Geek Daily

Here is what I liked this week. Enjoy!

Comparing Popular JavaScript/Ajax Frameworks
After four days of ASP.NET AJAX training with Stephen Walther I set out to learn more about my options in choosing a solution for a JavaScript/Ajax framework. If I realized days later I would be writing this comprehensive post on 7 of the most popular frameworks, I may have just went with the “Inny-Minny-Miney-Moe” method!

jQuery AJAX calls to a WCF REST Service
Since I’ve posted a few jQuery posts recently I’ve gotten a bunch of feedback to have more content on using jQuery in Ajax scenarios and showing some examples on how to use jQuery to cut out ASP.NET Ajax. In this post I’ll show how you can use jQuery to call a WCF REST service without requiring the ASP.NET AJAX ScriptManager and the client scripts that it loads by default. Note although I haven’t tried it recently the same approach should also work with ASMX style services.

SQL SERVER - Better Performance - LEFT JOIN or NOT IN?
First of all answer this question : Which method of T-SQL is better for performance LEFT JOIN or NOT IN when writing query? Answer is : It depends!

Video: Write Your First Silverlight Game
In this video, I demonstrate how to start writing your first Silverlight game. I show how to create a dramatic space scene, add a soundtrack, and associate movement with the mouse wheel. This is the first part of a two-part series.

Reading binary files using Ajax
But when it comes to binary files, helping hands from server-side technologies are often necessary.

So I googled around to see what I can do about binary files with Ajax and found this Marcus Granado’s post at http://mgran.blogspot.com/2006/08/downloading-binary-streams-with.html

What he posted there worked like a charm for FireFox and Safari but I couldn’t get it to work for IE.

But luckily, within the same page, someone had posted up a solution for IE as a comment, which is written in VBScript.

Safari CSS Masks
Webkit continues to impress with it’s early implementations of new standards. WebKit now supports alpha masks in CSS. Masks allow you to overlay the content of a box with a pattern that can be used to knock out portions of that box in the final display. In other words, you can clip to complex shapes based off the alpha of an image.

Popularity: 36% [?]

I have decided to start doing a Friday round up of all the interesting articles I find during the week. Here are some stories I found interesting for the week of March 3 to March 8. Enjoy!

Internet Explorer 8 will render in Standards Mode by default
The IE team has announced that it will render HTML markup in “the most standards compliant way it can.” It is nice to see that MS has decided to actually listen to what web developers want, in regards to IE, for a change.

The Top 5 Recommendations For Monetizing Your Blog
The readers over at ProBlogger have given their top recommendations on how to make some money with your blog.

Acid 3 released, Webkit praised
Jon Tan ran a few tests and posted the results. Hixie commented on his blog about the release, and praised WebKit on how they have been closing a large number of bugs

Silverlight to run on Symbian phones
Microsoft is working with Nokia to get Silverlight running on Symbian mobile phones. Would this help influence your decision to use Silverlight for UI over other technologies?

MVC Framework Preview 2 released, Jeff Palermo disappointed
Jeff gives a good overview, along with his opinion, of the changes that have been made in preview 2.

Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 is now available for download.
Take the first release of IE8 for a test drive. Will it deliver this time?

Popularity: 18% [?]

Outside of the .Net community it is hard to find someone that has anything positive to say about Silverlight. Whether it is becuase they are misinformed, hate MS, or they have formed this opinion after objective research of the technology, the fact remains Silverlight isn’t getting much respect and it has a huge mountain to climb in terms of an install base.

On the other side of the coin Flash has the upper hand. They have a staggering install base and have already been accepted by developers as an industry standard for developing animations.

As we all know this doesn’t ensure Adobe will rule this market forever and they are making some moves in order to preserve their market share and try and steal Silverlights thunder.

Part of Silverlights perceived, depending on who you talk to, advantage is the blending of client side and server side in the application as well as reusable controls, a concept us .Net coders already enjoy in our everyday lives.

The move that Adobe is making is to include the ability in include C, C++, Java, Python, and Ruby code into Flash that will get compiled into ActionScript. This is a smart move by Adobe which will strengthen Flash and remove the major reason a developer might decide to switch to Silverlight.

I have heard many scoff at Silverlight but when a major player like Adobe stands up and takes a step like this it is clear that they are not naive to the potential of Silverlight.

Popularity: 10% [?]

ScottGu has announced on his blog the release of Silverlight 1.0 and Microsoft’s intentions to make the Silverlight plugin available to Linux users to make Silverlight completely platform independant.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Microsoft has released a alpha version of their Silverlight Addin for Visual Studio “Orcas” (beta1). As someone who isn’t on the “bleeding edge” of the latest web technologies, I like to see how they do after the hype has worn off before trying them out, I don’t know what Microsoft plans for this Addin in regards to price.

Best case scenario for developers is that Microsoft releases this Addin for free and also for the free Express editions of Visual Studio. This would be the best scenario if Microsoft wants to quickly gain some ground on Flash, which charges for it’s development environment.

I gave up years ago trying to understand some of the, seemingly foolish, business and PR decisions Microsoft has made over the years, so nobody really knows for sure how this will turn out, unless of course it is in the release notes I was too lazy to read.

Cheers

Popularity: 8% [?]