A minor improvement on the bleeding edge

As a result of fixes in the last version the Ajax Toolkit, it is now possible to do a full compile of an Ajax.net website! There's not huge improvement in anything, but the resulting application is much cleaner.

Yet another FireFox tip

Type about:config in the address bar, filter by cache, and change the value of browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl to true. It speeds up the browing experience by quite a bit on ssl sites, particularly if they use Ajax.

Ajax

Two things: Microsoft recently came out with an update to their Ajax Toolkit, and I was told today that my Digital Tool Factory application is the sort of thing that Microsoft likes to spotlight as a case study. Happy day.

A needed innovation

Last night I spent about seven hours trying to get a particular Microsoft web product to work, only to discover at the end of a long search that you simply couldn't make it work that way. I was trying to update the error message dynamically and have it appear in the VCE

It would be quite handy to have a list of things that a product CAN'T do, it would save so much time trying to prove negatives. Perhaps that should be a new site idea.

Friday Rapid Fire

• European Solar Power - with an array of mirrors instead of photo voltaic panels
• CogMap - an online organization chart maker, pretty cool, very Ajax-ey
• SilverLight - Microsoft's Next Big Thing has it's first (that I've seen) user generated application. And I just learned Ajax...
  

Ajax.net nugget of wisdom

Here's something I've just spend 90 minutes discovering - if you use inline code containing a Request.Querystring that screws up the Microsoft Ajax.net code causing it to do a full postback.

Quick round up to clear off some firefox tabs

• An interesting Interface
• Why Hawks Win - an interesting article
• A good deal on health insurance
• Dashboard Mohamed - I'm not that brave myself....
• ASP.net AJAX Cheatsheets
• The lives of the first web builders, in wacky Canadian form.
  

Ajax is a seductive swamp

Specifically the Ajax.net toolkit. It would seem that one can't retrofit an existing site, though who knows why.

Cool C#/AJAX things

• Three dimensional plotting in C#
• Drag and Drop with Atlas
• Lots more Ajax
  

Sunday round up

• Cool Outlook tool - with mapping
• Flash + AJAX - could be cool, it seem to duplicate Atlas and Ruby on Rails, but could still be useful
• Hansel Minutes - for good taste in code
• A good description of government

  The federal government is like a fence around a farm. The fence raises no crops of wheat and— no fields of corn. It only protects the farmer while he raises his crops, he giving a good portion of his time to keep the fence in repair. Just so we give a good share of our taxes to keep the great government fence in repair. I beg of you to keep this thought in mind that government has not a dollar to give any man…not a bed, not a cow or calf. Nothing but protection while you are at work for yourself. …Government has nothing to give anybody.

• Photoshop Plug Ins!
• I think Blurb will be the publisher of my first photo book.
• An interesting history of the John Birch Society
• Online Diagrams! Finally.
• Brain Scanners? I remember this from a GI Joe comic in 1984.
  
• Possibly a real electric car. I'll let you know when I find out more.
• Atlas the ever shrill goes to a protest. The interesting point is the mixture of text, photos and video on the page.
  

Rapid fire and random thoughts

• Interesting thoughts on the use of mercenaries to settle third world conflicts (Darfour, the Congo, etc) at Instapundit and Marginal Revolution. I'm a bit queasy about the idea myself, though it's probably worth trying.
• Congress asserts amazing immunities for itself. No-knock raids and tear gas are good enough for you and me though.
• Why do we believe anything sponsored by supposedly independent interest groups, in this case, an epidemic of girls going wild?
• A nice AJAX primer from Brainjar.
• Traffic Data in Windows Live Local.
• The current media created craze is the fight club. I think this article misses out on reasons why it is appealing to techies though. If you're a programmer, you're spending all day in your virtual world, and stepping into the ring is about as far away from that as you can get.
  

More Ajax links

• Sortable Lists
• HoverSmack!
  
• Suggest Drop Downs
  
• Code Samples
• The Ajax Weblog
  
• Google Suggest, alas, in ASP 2.0
• AjaxInfo.com
• Ajax.net
• From 15 seconds
• CodeProject Ajax
  

Update: Fixed the link to Ajax Info after a reader alerted me to an error in the URL. Thanks Alexei!

More Ajax Links

Google-xjaxslt via the Google Blog.

AJAX

Asynchonous Javascript and XML - which allows the browser to communicate with the server without refreshing the page (a la GMail) is going to be revolutionary. An over view and a specific. Wow.

And the cool thing is that it's a synthesis of technologies, nothing really new. Wow.

Addendum - From Mike, another very cool article on it here