I’ll admit Chrome has really cleaned up browsers and Chrome & Opera have easily led the revolution in making browsing FAST again.  With Javascript execution smoking the competition (Opera smoking the competition for years now) and rendering that is pretty damn perfect.  IE has of course been a thorn pushing developers to build things that aren’t standards comliant, but with IE 9 actually meeting standards then that just means Chrome & Opera can focus on moving the industry forward with new creative solutions to browsing & using the Internet.  Throw in Firefox as they move forward and we’ll see advancements that haven’t happened since the heyday of the late 90s & early 21st Century.

I’m looking forward to seeing what advancements these browser companies put forward, and even the IE users can look forward to IE implementing the changes now that Microsoft isn’t busy distracting the web world with all that IE6 destructive nonsense.  I’m glad to see IE9 join the web world & start chasing the leading browsers.  Good job all!

I missed the last bit of the initial focus Developing Web Form Pages.  Primarily covering the state management, so to not leave the topic untouched I present the following notes.  Cheers!

Manage State

• Control.ViewState Property – Gets a dictionary of state information that can be used to store and retrieve the view state of a server control across multiple requests for the same page.  For more information read ASP.NET State Management Overview.
• The core functionality of viewstate is to read values and save values.
• PageStatePersistor.ControlState Property – Gets or sets and object that represents the data that controls contained by the current Page object use to persist across HTTP requests to the web server.  Control state is an object comprised of critical view state that the controls need to function.  It is contained in a separate object form normal view state information.  This view state is not affected when the page view state settings are changed.
• HiddenField Class – Represents a hidden field used to store a non-displayed value.
• Another common way to manage state is with cookies.  This is a non-Microsoft specific way of managing state, which is used by all browsers, web technology stacks, etc.  HttpResponse.Cookies Property – Gets the response cookie collection.  ASP.NET includes to intrinsic cookie collections.  The collection accessed through the Cookies Collection of HttpRequest which contains cookies transmitted by the client to the server in the cookie header.  The collection accessed through the cookies collection of HttpResponse contains new cookies created on the server and transmitted to the client in the Set-Cookie Header.  After you add a cookie by using the HttpResponse.Cookies collection, the cookie is immediately available in the HttpRequest.Cookies collection, even if the response has not been sent to the client.  For usage review How to: Delete a Cookie and How to: Write a Cookie.
• HttpRequest.QueryString Property – Gets the collection of HTTP query string variables.
• ASP.NET Application State Overview – Application state is a data repository available to all classes in an ASP.NET application. Application state is stored in memory on the server and is faster than storing and retrieving information in a database. Unlike session state, which is specific to a single user session, application state applies to all users and sessions. Therefore, application state is a useful place to store small amounts of often-used data that does not change from one user to another.
• HttpApplicationState Class – Enables sharing of global information across multiple sessions and requests within an ASP.NET application.
• Also be sure to check out the Session State Modes:
  • In-process Mode
  • State Server Mode
  • SQL Server Mode
  • Custom Mode

Just this week I was reading up on two of my hosting providers; smugmug for photographs and videos, and respositoryhosting.com for source control and project tracking. It occurred to me that both companies keep massive uptime and costs to a minimum by using cloud computing technologies. The provider for both being Amazon Web Services.

The CEO of SmugMug Don MacAskill writes a blog, and a long while ago wrote an entry titled “Amazon S3: Show me the Money”.  This is a great post about how Amazon S3 has saved SmugMug Millions.  Also note, the blog entry is from 2006, so I’d assume that they’ve saved millions more since then!

For more information be sure to read Don’s Blog Entry or check out the case study at Amazon.

The other site, repositoryhosting.com provides source control via Subversion, Mercurial, or Git.  I’ve started using Git and Mercurial more and more, and with my previous host just had Git and Subversion.  Don’t get me wrong, my previous source control host was awesome but I really needed access to Mercurial for various reasons.  One thing that my previous source control host, Unfuddle, and my current new host have in common is they use EC2 and S3 features of Amazon Web Services!

I’m going to be doing some jQuery work over the next few months so I thought to myself, “why don’t I put my notes and such up on the blog”.  I decided that was a good idea so this is the start of those notes & other such how-to write ups.

The first thing anyone needs to do when starting to use jQuery is to reference the library.  There area  couple different ways to do this, depending on which version you want to use.

Reference Method #1

One of the most common reference methods for jQuery is to reference the latest, greatest, always updated library located at Google hosted or Microsoft hosted CDN.  With this method you just reference the particular version you are using as shown below.

[sourcecode language="html"]
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../../Content/Site.css" /> 
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"> 
</script>
[/sourcecode]

The Microsoft jQuery CDN can be found here:

[sourcecode language="html"]
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../../Content/Site.css" /> 
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.3.2.min.js"> 
</script>
[/sourcecode]

Reference Method #2

The second method is to download the library from the jQuery.com Website.  Then of course reference it locally to the server you host it on.

[sourcecode language="html"]
<head runat="server">

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../../Content/Site.css" /> 
<script type="text/javascript" src="../../Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.js">
</script>

[/sourcecode]

Some ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC specific notes.

ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC comes with version 1.4.1 included in the Scripts Directory of any ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC Project Application Template you create/start.  This backs the new Microsoft support of the jQuery Library.