Saravana's Blog

Client Callback in ASP.NET Whidbey

I am working on ASP.NET 2.0 new features for the past one month. Last week i tried out Client Callbacks feature in ASP.NET Whidbey. This feature allows client script to call server side event asynchronously.

In most of the application we require this feature for posting some data to server without doing page refresh. Even for doing server side validation we can use this feature extensively. This feature is just wrapper over XMLHttp which we used previously to do asynchronous post. In my previous project, we extensively used XMLHttp Post. Now we no need to code for this, all this work will be done by Call back manager we just need to use this framework. Other advantage of this feature is, it is cross browser friendly. It will work both in Netscape and IE (of course it has to work here...). Basically it will work in all the browser which supports XMLHttp. To know more about client call back, read my article.

If you check out WebForm_DoCallback javascript function in script returned by webresource.axd handler, you can find out the client script for XML Http work. It neatly decides whether it wants to do post or get depending upon posted data size. My only concern is that, it posts the viewstate data also along with other posted data to callback page. I feel most of the time we might not require posted data(especially viewstate) as we are passing necessary information to call back page through argument parameter. So i feel there should be some way to avoid passing  viewstate to call back page. I am working on this, will update about this issue in detail in next post.

Software Architect Forum 2004

Microsoft Software Architect Forum 2004 happened in Bangalore last week. I attended many sessions there, most of the sessions were concentrated on SOA only. Other than that we had a session on RFID, Software Factories, Indigo..... I happened to meet Pat Helland, who was one of the founders of MTS (now COM+) and chief architect of Yukon's SQL Service Broker product. He gave two sessions on SOA, both were great. If you are interested in learning SOA, then check out his presentation on SOA during PDC.

Edit and Continue Support in ASP.NET

Soma and Eric Rudder came to our BDotNet UserGroup Meeting last week. We all had a Q & A session with Soma and Eric. During that session, i asked Soma about Edit and Continue support in ASP.NET. He told, as of now they dont have any plans of including this feature in Whidbey. If this feature is very useful, they will think about it after Whidbey release. Other then this session, we had a session on Software Design(by Arun) and on VSTS (by Gaurav).

Bought a book on Software Architecture

Yesterday i bought a book "Software Architecture in Practice - Second Edition" by Len Bass, Paul Clements, Rick Kazman. My lead (Mandar Bhagwat) suggested me to buy this book. I am very excited to read this book after i read the TOC and Preface. There are also lots of case studies in this book. If you are planning to become an architect, then it is a must buy book. I will also try to post here some of the good stuff i learn from this book.

Edit and Continue for C# in VS 2005

Like many C# developers i was also looking for Edit and Continue feature in C#. Its good to know that this feature will also be available in C# in whidbey release itself. Somasegar(Vice president of the Developer Division,MS) mentioned about this in his blog

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