Saturday, October 23, 2010

Test with Windows Live Writer

Everyone is telling me that this tool is really the cat’s meow. So far – about 20 words into it – it’s really not half bad.

Let’s insert a photograph, even though this blog isn’t so much of a blog as a glorified collection of bookmarks.

Hmmm, kinda cool!

I wonder if this would work with ScrewTurn Wiki? (Although I would tend to doubt it, but you never know.)

Saturday, October 16, 2010

A few thoughts on jQuery templating with jQuery.tmpl | Encosia

I have to create some email templates for use by (gulp) classic ASP. I thought I'd do a bit of reading on templates in order for (1) my template tag convention to be inspired by existing templates and thus be future-friendly, and (2) perhaps if I'm lucky, to find a template I can actually use on the server itself. (PURE, mentioned below, might be a candidate.)

A few thoughts on jQuery templating with jQuery.tmpl | Encosia: "I spent some quality time with Dave Reed’s latest revision of John Resig’s jQuery.tmpl plugin recently, migrating a small project from jTemplates. Since both the jQuery team and Microsoft team have requested feedback on jQuery.tmpl, I decided to write about my experience using it (as I am wont to do with these templating proposals).
Overall, jQuery.tmpl is a great step in the right direction. It’s small, it’s simple, and it’s fast. Overloading append() to allow the append(Template, Data) syntax is phenomenal. That approach feels more like idiomatic jQuery than anything else I’ve used, including jTemplates."

He mentions that it lacks composability, but this article is from May. Has Microsoft added it since then?

From the comments, a few more libraries to consider:
Spark - the new hotness, apparently. Included with the latest Microsoft MVC, if I'm not mistaken.
PURE - seems more decoupled than the others, but at first glance it doesn't seem to support to ubiquitous "${}" convention.

I'm still reading. This is kind of a brain dump for further research at some point when I have more time (i.e. when hell freezes over).

Monday, October 11, 2010

Teach Visual Studio Your Own Language -�Easy! - Journal - Rinat Abdullin

Teach Visual Studio Your Own Language -�Easy! - Journal - Rinat Abdullin: "In this article we'll see how simple it is to extend Visual Studio with a custom language. This language will have a real syntax that will be evaluated and transformed into the C# code on-the-fly, saving a few lines of repetitive code!"

BDD, Fluent Interface Generator, and a new .NET 3.5 Parser generator

StoryQ uses a fluent interface generated by Flit, the Fluent Interface Toolkit, which is turn was developed using Irony, a new development kit for writing parsers in .NET. (However, the last release was almost exactly a year ago, so who knows what's up with it?)

Tuesday, October 05, 2010

Javascript Libraries and ASP.NET: A Guide to jQuery, AJAX and Microsoft - Articles - MIX Online

Javascript Libraries and ASP.NET: A Guide to jQuery, AJAX and Microsoft - Articles - MIX Online: "When Microsoft announced they would begin providing official support for jQuery, few of us realized how profoundly that announcement would eventually impact client-side development on the ASP.NET platform. Since that announcement, using jQuery with ASP.NET has moved from the obscure, to a central role in ASP.NET MVC’s client-side story, and now to the point of potentially superseding ASP.NET AJAX itself."

NET jQuery Extensions at GitHub

Highlights include:
"Templating – Previously referred to as jQuery.tmpl or jQuery-tmpl, the jQuery Templating feature was Microsoft’s first foray into working with the jQuery team and community. Though its inclusion in jQuery isn’t planned until jQuery 1.5 is released, you can begin using it in plugin form immediately. That plugin is currently available on GitHub: http://github.com/jquery/jquery-tmpl"
and
"Data Linking – The next feature that may be a precursor to more official things to come is the jQuery-datalink plugin, which is also available on GitHub: http://github.com/nje/jquery-datalink. With this plugin, you can “link” JavaScript objects together so that they remain synchronized when changes are made to one or both of them. The canonical example of this is linking a JavaScript object’s properties to corresponding fields in a form, to eventually automate tasks such as change tracking and submission."

More from Scott Guthrie:
"jQuery Templates
The jQuery Templates plugin enables you to create client templates. For example, you can use the jQuery Templates plugin to format a set of database records that you have retrieved from the server through an Ajax request.
You can learn more about jQuery templates by reading my earlier blog entry on jQuery Templates and Data-Linking or by reading the documentation about it on the official jQuery website. In addition, Rey Bango, Boris Moore and James Senior have written some good blog posts on the jQuery Templates plugin:
When the next major version of jQuery is released -- jQuery 1.5 -- jQuery Templates will be included as a standard part of the jQuery library."