Tuesday, October 10, 2006

JSON - The bottom sponge in the cake

You can hardly have missed the explosion of "Web 2.0" sites, and the excitement around AJAX and in the .Net community, ATLAS.

However, when using the wonderfully simple UpdatePanel from ATLAS, it's actually the markup that's being sent over the wire as part of an asynchronous call.

It's been at the periphery of my consiousness for a while, but I came across a link to Jayrock today that makes me mindfull of optimising the out-of-band communications by using something a bit more clever than markup deltas.

Jayrock is a framework for JSON and JSON-RPC for .NET - it makes exposing services to JSON-RPC as easy as creating an HTTPHandler.

And it's open source too!

Strong names and Assembly loading

The MSDN Flash newsletter that hit my inbox today contained a number of interesting things, but what most piqued my interest was a link to a very good article on VSJ.

Titled Strength in naming, it provides a very good overview of how strong names are used to sign assemblies, which in turn allows them to be inserted into the GAC.

In it, Ian Stevenson provides a very nice little flow-chart of the assembly loading process - the article is worth a read just for that.