JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

A common question is how to create an editable list of data allowing users to Edit and Save existing data. The default MVC scaffolding in Visual Studio provides us with a way to implement this where Create/Edit/Delete are implemented on the server side and each action has a separate UI. Today we will see how we can implement it using jQuery and a lightweight client side library knockout.js (also referred to as KO).

On the server, we will use ASP.NET Web API to expose the database services that will be accessed by JavaScript. Needless to say we will use AJAX to communicate with the backend Services.

For any ‘List’ of data there is a need for implementing some kind of template or repeater behavior so that we can define the UI for one row of data and the library/framework takes that template and repeats it for the entire list. We know how to do this in ASP.NET MVC using Razor syntax. Today we’ll see how implement the repeater UI using KO’s templating engine. We will also see how we can define separate templates for Display and Edit modes.

Today we’ll see how to use a feature called Directives in Angular JS. Directives allow you to encapsulate custom behavior in an HTML element, attribute, classes and even comments. For example, the ng-app attribute that we use to define the scope of our Angular App is in fact a Directive, because there are no HTML5 attributes by that name! It’s Angular who interprets the attribute at runtime. 

Apart from helping add custom attributes, directives can also be used to create the server side equivalent of ‘tag-libraries’ on the client. Those familiar with WebForms or JSP development will remember you could create server side components with custom Tags like <asp:GridView>…</asp:GridView> where the GridView rendering logic was encapsulated in a server component. Well, Directives allow you build such components, but on the client. 

Some folks on our team have been working on making node.js work awesomely on Windows. There's a few questions you might have.

Tomasz Janczuk is working on the iisnode project lately. You might think that Windows and node don't belong together. "That's just wrong! What are they thinking? I thought IIS was all about .NET?" Well, you may recall I spoke at CodeMash a few years back on IIS7 and PHP and did a screencast showing how IIS7, PHP and FastCGI could push many thousands of requests a second. The IIS folks, the Windows folks, the Azure folks, want to make sure everything runs well on Windows. Remember, we sell Windows, so it's good if it does many things well. ;)

See how to use a $resource service in AngularJS to post data to an ASP.NET MVC Controller.

So to post data, we need to simply call the save function on our resource instance. However there is a slight gotcha. The $resource object expects all the functions to post to the same URL. In ASP.NET MVC terms, this means posting to the same action method with different HttpGet/HttpPost/HttpPut etc attributes.

In our current code currently, the HomeController uses GetTweets method to get the Data. Now Posting to a URL called GetTweets is semantically icky. So let’s update the Controller method to be called just Tweet. So we will do GET, POST, PUT etc. requests to the url /Home/Tweet. 

Ember.js is a powerful JavaScript MVC framework to create complex web applications that eliminates boilerplate and provides a standard application architecture, it supports UI Bindings, Composed Views, Web Presentation Layers, and plays nicely with others. In order to create a real-time interaction web application, I add a SignalR hub and REST service with ASP.NET MVC.

As seen at http://www.shareconf.de/

The infinite scroll pattern is simply a different kind of pagination. In this article, we will see how to implement an infinite scroll using ASP.NET WebAPI, KnockoutJS and jQuery

he most common requirement for a line of business application is to represent data in pages. Usually this involves showing data in a grid and showing a navigate pane with either page numbers or Next/Previous button (or both) to navigate to multiple pages. This works fine in most cases.

To me these two libraries seem like a match made in heaven. SignalR calling a JavaScript function to alter data, and Knockout automatically updating the UI, awesome!

In this post I’ll show how you can use KnockoutJS and SignalR together to create real-time web application with little effort. I’m going to create a very basic example of a web page showing a list of exchange rates hooked up using KnockoutJS. I’ll then create a server side page to update the data and use SignalR to call a JavaScript function to update the JavaScript model.

In last post, we implemented SignalR part of the stock ticker sample using Angular JS and modified the HTML page to use Angular’s directives. As promised earlier, we will finish the implementation in this post by incorporating UI changes using directives and filters. 

Angular JS is designed with separation of concerns in mind. One of the best architectural features of Angular JS is, it makes it easier to separate HTML and JavaScript separated from each other while playing together at the same time. Features like directives and filters can be used to easily extend Angular’s expressions and behaviour of HTML elements without wasting a lot of time and energy. 

So as you know I have been very interested in AngularJs lately and have been absorbing as much knowledge as I can on the subject. The application we are developing at work is getting close to beta so we began to look into bundling and minification of our JavaScript.

So, for the past couple of months I’ve been investigating a variety of topics from top-to-bottom, including HTML5 and CSS3, Bootstrap, ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework (including Repository, Unit of Work, and Service patterns), Dependency Injection, JavaScript (including the Module and Revealing Module patterns) and jQuery, KnockoutJS, and finally QUnit.

One topic I thought I’d blog about is how to unit test client-side JavaScript code, specifically ViewModels used by KnockoutJS that communicate with a Web API endpoint. To help illustrate these techniques I’ve created an ultra-simple ASP.NET MVC application that uses both Web API and KnockoutJS. Shockingly, it’s a to-do application.

I’ve been working with ASP and ASP.NET for about ten years now, starting with ASP classic and settling on .NET 2.0 as my favorite. My new year resolution this year (2013) was to upgrade my .NET work to .NET 4.0 using Visual Studio 2012 Express and really get to grips with MSBuild, so that I can concatenate and minify my JavaScript files as part of the normal build process of a .NET project, in Visual Studio.

I wanted a non-trivial project to demonstrate this process, because I find the devil is in the details. I have often faithfully followed an overly-simple tutorial or introduction to an unfamiliar subject, then discovered that the tutorial did not prepare me for when you want to do something even slightly difficult. So, in this tutorial we’ll be attempting to marry Knockout.js and jQuery UI. We will also be using a JSON file with a hierarchy of data to define a menu.

Durandal stitches together Knockout, Sammy, and RequireJS to make it easier to use these technologies together.

In this blog entry, I want to provide a brief walkthrough of using Durandal to create a simple Single Page App. I am going to demonstrate how you can create a simple Movies App which contains (virtual) pages for viewing a list of movies, adding new movies, and viewing movie details. The goal of this blog entry is to give you a sense of what it is like to build apps with Durandal.

One of the most awesome features in KO is ‘template’ binding. This is a simple mechanism for building UI structures with repeating UI blocks. Templates support data binding expressions to bind various HTML attributes (text, value, id, url etc.) to the data in the view model.

Typically, the template binding mechanism is used when the HTML table with rows or unordered or ordered lists need to be generated dynamically based upon the data received from the external source like WEB API or WCF Services.

Gregor Suttie introduces KnockoutJS, a JavaScript library that bring tons of richness to your ASP.NET MVC web application with features like ‘Declarative Bindings’, ‘Dependency Tracking’, ‘Templating’
and ‘Observables’.

I recently started using QUnit for unit testing JS code and I’m really impressed with it. I’m sure Jasmine framework is equally good, but I picked up QUnit because none of the languages/frameworks I have learned so far have the letter ‘Q’ in them!!

So I have a simple page which is used to add two numbers and show the sum as a text.