Book Image

Microsoft AJAX Library Essentials: Client-side ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Explained

Book Image

Microsoft AJAX Library Essentials: Client-side ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Explained

Overview of this book

Microsoft AJAX Library Essentials is a practical reference for the client-side library of the ASP.NET AJAX Framework 1.0, and a tutorial for the underlying technologies and techniques required to use the library at its full potential. The main goal of this book is to get you comfortable with the Microsoft AJAX Library, a huge set of functions that can be used for developing powerful client-side functionality.Beginning with a hands-on tour of the basic technologies associated with AJAX, JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest, JSON, and the DOM, you'll move on to a crash course in the Microsoft AJAX tools. You will learn, through numerous step-by-step exercises, how to create basic AJAX applications, how the object-based programming model of JavaScript works, and how Microsoft AJAX Library extends this model. You'll understand the architecture of the Microsoft AJAX components, how they all fit together, and exactly what they can do for you. Then you will learn how to use the Microsoft AJAX Library in your web projects, and a detailed case study will walk you through creating your own customized client components. At every stage of your journey, you'll be able to try out examples to illuminate the theory, and consolidate your understanding. In addition to learning about the client and server controls, you'll also see how to handle errors and debug your AJAX applications.To complement your new found skills, the book ends with a visual reference of the Microsoft AJAX Library namespaces and classes, including diagrams and quick explanations for all the classes mentioned in the book, providing an invaluable reference you will turn to again and again.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Copyright
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

Testing


There are a lot of testing tools available today, but only few of them allow for automatic testing of AJAX applications. Dan Wahlin has put together a list of automated testing and debugging tools on his weblog at http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/ on 2007/02/16/.

In his article we can find some of the tools that we presented so far, and also a comprehensive list of tools that we can use for automatic testing.

A less documented feature of Fiddler is that it can generate Visual Studio WebTest files that can be using in Visual Studio. Why is this necessary? Visual Studio doesn’t record AJAX requests based on XMLHttpRequest, but only full postbacks.

In order to create a Visual Studio WebTest file, you need to follow these steps:

  1. 1. Open Fiddler.

  2. 2. Start capturing the traffic by pressing F12 or by selecting File | Capture Traffic.

  3. 3. Browse the AJAX application and Fiddler will register the requests.

  4. 4. After having finished the steps save the session by going to File | Save | Session(s)...