Recap -- MSDN Atlas Presentation
So the presentation went fairly well. Being my first webcast, I was a bit nervous and went
a little faster than I had hoped.
For the auto-complete demo (on the server-centric side), it turns out I mispelled the ServicePath value in the
AutoCompleteProperties. It should have been:
ServicePath="AutoCompleteService.asmx"
I should have spent more time trying to debug it but I didn't want to miss out on
any of the other demos. The reason I'm even bringing it up is because it would nice to see more diagnostic tools integrated into Visual Studio for these types of applications.
Ideally in this
situation, either a runtime-exception should have occurred (since
the service didn't exist) or maybe a warning in
the Visual Studio error list tab
could have appeared, notifying me that the ServicePath could not be resolved. As
far as other tools go,
Fiddler and Nikhil's
Web Developer Helper are
great for inspecting the data that comes across the wire but ultimately,
shouldn't this be integrated into the development environment? I'm interested to
hear what others think about this and what they would like to see as far as debugging and
other tools for client-side development.
Lastly, it turns out I had a slide missing in the powerpoint deck. The slide was for Ajax principles. Since it wasn't included in the deck and ultimately the presentation,
I thought I would just include both the Ajax Guidelines and Principles here:
Guidelines
- Be aware of network latency
- Borrow from conventions of HTML applications and desktop applications
- Look for caching opportunities
- Look for batching opportunities
- Do not load entire pages
- Do not over-use ajax
Principles
- The browser host an application not content - A more complex application is delivered
to the browser. The application knows how to response to the user.
- The server delivers data not content - the server should only send back relevant
data
- User interaction can be fluid and continuous
- JavaScript is real coding that requires discipline
- Avoid gratuitous animation
Sources: