January 2007 is fast going down as the month of key releases.

Today is no different as we see the RTM (final) version of Microsoft ASP.Net Ajax 1.0. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that I have been using the CTP’s and Beta’s since last April and I have seen many improvements. The 1.0 final release promises to be a fundamental release that will see many ASP.Net applications update to include more AJAX capabilities as development departments realize just how easy it is with ASP.Net Ajax.

I’m still not convinced that the bugs are all out, but I do think that you should invest some of your time downloading and using this if only for the ease of hooking up Web services and server-side code to your client-side scripts etc…
ASp.Net Ajax 1.0 allows you to use your existing investment in Visual Studio 2005 to build richer more client friendly ASP.Net applications with less effort. And if that wasn’t enough then make note: it’s from Microsoft and it’s free…

There is also a control toolkit containing over 30 controls for you to make use of including Accordion, AutoComplete, Masked Edit, Tabs. This part is a community shared-source project and there is plenty of documentation, samples and an SDK so you can create your own controls, why not have a go and submit them for inclusion in the toolkit’s future releases.

Then if you are still feeling adventurous you could download the ASP.Net Ajax Futures January CTP which extends the Core ASp.Net Ajax 1.0 platform with extra stuff not yet in the released version. If you used the CTP versions of ASP.Net Ajax then you will possibly need this as some stuff didn’t make it into the release version for one reason or another and you may find your projects break without it.

When I blogged about the new Milestone 8 inclusions for Aptana the other day I hadn’t noticed that the Automatic update panel now gives a lot more information regarding the update. (maybe it did this before and I wasn’t paying attention?) for example build 0.2.8.13195 has 80 features added and 38 bugs fixed I am currently on build 0.2.8.13109. Scrolling down the Auto update window I get a categorised list of the bugs fixed in each area so I can easily see if an issue I am seeing is fixed. I like this form of updating as I can see clearly whether or not I want to take this build, what improvements I am getting and I generally feel much more comfortable about it.

I think Microsoft could learn from this, as well as many other big name brands. Often it feels like you have to squeeze blood from stone in order to see just what changes have been made to your system. Visual Studio 2005 SP1 is my case in point. It was only after much bugging and moaning that information slowly trickled through. I am very grateful to those who did release the information, but I recon we deserve to have it much sooner.

Hats off to the Aptana dev team this whole development process is great, you are a good example to us all.

Chris Pirillo has recently posted a cool list of his top 10 Tweaks, Tips and Tricks for windows Vista. There’s some great stuff in there, including a great tip to get multiple timezones reporting from your taskbar clock. Handy if you are a business user or have friends or family living in another time zone and you want to be sure you are about to wake them up when you call!

He’s also got some sound advice if you are considering upgrading your Windows XP installation to Vista.

January 2007 is starting to be the begning of what I hope is a very exciting year for web developers. We’ve recently seen the release of Prototype 1.5 and the superb new site that goes with it, Aptana updates that include an embeded Firefox browser, and now we have the final release of Script.aculo.us 1.7 as well…

On the heels of the recent release galore here’s one more:

script.aculo.us 1.7 is final!download away!

So what’s new? Basically, the new stuff is all about Effect.Morph and all the goodness you can read about here and here.

Of course, we’re on Prototype 1.5 final now.

As always, get the fine print from the CHANGELOG.

Now, if script.aculo.us only had an API documentation like the new one for Prototype. The wiki is great, but a more complete, up-to-date and coherent resource would be even better. Well, let’s see about that…

Of course thanks to the contributors. And yeah, I know that there are quite a bunch of tickets and patches pending-let’s get this one out first and get all that love in the next version.

NOTE: This is not the version included in Rails 1.2.1.-. You can use this version with Rails 1.2.1, just download and overwrite the files provided by Rails! The next Rails release will include this, of course.

[Via mir.aculo.us - Home]

Is it just me or does Aptana become more of a killer app every day?

For Aptana users who are have updated to the “nightly” Milestone 8 release, an embedded XUL-based Firefox browser is now available as an additional option to preview your HTML pages. (Currently, this feature is only available to Windows and Linux users; however, it will be available to Mac users soon.)

To try out the new Firefox browser option, update to at least the “nightly” build 0.2.8.13195 (see Changing your update version type of Aptana to update to “nightly”), and follow the instructions below:

Embedded Firefox XUL Support Instructions

Please report any issues that you find either on the Aptana Forums or in Trac.

[Via Aptana :: Weblog]

I wanted to put out a post to apologise to the firefox users who read my blog.  I too am a firefox user and am currently running Firefox 2.  Over the past few months i’ve been running this blog I have noticed a couple of strange things that appear to affect the Firefox browser only.

Firstly there are the missing images in the link panels on the right side of the blog —–>

Firefox users may only see the text links, a good advertisement for accessibility ;-)  although i havea way to go before I can call this blog truly accessible.

The second thing is a recent development due to a free ugrade all Wordpress users got in the new year.  Hovering over links on the page should produce a pop-up preview of the page I’ve linked to, unfortunately Firefox doesn’t seem to handle this well at all either.  The pop-up appears but it looks ugly and doesn’t show the preview.

I have a theory that I am going to try out when I get a chance to look at this properly in the next couple of days.  I think it has something to do with remote images maybe.

I’d be interested to hear if you have had any problems using firefox to view my blog and what issues, if any, that you have seen.

Thanks all!

I have head of some strange photography projects before but I think this one is the strangest…

The textures could be really useful for photoshop though and tht instantly makes it a work of pure genious!
Thanks to the Think Vitamin Newsfeed for the link.

I blogged a while back about the fantastic new Firebug release that has thron down the gauntlet to the IE developer toolbar folks who appear to have thrown out a very poor release recently.  Firebug is a very powerful and rich debugging tool and to get the most out of it you’ll need some kind of tutorial.

Luckily a tutorial has just been released and it looks good too.  The Ajaxian Blog has a good description and links to the article in this post.

The fantastic Prototype JavaScript library has been updated to version 1.5 and has a shiny new website and documentation to go with it too.

the new site is clean and simple and you’ll find links to the documentation and a new discussion section that includes a mailing list and the IRC address so you can hook up with other Prototype JS users to get quick answers to any difficulties you may be having.

There is also a new contribution section which makes it easy to submit bugs or code you think could be included in the library to make it even better than it is now.

Add in a new blog and API explorer and this makes Prototype more accessible which is a good thing.

Prototype is an excellent library and with the new documentation and community centric website it’s gotten a whole lot better.

So, what are you waiting for? go and explore discover the parts of Prototype JS you never knew existed and then go create even better Ajax applications

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.