Professional ASP.NET 3.5 in C# and Visual Basic Part 163 ppt

It’s not optimized for ASP.NET, but it includes some amaz-ing JavaScript-specific support that makes it worth lookamaz-ing at for AJAX or JavaScript heavy sites.. Aptana’s IntelliSense i

Figure B-3

IE WebDeveloper Toolbar and Firefox WebDeveloper

Both of these toolbars are free and absolutely essential for Web development The IE Web Developer

Toolbar is from Microsoft and extends Internet Explorer with a docked ‘‘Explorer Bar’’ offering features

such as DOM inspection and element outlining You can edit the CSS and see what styles are applied to

specific elements as seen in Figure B-4

Figure B-4

Firefox has a similar but even more powerful Web Developer Toolbar created by Chris Pederick It takes

a slightly different direction for its user interface by including a number of menus, each literally chock

full of menu options You can disable cookies, CSS, images, inspect elements, form inputs, and outline

tables, as shown in Figure B-5

Figure B-5

ASP.NET developers today need their sites to look great in both browsers These two toolbars put a host

of usefulness at your fingertips Highly recommended

Aptana Studio — Javascript IDE

Aptana offers a pay-for Professional Edition and a Free Community Edition It’s a Web development

environment based on the Eclipse codebase It’s not optimized for ASP.NET, but it includes some

amaz-ing JavaScript-specific support that makes it worth lookamaz-ing at for AJAX or JavaScript heavy sites

One of Aptana’s most compelling features is its understanding of browser compatibility of JavaScript

properties and functions Aptana’s IntelliSense includes icons for the various browsers and dims them

out appropriately for unsupported features, for not only JavaScript, but also HTML and CSS, as well

The Professional Edition also includes a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) editor with syntax

highlight-ing for JSON datasets This is a great feature if you’re passhighlight-ing a large and deep dataset back and forth via

AJAX

Aptana also includes all the major open source AJAX libraries such as Prototype and Scriptaculous, as

shown in Figure B-6 Adding support for them simply requires checking a check box It also integrates

with Firebug The Pro edition integrates with Internet Explorer

Figure B-6

Profilers: dotTrace or ANTS

If you’re not measuring your code with a good profiler you really don’t realize what you’re missing out

on Only a profiler can give you extensive metrics and a clear understanding of what your code is doing Visual Studio Team System 2008 includes a Profiler in the top-level Analyze menu If you’re not running VSTS, there are excellent third party profilers such as Jetbrain’s dotTrace and Red Gate Software’s ANTS that are worth your 10-day trial

.NET Profilers instruments a runtime session of your code and measure how many times each line is

hit and how much time is spent executing that line, as shown in Figure B-7 They create a hierarchical

series of reports that allow you to analyze time spent not only within a method, but within child methods executed through the stack Reports can be saved and multiple versions can be analyzed as you improve your applications, revision after revision

Figure B-7

If you haven’t already done so, consider adding profiling of your ASP.NET application to your software development lifecycle You’d be surprised to learn how few developers formally analyze and profile their applications Set aside some time to profile an application that you’ve never looked at before and you’ll

be surprised how much faster it can be made using analysis from a tool such as ANTS or dotTrace

‘‘He who lends a book is an idiot He who returns the book is more of an idiot.’’ — Anonymous, Arabic

Proverb

PositionIsEverything.net, QuirksMode.org,

and HTMLDog.com

When you’re creating Web sites that need to look nice on all browsers, you’re bound to bump into bugs,

‘‘features,’’ and general differences in the popular browsers Web pages are composed of a large

com-bination of standards (HTML, CSS, JS) These standards are not only open to interpretation, but their

implementations can differ in subtle ways, especially when they interact

Reference Web sites, such as PositionIsEverything and QuirksMode, collect hundreds of these hacks and

workarounds Then they catalog them for your benefit Many of these features aren’t designed, but rather

discovered or stumbled upon

HTMLDog is a fantastic Web designer’s resource for HTML and CSS It’s full of tutorials, articles, and a

large reference section specific to XHTML QuirksMode includes many resources for learning JavaScript

and CSS and includes many test and demo pages demonstrating the quirks PositionIsEverything is

hosted by John and Holly Bergevin and showcases some of the most obscure bugs and browser oddities

with demo examples for everything

Visibone

Visibone is known for its amazing reference cards and charts that showcase Color, Fonts, HTML,

JavaScript, and CSS Visibone reference cards and booklets are available online and are very reasonably

priced The best value is the Browser Book available atwww.visibone.com/products/browserbook.html

I recommend the laminated version Be sure to put your name on it because your co-workers will make

it disappear

www.asp.net

I work for Microsoft on the team that runswww.asp.net The site is a huge resource for learning about

ASP.NET and the various technologies around it Figure B-8 shown part of the Community page for

the site, where you’ll a link to my Weblog, among others, and links to other community resources The

www.asp.net/learn/section includes dozens and dozens of videos about general ASP.NET and how to

use it

Figure B-8

T idying Up Your Code

‘‘After every war someone has to tidy up.’’ — Wislawa Szymborska

Refactor! for ASP.NET from Devexpress

Refactoring support in Visual Studio 2008 continues to get better The third party utilities continue to

push the envelope adding value to the IDE Refactor! for ASP.NET adds refactoring to the ASP.NET

source view

For example, in Figure B-9 while hovering over the Refactor! context menu and selecting the ‘‘Extract

UserControl’’ refactoring, a preview of the changes that would be made appear within the source view.

A new UserControl would be created in a new fileWebUserControl0.ascx The currently selected label control would turn into aWebUserControl0control You can then choose a new name for the UserControl immediately after the refactoring

The most amazing thing about Refactor! for ASP.NET is that it’s a free download from

www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/IDETools/RefactorASP/ It includes 28 refactorings that make it

easier to simplify your code and your ASP.NET markup

Figure B-9

Code Style Enforcer

Code Style Enforcer from Joel Fjord´en does just that It’s a DXCore Plugin that enforces code style rules

that you configure DXCore is the free engine from DevExpress that Refactor! uses to extend Visual

Studio

Every team has a coding standard that they’d like programmers to follow, but it’s not only hard to keep

track of all the rules, it’s tedious Are methods supposed to be CamelCased or pascalCased? Are we

putting ‘‘m_’’ in front of member fields?

Code Style Enforcer is a lot like Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checker except for code As

shown in Figure B-10, identifiers that do not meet the code style guidelines are underlined in red You

can right-click on each error and Code Style Enforcer will use DxCore to refactor and fix each violation

Style guidelines are configurable and the default uses Juval Lowy’s excellent C# Code Style Guidelines

available fromwww.idesign.net The latest version will also generate code rule violation reports for a

solution using XML and XSLT providing customizable different templates Code Style Enforcer is an

excellent tool to add to your team’s toolbox

Figure B-10

Packer for NET — Javascript Minimizer

When creating an ASP.NET Web site, you often find yourself creating custom JavaScript files During

development, you want these files to be commented and easy to read During production, however,

every byte counts and it’s nice to reduce the size of your JavaScript files with a JavaScript ‘‘minimizer.’’ Packer for NET is a C# application that offers compression of JavaScript or simple ‘‘minification’’ by

stripping comments and white space

You’d be surprised how well these techniques work For example, Steve Kallestad reported that a copy of the JavaScript library Prototype 1.50 was 70K before JavaScript-specific compression It became 30K after the process, and then reached only 14K when gzip HTTP compression was applied From 70K to 14K is a pretty significant savings

JavaScript-specific compression does things such as renaming variables to single letters, being aware of global variable renaming vs local variable renaming, as well as stripping unnecessary white space and comments

Packer includes utilities for compression at both the command line and within MSBuild projects The

MSBuild targets can be added to your build process Consequently, your integration server is continuous

so you receive these benefits automatically and unobtrusively

As an example, a JavaScript library might start out looking like this:

var Prototype = {

Version: ’1.5.0’,

BrowserFeatures: {

XPath: !!document.evaluate

},

ScriptFragment: ’(?:<script.*?>)(( \n|\r|.)*?)(?:<\/script>)’,

emptyFunction: function() {},

K: function(x) { return x }

}

Packed, the JavaScript might end up looking like this (as an example) .but it will still work!

(c(){f 7.2q(/< \\/?[^>]+>/5a,"")}),2C:(c(){f 7.2q(P

5d(1m.5s,"9n"),"")}),9j:(c(){k 9m=P 5d(1m.5s,"9n");k 9k=P

5d(1m.5s,"ce");f(7.E(9m)||[]).1F((c(9l){f(9l.E(9k)||["",""])[1]}))}),3P

:(c(){f 7.9j().1F((c(4s){f 6A(4s)}))}),cd:(c(){k 1h=N.4f("1h");k

2V=N.cc(7);1h.63(2V);f 1h.2P}),cb:(c(){k 1h=N.4f("1h");1h.2P=7.9i();f

1h.2O[0]?(1h.2O.o>1?$A(1h.2O).2A("",(c(3Y,1G){f

3Y+1G.4j})):1h.2O[0].4j):""}),6J:(c(9h){k

E=7.4d().E(/([^?#]*)(#.*)?$/);h(!E){f{}}f

E[1].3m(9h||"&").2A({},(c(2E,Q){h((Q=Q.3m("="))[0]){k v=9g(Q[0]);k

l=Q[1]?9g(Q[1]):1b;h(2E[v]!==1b){h(2E[v].3k!=1M){2E[v]=[2E[v>}h(l){2E

[v].M(l)}}1k{2E[v]=l}}f 2E}))}),2F:(c(){f 7.3m("")})

There are many JavaScript minimizing libraries available; this is just one of them However, it’s options,

completeness, and integration with MSBuild that make Packer for NET worth trying out

V isual Studio Add-ins

‘‘If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe.’’ — Abraham Lincoln

ASPX Edit Helper Add-In for Visual Studio

Sometimes an add-in does something so small and so simple that you might dismiss it at first glance But when you find yourself doing the same action over and over again, you’ll be thankful for the ingenuity

of developers who create time savers like this little gem

The ASPX Edit Helper does two things, and it does them well Not everyone likes to use the visual

designer in Visual Studio 2008 Some users prefer to type ASPX mark-up directly in the source view This add-in automatically fills in"runat="server"andid="randomid"when you type a server control It also includes short codes for automatic insertion of snippets

For example, if you type/lbland press Enter, you’ll get:

<asp:Label runat="server" id="lbl5394" Text="" />

A nice touch is that the cursor will be automatically positioned within the id attribute in the random ID selected so you can immediately begin typing a new ID for the control This thoughtful design will allow you to create complicated forms with minimal typing very quickly Figure B-11 shows the moment just before I press Enter after typing the/txtshort code

Figure B-11

Installation is easy Just unzip into your Visual Studio Add-ins folder As an aside, the authors also

include source code, which is useful if you’re interested in writing your own Add-in