~500 million users.

Chris queried the top 200 web sites and 50% of them are in strict mode. When he did this in IE 6, only one of them was like this. He hinted at having developers opt-in to standards mode in a different way.

Mike Shaver

Mike also said that he doesn’t consider it to be a browser war….. but rather a “mindshare struggle”.

The new “war” is having cool applications being built on the web itself. If the next flickr/gmail/… is built on the web, it is winning.

Don’t look to the W3C for the future.

Håkon Lie

“If you need a good browser for Windows 98 we have it”

Ajax is bad. We need to add HTML, CSS, and the like, and he had some funny acronyms.

He then discussed the ACID 2 test and had a lot of fun with IE 7 showing how it compared to Opera 3.6 from 1998.

The Wii (which uses Opera) is going to change the web. More people are trying to get their sites rendering correctly with the Wii than “who cares about that Opera browser”.

We need to support video as a first class citizen (and sound). “We can’t leave it to plugins anymore”.

What video formats should we support? There aren’t many open formats, so they use Ogg formats.

Where’s Apple?

They refused to send someone saying that “we are busy writing software”.

Developing a web application that responds to users requests quickly is a target and a challenge for all web developers. ASP.NET was designed with speed optimization and performance improvements in mind. The set of enhancements like: Pages compilation, and Automatic storage on the server are new to ASP.NET. However, these enhancements are not enough to protect you from slow performance when a large number of http requests are simultaneously processed by your web application.

To write a well performing web application you must make a balance between four common performance measures.
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A few nice updates to the Personalized Homepage this week for those who are feeling too lazy to customize it. If for instance you’re feeling lazy about browsing for new content to add to your homepage, there’s a new feature that will give you item-to-item recommendations. For my part, I have the Digg gadget on my page. If I click on the gadget’s drop-down menu and select “You might also like…” I’ll get a bunch of stuff that other people who like Digg also liked, including Slashdot, Wired News, Macworld, and more.

For those who are too lazy to create new tabs to organize stuff, here’s a bit of magic. If you add a new tab to your homepage, you can name your tab and have the option of letting us select the content for you based on your chosen name. Say I create a tab called “Astronomy” to get the latest news and info on that topic. We’ll populate the page with the NASA image of the day, the current moon phase, and a bunch of feeds related to astronomy. Less lazy folks are welcome to try to stump us with tab names.

And if you just don’t know what you want, we’ve added ratings and reviews to our directory, so you can see what other people have to say before committing to a new gadget.

Look at this great post from Joe:
“The IIS team delivered an amazing product with IIS 6 but they sure haven’t rested in their laurels since then.

They’ve been doing all sorts of great work, not the least of which is IIS 7.

So I thougt I’d share this list of IIS Resources that I keep my eye on.”
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Ian Hickson (Hixie) has been interviewed regarding X/HTML 5.

There is some good stuff in the interview including:

* New datagrid “which is a tree view/list view control with built-in support for AJAX-backed data stores, so you can do something like the typical Webmail view of all your tens of thousands of e-mails, but instead of only showing 20 at a time, you can just scroll through all of them, without having to actually download them all until they’re needed.”

* Offline indicator: A simple API to ask if you are on or offline. There was talk of this with the Apollo team. It turned out to be a harder problem than Adobe thought, and there are levels of checking (are you on a network. are you on an intranet. etc).

* Cross domain and cross frame communication

* Scoped CSS: Wouldn’t it be nice to say ’style this content with these rules’? This way you could have the user generated content in a nice sandbox (e.g. RSS reader)
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MiniAjax is a site that has gathered interesting dhtml examples (many of which we have covered in the past) and put them together.

Monday’s publication of Windows Vista Tips for IT Pros triggered an avalanche of email, thanks for that. Here’s what will likely be just one installment in a long list of Vista tips, most of which come directly from SuperSite readers. Enjoy!
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