jQuery – Why You Want It & How to Use it in ASP.NET - Dave Bush
With the release we're currently developing at work we've been using jQuery more and more. Put me down in the fan column. I really, really like it - but I'm still a newbie to it in so many ways. So when I saw there was going to be two sessions about using it I figured attending one would be a good idea. I'm glad I made Dave's talk. It was chock full of demos. I'll admit that even being a relative newbie it took a few samples before we got to examples I hadn't seen, though.The best parts were some of the best practices he provided. For example, Dave suggested linking to the jQuery library hosted on Google's servers rather than serving it up on our own machines. Many sites do this and it leverages the browser's caching to improve performance.
An interesting point Dave made was to point out there is a difference between jQuery's document.ready event and the document.onLoad event. The document.ready fires as soon as the page is parsed enough where all JavaScript can be executed while the document.onLoad fires when the page is done rendering. Knowing the difference between the two can be instructive when trying to decide which event should be referenced when code needs to run.
Dave suggested making sure we apply VS2008 SP2 so we can have Intellisense when coding jQuery statements. Step by step instructions on how to do this are available on Scott Guthrie's blog here.
Another revelation, and one which I will surely be sharing with my peers at work, was a throw away line Dave had talking about a JavaScript library that forces IE6 to behave like IE7. I wrote that down with the intention to research it because of our requirement for continued support of IE6. Anyway, a quick Google search resulted in this blog post talking about the IE7.js library. It's still just a lead at this point... but I intend to follow up on this soon.
Dave's blog is http://blog.dmbcllc.com
