The Ajax interface has proved an interesting animal. Many people trace asynchronous JavaScript use back to Microsoft’s early Outlook Web clients, but it was not promoted by Microsoft much until open-source AJAX [for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML] as used by Google became popular about three years ago. Then, Microsoft embraced it wholeheartedly, creating its own ASP.NET Ajax version of AJAX, and saving some trouble for its developer legions. Yet, third parties still have a role to play in moving ASP.NET Ajax forward, as SearchWinDevelopment.com’s Vendor roundtable series can attest.

ASP.NET Ajax Roundtable Part 1 - Browser Compatibility

ASP.NET Ajax Roundtable Part 2 - Resurgence in JavaScript

ASP.NET Ajax Roundtable Part 3 - Open Source

The USENIX conference is a technical undertaking dedicated to all things UNIX and some things Linux. Actually, it is nothing less than the premier event for system programmers.

Despite the UNIX-leanings, USENIX in recent years has featured some Microsoft experts, usually from the company’s research arm.  This year, at USENIX in Boston, Benjamin Livshits and Weidong Cui of Microsoft Research shared a view on the company’s work on JavaScript worms.

In the paper they proposed Spectator automatic detection and containment solution for JavaScript worms. . The Spectator software examines the traffic between a Web application and its users, looking for long propagation chains associated with worms.

Richard Campbell and Kent Alstad of Strangeloop recently presented strategies to improve scaling in the ASP.NET environment. They look at some performance forumlae, and look at the challenging issues in measuring each performance element.

“The ASP.NET techniques that work effectively for 10,000 simultaneous users aren’t as effective with 100,000 users, and the rules change again with 1 million users,” they write in an MSDN article.

Among the many tips they impart: Always test your caching code for these complex scenarios.

A whole new thing called ‘Web 2.0′ has arisen along with the AJAX phoenix. AJAX can improve responsiveness of networked applications by getting the client to do more work. But the first request from and the first download to the client-side cache can incur a dramatic performance hit.

Microsoft Research boffins have been cogitating on this, and have produce a PDF paper discussing Doloto, a system that analyzes application workloads and automatically performs code splitting of existing large Web 2.0 applications.

Since code download is interleaved with application execution, users can start interacting with the Web application much sooner, without waiting for the code that implements extra, unused features, using the Doloto framework, the team writes.

Microsoft has released the Silverlight 2.0 lab so you can program this innovative technology while working in a safe, supportive environment. Some of the labs include: Basic Concepts, Concepts in building Connected Applications, Building Reusable Controls, Exploring the Integration between Silverlight and its browser host, and Dynamic Animation. All tutorials need Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Runtime, Visual Studio 2008 Tools and Silverlight 2 Beta 1 SDK installed.

You can also find out about new Silverlight Essential Training with how to add video, animations, and interactive features such as drag-and-drop functionality.