Long Time!!!

It has been quite some time that I have not been that active on my blog, as I used to be a year back. Now, I am getting back to the routine and have been eagerly waiting to get back to my blog. However, before I get back, I thought it’s a good idea to share what has been going on at my end in the last few months.

It was back in October 2008 that my company’s vice president asked me to be one of the authors of the official blog of the company. The aim was to present the technical leadership and technical diversity of the resources we had at the company. So, I decided to start blogging for the company’s blog. The first thing I did was revamping the complete blog so as to have a consistent look and feel of the blog with the company’s website. Then, I wrote a few articles on HTTP Compression, Engineering Enterprise Level Applications using Microsoft .NET Framework and User Experience Design Patterns. The experience was great and the recognition was worth the effort.

In January 2009, I decided to relocate to London, UK for work. I got Tier 1 in February, left my existing job at TRG TECH; The Resource Group in March, moved to UK in April, started working for a multi national MVNO in the name of Lebara in May 2009.

So over the past few months there have been quite some transitions going on and I was unable to keep up with my blog. However now I am getting back to it.

One of the many good things about all these transitions is that my technology spectrum and technical horizon is increasing. Previously I have been working purely on the call centre centric software product development with all the energies channelized in re-engineering a high availability, fault tolerant, scalable, secure and rich interactive solution, but now at my new job at Lebara, I am working more on integration and B2B projects, along with extending and customizing Microsoft’s business management software product range.

Now you can expect a bit more technical diversity on my blog with some technical articles on Microsoft Dynamics as well, in addition to the .NET and Java Script stuff. Hope you would like it.

Google Analytics reveal the 'Top 7 - Last One Year'

I have been using Google Analytics for quite some time now to find out some of the hidden facts and a few of the interesting user trends on this blog.

Today I generated a report of the most visited blog entries for the last one year and found that people love to read about ExtJS and other web 2.0 stuff; my blog is getting the attraction of a lot of such readers.

Here are the rankings - you might be interested in reading a few of them as well!

1. ExtJS 2.0 - Making Web applications more responsive with minimal network traffic!
2. How To: Setup JavaScript IntelliSense for ExtJS in Visual Studio 2008 (SP1)
3. ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview: Dynamic Data Websites Part 1, Engineering Data Centric Web Application from End-to-End
4. Comet: The futuristic view of web applications – A food for thought!
5. Engineering Secure Web Apps in ASP.NET 2.0
6. FireBug + YSlow for Mozilla Firefox: A must use tool for all Web2.0 developers
7. Emprise JavaScript Charts with ASP.NET AJAX

Now blogging at the official trg tech blog

I have recently started blogging on the official blog of my company; trg tech.

We plan to share the experiences of trg techies at trg tech on the official trg tech blog. Other than the technical stuff, you will also find words from the recruiters and others at trg tech in order to get to know about the lifestyle of trg techies at their very own company i.e. trg tech.

Hope you would like the posts over there too. Its http://trgtech.blogspot.com.

Google Chrome – Web Browser for the Next Generation of Web Apps

Google Chrome is available for download from today!

It’s a brand new web browser by Google for those who love GMail, Google Docs and other JavaScript centric web applications; applications which have truly proved the very essence of Web as a Platform.

Google Chrome is yet another examplification of the simplicity and elegancy of Google’s User Interfaces. It’s fast, it’s speedy and it’s yet another innovation on part of Google in terms of its memory management and JavaScript execution. It considers every tab and every website as a separate process. Google has definitely created a benchmark in Web Browsers.

It has got features that are very useful for Web2.0 Engineers. It has got built in DOM Inspector, JavaScript Debugger, Network Traffic Analyzer, Memory / CPU / Network Profiler so that you can precisely know which web app or web page is taking more memory, CPU or bandwidth.

Google has not just engineered this whole thing but have presented the whole concept behind it in an equally superb way. Read the full story of Google Chrome at http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/# to explore what it actually is.

How To: Setup JavaScript IntelliSense for ExtJS in Visual Studio 2008 (SP1)

One of the much awaited features incorporated in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 is the JavaScript IntelliSense support for 3rd Party JavaScript Frameworks like ExtJS, jQuery, Prototype etc.

Now you can add references to your 3rd party libraries in you JavaScript files and JavaScript blocks, and Visual Studio 2008 (on installation of Service Pack 1) will start recognizing the classes and functions defined in those libraries.

In order to setup ExtJS JavaScript IntelliSense you just need to add the following lines (/// reference tags) in your JavaScript files or script blocks to make it work. (Adjust the relative paths to the two JavaScript files as per your website hierarchy)

And here is the outcome; ExtJS based classes are now available in IntelliSense

Moreover a variable that’s initialized as with ExtJS based Store is now showing the respective methods of Ext.data.Store class in IntelliSense

I have updated the ASP.NET AJAX with ExtJS sample to incorporate this JavaScript IntelliSense feature. You can download the updated code sample from here.

What I can say about this feature is; it is simply a superb addition in Visual Studio feature set and will definitely increase the popularity and penetration of JavaScript based frameworks and libraries.

TRG Tech Talk Series: “AJAX – Inside Out”

I gave a presentation at my company in connection to the new Tech Talk series initiated by TRG TECH. I was honored to be the very first one to have a Tech Talk in this connection. The topic I chose for this first Tech Talk was “AJAX – Inside Out”. The reason for choosing this topic was to build the foundation for our upcoming Tech Talks on engineering rich, interactive user experiences over the web which me and my team will be conducting in a month or so.

My presentation covered everything related with AJAX including

• Web 2.0
• XMLHTTPRequest
• Hidden Frames
• ASP.NET AJAX
• JSON
• Programming Model of ASP.NET AJAX
• Server Centric Programming Model
• Client Centric Programming Model
• Trade Offs of the two Programming Models
• Supporting tools for Web 2.0 developers for analyzing the network traffic created by your web app, manipulating DOM, styles and other aspects of your web app and browser.

The supporting tools for the debugging and analysis included the following

• Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar
• Nikhil Kothari's Web Development Helper for Internet Explorer
• Firebug for Firefox
• YSlow for Firebug

I also gave three demos/code walkthroughs during the course of this presentation one on each of the XMLHttpRequest, UpdatePanel and PageMethods.

The feedback and response was overwhelming and the hall remained jam packed till the end :)

You can download my presentation from here so as to have a deeper look at it and get better insight of AJAX really from inside out.

Emprise JavaScript Charts with ASP.NET AJAX

I am a big fan of ExtJS for engineering rich interactive user interfaces for all the data centric web2.0 based applications, but one of the components that’s missing in ExtJS is the charting component. I consider ExtJS as a comprehensive java script based UI Framework but still they haven’t focused on providing Java Script based charting controls so far.

Most of the charting controls I came across are server centric and require the chart image to be transmitted to the web browser; others require some plug-in (Flash Player etc) to be installed on every client machine or some other limitation.

I came across EJS Charts (Emprise Java Script Charts) some time back and found it really useful in fulfilling the gap in the graphical data presentation needs over the web by presenting these charts in an equally responsive fashion like the data.

The good things about them are

• They are purely Java Script based charting controls, doesn’t require any plug-in to be installed on client machines
• They are pretty much interactive; provide features like zooming, mouse hints etc.
• Just provide them with the data in java script (arrays, xml, csv) and they will render the specified chart at the client end.
• Series can be added to / removed from an already rendered chart so as to get the affect of a continually updating chart.
• Minimizes the overall network traffic generated by the web app, they require transfer of just the data between the server and web browser and not the complete chart in image format.
• Programming model is fairly simple.
• Works with all the modern browsers i.e. Internet Explorer 6 and above, FireFox 1.5 and above etc.

The bad things about them are

• They don’t provide extensive range of chart types as provided by other server side charting controls, but I hope that they will mature over the period of time.
• They are not widely spread so far; people are really un-aware that this thing can happen at the client end too.

Here is the simple sequence of steps you need to follow in order to utilize these web2.0 Java Script based charts in ASP.NET AJAX.

• Call the server method to get the data (e.g. List<keyvaluepair<string,int>>) from the ASP.NET PageMethod (if required, otherwise use the data got from the last call to the server method) and hook the callback for it.
• In the callback function, check if the EJS based 'Chart' object is already defined, if not then define one. The constructor of that EJS Chart takes a div id where it needs to render the generated chart. You can optionally specify other properties in the constructor for the chart in order to customize title, captions, hints, legend, gridlines and other visual and behaviour related properties of the chart. If a series is already added in the previosuly generated chart, remove it so that the new series as per the user selection can be added to the same chart instance.
• Transform the data returned from the Server (e.g. List<keyvaluepair<string,int>>) to an ordinary 'Java Script Array'
• Define the EJS based 'Chart Series' (LineSeries, BarSeries or AreaSeries etc) as per the user selection and supply the array you have just created as the datasource for the chart.
• Add this 'Chart Series' instance to the 'Chart' instance

Here are the images of the charts generated from the sample code I have uploaded for you to have a look at and experiment.

You can download the sample code that uses EJS with ASP.NET AJAX (that present different graphical representations of data based on user selected chart type) from here. Please note that the sample code uses ASP.NET 3.5 (December Extensions Preview) and EJS Personal Edition (EJS personal edition has got a few limitations too, read more about those from here).