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Book Review: Professional ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX

I’ve been knocking together a little hobby project that contains plenty of AJAX, both the ASP.NET and rolled-from-scratch variety, and needed something to act as a bit of a reference to get me through some of the more non-obvious attributes and properties, so I spotted this on Amazon and went for it. I’ve got to say, that when it arrived, it was a bit of a shock. This is the thinnest technical book I’ve ever bought, compared with other Wrox publications it just looks puny!

To be honest, a lot of the content is a bit puny too. Maybe it’s just me being a bit to eager, but i already knew about 75% of the content just from my Internet based studies. The chapter of the AJAX Toolkit is particularly thin and doesn’t cover anywhere near as much functionality as one would expect.

On the other hand, the chapters on debugging and testing, deployment and building AJAX based customer controls are particularly illuminating. To sum up, I’d say this was a decent introduction to the subject, but not something that deserves a ‘Professional’ title added to it. A half decent weekend read, 6 out of 10. More at Amazon.co.uk…

AJAX.ASP.NET library interop

I’ve messed around quite a bit with the ‘Atlas’ libraries in the past, and only recently have I had a real reason to play with the updated and re-badged Ajax.Asp.Net libs. My main frustration with the old libraries was that the system threw a wobbler if you tried to use it in conjunction with one of the shockingly good pre-built javascript libraries such as prototype or scriptaculous.
It’s good to see that Microsoft has gone a long way to code their way around code base clashes and are a member of the OpenAjax Alliance, dedicated to interoperability amongst libraries.
Anyway, here’s a brand new how-to video that has only just appeared on the official AJAX.ASP.Net site.

Liverpool ASP.NET Usergroup….

I’m thinking of re-activating the Liverpool ASP.NET usergroup again. Things ground to a halt last time as it degenerated into some kind of geeky piss-up! Anyway, if I do it, it’s going to be done properly this time….Pizza….Guest Speakers….ASP.NET related discourse rather than ‘fancy another pint?’….the full nine yards. Any old members still interested? Any new people interested? Leave me a comment.

Post Web 2.0 Design

After every combination of rounded corner, gradient background and primary colour has been exhausted by the design cliches of web 2.0, it appears that true, honest-to-goodness design is slowly returning to the web. The advantage and simultaneous problem of the web-twenny design rulebook was that every site looks the same….a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. Anyway here’s a link to the current state of the art in web design. Clean, sharp looking design that carries itself with confidence and individuality.

Inspiration Package: 60+ Usable & Elegant Designs