Archive for the ‘JQuery’ Category

AgileDash Business Plan

Friday, May 28th, 2010

AgileDash, our flagship product which is an Agile project management tool which we be capable of running in multiple platforms.  The first platform AgileDash will be available on is Microsoft SharePoint, which we are naming AgileDash SP.  AgileDash SP was originally planned to be released for the new and powerful Microsoft SharePoint 2010 platform.  However, as much as I want to develop against SharePoint 2010, most people and potential customers are still using 2007 and they will be for the near future.  There are several reasons for this, the main reason is that SharePoint 2010 is 64 bit only.  This is a good thing since it gives 2010 the ability to be more powerful by being able to scale vertically as well as horizontally.  This also comes with a price to pay that a lot of customers are running 32 bit hardware still, they have heavy investments in this hardware and it will take time for them to convert over.

Now with all of that said, this was not a light decision on our part.  SharePoint 2010 offered a rich client API for us to develop against with Silverlight and jQuery.  SharePoint 2007 however does not offer this, and its extremely difficult to develop against when it comes to client side applications, in particular rich interface applications such as Silverlight.  I ran across something that changed my decision drastically, Marc D Anderson has been working on a jQuery framework called SPServices that acts as a proxy to the SharePoint 2007 web services that lets you easily and naturally program against.  He is actively developing this framework and it supports a large degree of functionality.  I plan on working closely with Marc to develop and get this framework working in Silverlight.

I plan to start testing several scenarios in Silverlight calling out to the SPService jQuery library immediately.   I will be posting about my findings on how this is working, what the performance is like, etc.

Posted in .NET, Agile, company/business, JQuery, SCRUM, SharePoint, Silverlight, tools | No Comments »

ASP.NET MVC – AJAX or JQUERY?

Monday, March 1st, 2010

When using ASP.NET MVC you have a wide degree of freedom, especially compared to the traditional ASP.NET WebForms.  But with that freedom comes a degree of complexity and choices, one of those choices is how to handle asynchronous calls, manipulation of the DOM, and all the other necessary client side behaviors.  Luckily there are a bunch of choices to choose from now days, one that I have lots of experience with is JQuery, and in my opinion it is the most mature and has the most support.  JQuery has many plugins that you can download to extend its behavior in order to give you additional functionality.  It has a very easy to use syntax to manipulate the DOM and it has a very large user base which makes finding solutions to your problems very easy.

In addition, ASP.NET MVC and JQuery go together quite well, which can not be said for ASP.NET WebForms.  Although JQuery does work with WebForms, I know I have used it extensively, there are several issues you will run into when using it.  With ASP.NET MVC, those issues are nearly nil, mostly because ASP.NET MVC drops the legacy life cycle of WebForms for a more HTML driven approach for the view.  This makes it extremely easy to use these open source frameworks that have been so hard to integrate in the past.

I have done a bit of research on this topic, there is a good StackOverflow post about this very same subject and it was answered with quite a bit more detail. My ultimate decision at this time is I am going to try to keep it lean and stick to only using JQuery.  Microsoft has started to fully back JQuery on multiple fronts, they are shipping ASP.NET MVC with JQuery.  Shortly they will also start to ship Visual Studio 2010 with JQuery, and they also offer the latest versions of JQuery through their Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Posted in .NET, JQuery | No Comments »

Silverlight or JQuery

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Establishing the criteria for a new application is a hard thing, if you choose poorly you may not contend well against your competition.  However, if you choose right, or choose something that will let you be unique you may stand a chance.  That is the decision I had to make, do I want to use Silverlight 3 which is completely new to me, or do I use JQuery which I have substantially more experience using.  I want to offer a rich user experience, but I also do not want to slow the user down.  I have already looked at adoption rates for Silverlight worldwide we are looking at 41% as of January 2010.  That is pretty substantial but no where near 100%, or 90% which is where Flash/Flex is currently.

Normally the choice between Silverlight and JQuery won’t be as ubiquitous as it is here, they server different purposes, but their feature set does overlap in several areas.  Silverlight offers a very rich user experience, and a very powerful subsystem, being able to utilize the .NET Framework.  You do not get the full framework, but you do get a pretty substantial subset of it.

The difficult choice I have is can I accept the fact that users have to download a plugin?  Can I also accept the fact that in some rare instances Silverlight can be sluggish from my experience, since it relies on the client to render.  While both rely on the client, in most cases I have never found JQuery to be that bad, additionally there is a pretty big upfront cost for choosing Silverlight.  The Silverlight package must be downloaded to the client, there are some techniques out there to optimize this by only loading what you need to up front and then loading the rest later when its needed, etc.  Lastly there is the problem that Silverlight does not support Linux, and has some hacked support for Google Chrome which I have found mixed results with, but the majority of the time it works.

I think ultimately my decision is going to be to rely on the JQuery Framework and its rich UI plugins.  I have experience with this, and the ASP.NET MVC stuff works well with it.  Also since I am going to rely on Windows Azure as the hosting platform, if I chose Silverlight I would have to build a messaging system using WCF so that Silverlight could talk to the Azure Platform API’s since they do not at this time have an API set that works with Silverlight.  I feel like I am limited a bit using JQuery and HTML however, so I may use a mix of the two for certain situations when the need arises.

Posted in .NET, JQuery, Silverlight, Windows Azure | 1 Comment »