Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX debut on CDN

Microsoft's ASP.NET launched a new Microsoft AJAX CDN service that provides caching support for AJAX libraries (ASP.NET AJAX and jquery) recently.

Google, Yahoo and AOL have been doing the same for quite sometime. The idea of hosting these files on CDN is to distribute your javascript and css libraries on several servers around the world and serve the user with requested information from a location nearest to the user. This is the main advantage of a CDN, delivering content from a location closest to the user to reduce delay. The CDN's are a combination of software and hardware.This is mostly used for content that does not chage over time significantly. The content servers are provided by such companies as Akamai, Mirror Image Internet, Limelight etc. It was rumored that Microsoft has an interest in Limelight but it appears many more are interested.

• Google hosts several popular ajax libraries at the Google site. These libraries hosted on Google CDN can be used for animations, easier DOM navigation, Gadgets, etc.

• Dojo Toolkit organization hosts its javascript and style related files on the AOL CDN. If you need to use Dojo this may be easiest place to start with. These are also on Google CDN.

Read my article where I used javascript hosted on AOL CDN and the style sheets from my intranet to demo jQuery inside a DOJO accordion.

• Yahoo's YUI (Yahoo User Interface) library hosts its Javascript and CSS on Yahoo CDN. Read more about Yahoo CDN here..

John Resig's jQuery

About jQuery and how to download
This is a nice light weight wrapper tool to write amazing JavaScript.It is distributed under a public license.
There are two versions you can download -minified and uncompressed from the following web
URL,
http://docs.jquery.com/Downloading_jQuery#Current_Release

What you do after download?
(This is for the Windows XP users)
Get the downloaded jquery-1.3.min.js file into any folder. I keep all of my stuff on desktop
where I can see it. Create a virtual site on your IIS 5.1 and use the folder you down loaded the file to keep site files. If you are experimenting,  give all rights on the folder to yourself. You are done.


What next?I will be writing a few scripts that will highlight jQuery's magical effects. Mine is not the only source, there are tons of info on jquery.com site as well as else where. Just make a web search if you are motivated.

What do you use to create a script?

You can use just Notepad. Microsoft supports it in Visual Studio 2008.You cannot upload and use Notepad created file with VS 2008 unless you have created a HTML document  proper to use with VS 2008.

The Visual Studio 2008 SP1 connection

If you are interested in developing web apps using jquery in VS 2008 make sure you read this article,
jQuery intellisense in VS2008

Good luck with jquery

Dojo TabContainer in 3 browsers

All browsers are not created equal (in fact they are created unequal).

The Dojo TabContainer displays tabbed pages with a variety of content placed in them in content panes which are containers for content.

Many web site especially those that have a lot of information on them such as the eCommerce sites have a need for a large number of tabbed pages. How does a large number of tabs render when browsed. The picture shows how the three browsers render a resized web page with these user interfaces.

Mini conclusion: FireFox 2.0 and Opera 9.01 does better than IE 7.0