Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta

Microsoft published Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta on 03-Dec-2010. To download click here.

jQuery 1.4.4 Released

The fourth minor release of jQuery 1.4 is now available — less than one month after 1.4.3 was released.

Unsurprisingly, version 1.4.4 is primarily a set of bug fixes following feedback from the user community. There is only one new feature…

 

jQuery.fadeToggle()

The .fadeToggle() method provides fade-in and fade-out animation. If an element is visible, it’s opacity is reduced and, when it reaches zero, the display property is set to none so the element disappears from the page layout.

Calling .fadeToggle() on an invisible element (where display:none is set) makes the item visible and fades it back in.

 

Major bug fixes

If you’ve been struggling to make your code work, you’ll be pleased to know that the following issues have been fixed:

• The .width() and .height() of hidden elements are reported correctly (in some situations, previous versions would return negative values). This is likely to be the cause of most 1.4.3 to 1.4.4 update compatibility issues.
• Host and protocol names are now compared case-insensitively when determining whether an Ajax request is local or remote.
• Computed CSS for elements now returns “auto” consistently rather than an empty string.
• A function bound to the document ready event will now fire once (it was firing twice).
• The .removeData() failure has been fixed.
• The attribute not equals selector ([foo!=bar]) now works in Firefox.
• Child (>), next sibling (+), and previous sibling (~) selectors now work when combined with pseudo-selectors (such as :last).
• .show() will not fail if .hide() was initially called on a hidden element.

Links

Grab jQuery 1.4.4 from:

• Uncompressed version (179kB) –
  http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.4.js
• Minified version (26kB gzipped / 76kB non-gzipped) –
  http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.4.min.js
• Microsoft CDN –
  http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js
• jQuery 1.4.4 documentation –
  http://api.jquery.com/category/version/1.4.4/

Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta

THE SIMPLEST WAY TO BUILD BUSINESS APPLICATIONS FOR DESKTOP AND CLOUD.
Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta helps you solve specific business needs by enabling you to quickly create professional-quality business applications, regardless of your development skills. LightSwitch is a new addition to the Visual Studio family. Visit this page often to learn more about this exciting product.
Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta will be available on August 23.
You can find introduction to LightSwitch video here.

Microsoft Introduces IIS Express

Developers today build and test ASP.NET sites and applications using one of two web-servers:

• The ASP.NET Development Server that comes built-into Visual Studio
• The IIS Web Server that comes built-into Windows

Both of the above options have their pros and cons, and many ASP.NET developers have told us: “I wish I could have the ease of use of the ASP.NET Development Server, but still have all the power and features of IIS”.  Today I’m happy to announce a new, free option that we are enabling – IIS Express - that combines the best characteristics of both, and which will make it easier to build and run ASP.NET sites and applications.
IIS Express will work with VS 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express, will run on Windows XP and higher systems, does not require an administrator account, and does not require any code changes to use.  You will be able to take advantage of it with all types of ASP.NET applications, and it enables you to develop using a full IIS 7.x feature-set.

How Things Work Today

Before I get into the details of IIS Express, let’s first quickly review how the ASP.NET Development Server and IIS options work today.

ASP.NET Development Server

Visual Studio’s built-in ASP.NET Development Server (also known as “Cassini”) has the benefit of being light-weight and easy to quickly run.  It doesn’t listen on remote ports (which makes it easier to get approved for many corporate security environments), works even when you are running under a non-administrator account, and doesn’t require a separate installation step.

The fact that it is so easy to get running is a huge positive of it – and the reason it is the default web-server used by ASP.NET projects in Visual Studio when you press F5 to run them:

The downside with the ASP.NET Developer Server, though, is that it does not support a full set of web-server features.  For example, it doesn’t support SSL, URL Rewriting Rules (like the SEO URL Rewrite Rules I blogged about here), Custom Security Settings, and other richer features now offered with IIS 7.

IIS Web Server

IIS is the other option developers use when running and testing their applications with Visual Studio.  You can configure a web project within Visual Studio to use IIS by right-clicking on the project and pulling up its properties (and then by clicking on the “Web” tab within the properties window)":

Using IIS as your development server allows you to take full advantage of all web-server features (SSL, URL Rewrite Rules, etc).  IIS is a full-fledged web-server – which means you’ll get an experience closer to what it will work like when you deploy the application on a production server.

The downside with using the IIS option today, though, is that some companies don’t allow full web-servers to be installed on developer machines. IIS also requires administrator account access to setup and debug projects.  Different versions of Windows also support different versions of IIS.  For example, if you are running on Windows XP you have to use the IIS 5.1 web-server that comes with it – which doesn’t support all the new features of IIS 7.x.  Configuring a web project within VS to use IIS also requires some extra installation and configuration steps.

IIS Express – The Best of Both Options

We have been working on a new flavor of IIS 7.x that is optimized for developer scenarios that we are calling “IIS Express”. We think it combines the ease of use of the ASP.NET Web Server with the full power of IIS.  Specifically:

• It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 10Mb download and a super quick install)
• It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio
• It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, Media Support, and all other IIS 7.x modules
• It supports and enables the same extensibility model and web.config file settings that IIS 7.x support
• It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS web server as well as the ASP.NET Development Server (they do not conflict at all)
• It works on Windows XP and higher operating systems – giving you a full IIS 7.x developer feature-set on all OS platforms

IIS Express (like the ASP.NET Development Server) can be quickly launched to run a site from a directory on disk.  It does not require any registration/configuration steps. This makes it really easy to launch and run for development scenarios.

VS 2010 Integration

We are enabling IIS Express so that it can be easily used with Visual Studio 2010. You’ll be able to configure VS 2010 to use it instead of the ASP.NET Web Server as the default web-server on ASP.NET Projects.  Like the ASP.NET Development Server today, you won’t need to register a site or virtual directory to use IIS Express. It will support the same usage-model as the ASP.NET Development Server today – just with more feature support.

When you press F5 to run an ASP.NET project, Visual Studio can automatically launch IIS Express and use it to run/debug the application (no extra configuration required).  Like the ASP.NET Web Server, IIS Express will show up in your task-bar tray when running:

You can right-click and click “exit” on the icon above to quickly shutdown IIS Express.  You can also right-click and pull up a list of all sites running with it, as well as the directory location and .NET versions they are running under:

Two cool things to notice above:

1) The “Test Site” we are running, as well as IIS Express itself, live under the c:\users\[username] folder on disk. This enables non-administrator usage of IIS Express and sites – and enables a bunch of scenarios not possible with the full IIS today (including the ability to run IIS Express in both a locked-down enterprise environment as well as a locked-down school shared computer environment).

2) The “Test Site” we are running above using IIS Express supports both HTTP and HTTPS access.  IIS Express automatically installs a “self-signed certificate” and enables URL ACLs and SSL Certificates for ports so that developers (running as non-administrators on a machine) can use SSL without needing to elevate their accounts or setup any additional configuration.  This enables you to configure secure pages within your applications (like Logon forms) for SSL and run/test them at development time just like they’ll work on your real web-server.

IIS 7.x Feature Set

IIS Express is as easy to run and use as the ASP.NET Web Server you are familiar with today.  But because IIS Express is based on the IIS 7x codebase, you have a full web-server feature-set that you can use.  This means you can build and run your applications just they’ll work on a real production web-server.  In addition to scenarios like SSL, you can take advantage of the IIS 7.x URL Rewriter module, Media Extensions, Dynamic Compression, Advanced Logging, Custom Security and other rich modules now available.

In addition to supporting ASP.NET, IIS Express also supports Classic ASP and other file-types and extensions supported by IIS – which also makes it ideal for sites that combine a variety of different technologies.

Summary

IIS Express makes it even easier to build, run and test web applications.  It works with all versions of ASP.NET and supports all ASP.NET application types (including obviously ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC applications).  Best of all – you do not need to change any code to take advantage of it.  You’ll be able to optionally use it with all your current projects today.

Microsoft WebMatrix

• IIS Developer Express: A lightweight web-server that is simple to setup, free, works with all versions of Windows, and is compatible with the full IIS 7.5.

• SQL Server Compact Edition: A lightweight file-based database that is simple to setup, free, can be embedded within your ASP.NET applications, supports low-cost hosting environments, and enables databases to be optionally migrated to SQL Server.

• ASP.NET “Razor”: A new view-engine option for ASP.NET that enables a code-focused templating syntax optimized around HTML generation.  You can use “Razor” to easily embed VB or C# within HTML.  It’s syntax is easy to write, simple to learn, and works with any text editor.

Microsoft introduces a new lightweight web development tool that also integrates the above technologies, and makes it even easier for people to get started with web development using ASP.NET.  This tool is free, provides core coding and database support, integrates with an open source web application gallery, and includes support to easily publish/deploy sites and applications to web hosting providers.

Microsoft calling this new tool WebMatrix, and the first preview beta of it is now available for download.

What is in WebMatrix?

WebMatrix is a 15MB download (50MB if you don’t have .NET 4 installed) and is quick to install.

The 15MB download includes a lightweight development tool, IIS Express, SQL Compact Edition, and a set of ASP.NET extensions that enable you to build standalone ASP.NET Pages using the new Razor syntax, as well as a set of easy to use database and HTML helpers for performing common web-tasks.  WebMatrix can be installed side-by-side with Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express.

Note: Razor support within ASP.NET MVC applications is not included in this first beta of WebMatrix – it will instead show up later this month in a separate ASP.NET MVC Preview - which will also include Visual Studio tooling support for it.

For more information please visit http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/07/06/introducing-webmatrix.aspx

Pinning Projects and Solutions with Visual Studio 2010

Scott Guthrie did a blog post that covers a very small, but still useful, feature of VS 2010 – the ability to “pin” projects and solutions to both the Windows 7 taskbar as well VS 2010 Start Page.

http://bit.ly/cfeIRC

Creating MVC web applications in F#

Here is the nice blog by Tomas Petricek on developing MVC web applications in F# using ASP.NET. http://tomasp.net/blog/fsharp-mvc-web.aspx

jQuery UI 1.8.1 Released

The first maintenance release for jQuery UI 1.8 is out. This update brings a bunch of fixes to Autocomplete and a few fixes to other plugins. For the full list of changes, see the changelog. You can download it here:

Download

File Downloads

• Development Bundle: http://jquery-ui.googlecode.com/files/jquery-ui-1.8.1.zip
• Themes Package: http://jquery-ui.googlecode.com/files/jquery-ui-themes-1.8.1.zip

Google Ajax Libraries API (CDN)

• Uncompressed: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.1/jquery-ui.js

Developing your Data Access Layer with ADO.NET Entity Framework 4

Please visit http://tinyurl.com/37jqqfx for an excellent article by Amirthalingam Prasanna on developing data access layer with ADO.NET entity framework 4.0

Top 10 reasons to go for Visual Studio 2010

Quickly interpret your code: The new code editor makes it easy to zoom in on your code, highlight method references, and overlay powerful features.

Create rich user experiences: Use new visual designers for Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight™ to target Windows® 7 and the Web.

Customize Visual Studio to fit your style: Key IDE enhancements–including support for multiple monitors and improved readability–that make the familiar environment even more productive.

Use your existing skills: SharePoint development, including tooling for Web Parts, Lists, Workflows, Events and more, bring great new customized collaboration tools to your company.

MSDN subscriptions: With Visual Studio 2010 MSDN subscriptions, you have access to specified servers and clients for development and test purposes, in addition to all the other MSDN subscription benefits such as support resources, Windows® Azure™ compute hours, learning tools, and high quality information resources.

Database Development Made Easy (Premium): Apply the same life-cycle tools to your database code and your application code. This includes offline development of database schema, use of source code control to persist versioned schema information, participation in Agile methodologies and use of the associated work items.

Identify Test Impact from Code Changes (Premium): Test Impact Analysis provides a list of recommended tests to run after code changes are made. Developers know immediately which tests are impacted by a given change and testers know which tests to run to verify a given build.

Understand Existing Architectures (Ultimate): The Architecture Explorer and UML sequence diagrams help you explore and understand your existing code assets and their inter-dependencies.

IntelliTrace™ Eliminates ‘No Repro’ (Ultimate): Easily step through code that was previously executed on the same or another machine in order to identify what happened during the code execution and significantly cut down on time spent reproducing a bug.

Prototype Ideas Quickly (Ultimate): With Sketch Flow in Expression Studio you can quickly deliver a functioning prototype that looks and feels like handwritten mock-ups.

6 Cool Features of Visual Studio 2010

1 - Generating Sequence Diagrams To Inspect And Document control flow

Another cool feature in Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to generate Sequence diagrams. You may right click inside a method and select “Generate the sequence diagram”  from the pop up menu, to generate the diagram. In this example, you may see that my SubmitOrder method in OrderViewModel class is instantiating an OrderServiceClient, to call AddOrderAsync method inside the same.

2 - Architecture Explorer

A cool addition in VS2010 is the Architecture Explorer (Click View->Architecture Explorer). The Architecture Explorer will provide you a very friendly interface to browse through and navigate to your solution assets. You can right click on an item (Namespace, Class Name, or Class Member etc) and select ‘View Content’ to navigate to the definition as well.

Also, you can export the selected items to a graph document from the Architecture explorer. You can do this by selecting the members, and clicking the ‘Create new graph document’ button (in top left corner) of the Architecture Explorer. Let me export some of the members in my OrderViewModel class, and have a look at the generated graph. You can also use the graph document to understand your code members in a better way, to analyze circular references, un referenced nodes etc (see the image below.)

3 – Code Navigators

Visual Studio 2010 has a number of useful code navigators. A simple yet useful code navigation/identification feature is ‘Highlight Reference’ - you can double click on any member to view the references highlighted, and can navigate across references using the Ctrl + Shift + Up/Down arrows.

Another cool code navigator is the ‘Navigate To’ window. You can use ‘Navigate To’ to search code members quickly when you work with the editor.

You can bring up the “Navigate To” window using the shortcut Ctrl , (press Ctrl and comma). You can search by any term, and you can even search using camel case. See that I’m searching for ‘OV’, to get a list of all code members following the OV convention.

Another cool code navigation feature in Visual Studio 2010 is the ‘Call Hierarchy’ window. You may right click any member to bring up the popup menu, to select ‘Find All References’ to bring up the call hierarchy window. So, next time when you change a method, you can have a look at where all you are going to impact. You can also view all overrides of your method, if you have any.

4 – Pinning Data Tips While Debugging

When you are debugging, you can pin variable values, so that they’ll be there for you to see later.

Also, you can even enter comments for a pinned data tip, so that you can view the comment later.

VS 2010 has also got a tone of other Debugger Enhancements, read about them from Scott Gu’s blog if you are interested.

5 - Consume First Development

Visual Studio is so smart that it can stub your classes, members etc on the go, when you type the code. For example, assume that you have a customer class, and you thought it should have a new method while doing something. You can just type the member name (method, property etc), rest your mouse on top of the tiny blue line under your new method to bring up the popup menu.

Click that, and you’ll see VS stubbing the method for you, as shown below. Note that VS has inferred the parameter type.

You can do that with constructors, properties, method overloads etc as well. That is super cool, especially if you are a TDD guy.

6 – Extension Manager for downloading and installing plugins

The Extension Manager in Visual Studio 2010 will allow you to download and install cool plug-ins for your VS IDE. You can bring up the extension manager window by clicking Tools->Extension Manager. Extension Manager will connect to Visual Studio 2010 online Extension library, and you can search and find cool plug-ins there.

Once installed, you may also Disable or Uninstall your plug-ins from the extensions manager.

VS 2010 Debugger Improvements (BreakPoints, DataTips, Import/Export)

Scott Guthrie did a blog post that talks about a bunch of small, but really nice, new VS 2010 debugger features: Click here to view.

• Breakpoint Labels
• Importing/Exporting Breakpoints
• Pinned DataTips
• See the Value from Last Debug Session (Great Code Editor Feature)
• Importing/Exporting Pinned DataTips

Microsoft launches Visual Studio 2010 & .Net Framework 4.0

Microsoft launched its Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4 globally, including in India on 12-Apr-2010.

Get multiple monitor support; new support for SharePoint development, including numerous templates; enhanced multi-targeting support allowing developers to target multiple versions of the .NET Framework; and experience how Visual Studio 2010 simplifies building standards-based Web applications with improved AJAX frameworks, core IntelliSense support for JavaScript, and jQuery. You can download the trial here.

"Together, these technologies simplify the entire development process, enabling developers to build new platforms and build high-quality applications," S Somasegar, Senior Vice President, Microsoft Corportion said delivering the keynote address at the TechED 2010, a technology conclave which commenced in Bangalore.

Microsoft's top 50 partners have also made available products and solutions based on its latest wave of developer technologies, he said.

Somasegar said with .NET Framework four client profile, the runtime has been decreased by over 80 per cent.

Direct Download Links of Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 Professional Trial
Visual Studio 2010 Premium Trial
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Trial
Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010
Visual Studio 2010 Express Direct

After downloading the VS 2010 ISO images you can do any of the following things

1. Burn it to blank CD/DVD using CD/DVD burning software, In Windows 7, you can ISO Burner tool.
2. Open and copy ISO image files and their contents to a local folder using extracting tools, like WinZIP, WinRAR and 7Zip.
3. Virtually mount and access ISO image as a device.

All Visual Studio 2010 TRIAL editions are free for 90 days. After 30 days, you must register the product to obtain a free key which extends the trial to an additional 60 days.

jQuery UI 1.8 adds position, button, autocomplete, new widget factory, lighter core

The final release of jQuery UI 1.8 with 5 new plugins, 1 new effect, and hundreds of bug fixes and improvements.

We’ve worked extremely hard to make jQuery UI lighter and more modular with an even more flexible and extensible core. Now it’s even easier to build your own widgets or extend ours, whether you use the jQuery UI Widget Factory, the jQuery UI CSS Framework, or both. This release is a collective effort spanning more than 9 months with contributions from hundreds of developers, designers, testers and users. We thank you for all your help and support. And we even get personal (we’ll name names!) at the end of this post.

The code, themes, demos, and documentation are now live on jqueryui.com, the jQuery UI Download Builder, ThemeRoller, and Google’s AJAX Libraries API.

Note: There are significant (and in some cases breaking) changes in this release. If you currently use or develop jQuery UI plugins be sure to consult both the Changelog andUpgrade Guide for full details on these changes and their impact.

ASP.NET MVC 2 Released

The final release of ASP.NET MVC 2 is now available for VS 2008/Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with ASP.NET 3.5.  You can download and install it from the following locations:

• Download ASP.NET MVC 2 using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer
• Download ASP.NET MVC 2 from the Download Center

ASP.NET MVC 2 Features

ASP.NET MVC 2 adds a bunch of new capabilities and features.  I’ve started a blog series about some of the new features, and will be covering them in more depth in the weeks ahead.  Some of the new features and capabilities include:

• New Strongly Typed HTML Helpers
• Enhanced Model Validation support across both server and client
• Auto-Scaffold UI Helpers with Template Customization
• Support for splitting up large applications into “Areas”
• Asynchronous Controllers support that enables long running tasks in parallel
• Support for rendering sub-sections of a page/site using Html.RenderAction
• Lots of new helper functions, utilities, and API enhancements
• Improved Visual Studio tooling support

You can learn more about these features in the “What’s New in ASP.NET MVC 2” document on the www.asp.net/mvc web-site.

Visual Studio 2010 RC Updates

Microsoft released VS 2010 RC patches to fix following issues

• Patch that fixes crashes with Tooltip invocation and when hovering over identifiers
• Patch that fixes issues with the Web Forms designer not correctly adding controls to the auto-generated designer files
• Common Cause of Intellisense and IDE sluggishness on Windows XP, Vista, Win Server 2003/2008 systems
• Improved Text Rendering with WPF 4 and VS 2010

jQuery 1.4.2 released

jQuery 1.4.2 is out on February 19th, 2010. This is the second minor release on top of jQuery 1.4, fixing some outstanding bugs from the 1.4 release and landing some nice improvements. There were a total of 40 tickets closed in this minor release.

In this release we’ve added two new methods: .delegate() and .undelegate(). These methods serve as complements to the existing .live() and .die() methods in jQuery. They simplify the process of watching for specific events from a certain root within the document.

ReSharper 5 Beta 2 Released

Please click here to find more.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate

Microsoft has released Release Candidate (RC) for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 to all MSDN subscribers on February 8th 2010 and will be made available to the world on Wednesday, February 10th. The RC includes a go-live license for people who want to deploy in their production environment.

Please click here to download.

Visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd441784.aspx for release candidate walkthroughs. 

jQuery 1.4.1 Released

jQuery 1.4.1 is now out! This is the first bug fix release on top of jQuery 1.4, fixing some outstanding bugs from the 1.4 release and touching up some gaps in the API.

New Features

A full list of the API changes can be found in the 1.4.1 category on the jQuery API site.

• .live(“focus”) and .live(“blur”) now work – mapping to .live(“focusin”) and .live(“focusout”). (Documentation, Ticket)
• .live(“hover”) now exists, mapping to .live(“mouseenter mouseleave”). (Documentation, Ticket)
• It’s now possible to bind multiple event types with live. (Documentation, Ticket)
• Calling .die() (with no arguments) removes all bound live event handlers. (Documentation, Ticket)
• .height( function ) and .width( function ) now exist. (Height Documentation, Width Documentation, Ticket)
• jQuery.parseJSON has been exposed, allowing you to parse JSON strings into JavaScript objects. (Documentation, Ticket)
• jQuery.error has been exposed, to be used by plugin developers to provide informative user feedback. (Documentation, Ticket)

Bug Fixes

Core

• window.JSON can’t take an empty string

Events

• multi event bind() causes namespacing to fail

• bind() with special events causes things to get corrupted (Ticket 1, Ticket 2)

• change event broken in IE

• Unable to preventDefault on live submit

• Select change event firing on first focus

• .live() is affecting inline scripts

• Stop live click from triggering on right click

Traversing

• prev/nextUntil needs to check for non-elements

• Make sure filter/not only does it on elements

Effects

• Make sure animations only happen if speed is truthy or 0

Ajax

• ajaxError not firing on 404 for load

• if data has length breaks param

• Make sure context is set back to original in all cases

• Don’t deep extend context

• Don’t attempt to set the readyState

• Parsererror cause lost

Offset

• Make sure .offset(coords) return a jQuery set

Manipulation

• Make sure .html() is XHTML purified

• Cloned checkbox checked aren’t cloned in WebKit

• replaceWith(fn) function scope is useless

• wrapInner(fn) is inconsistent with wrapInner(html)

• .remove() not removing generic handler

• Possible memory leak with remove()/events in IE

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Launch Date Postponed

In a very small announcement by Developer Division’s Marketing and Communications Manager Rob Caron, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 is set to be officially launched April 12, 2010 and not March 22 as previously announced. However, the date for release to manufacturing (RTM) still remains unknown.

Historically, RTM for Visual Studio has been months ahead of the official launch. Visual Studio 2008 as an example was RTM November 19 2007, but officially launched February 27 2008, 3 months later.

Scott Guthrie reported late last year that Visual Studio 2010 is postponed because of performance issues found in Beta 2 and revealed plans for an intermediate release in February:

…we plan to make a Release Candidate build available in February that everyone will be able to download and test. It will be a public build and include a broad “go live” license that supports production deployment.

Taking into account that the official release date is now April 12 and the RC is in February, the date difference between the official release and the RTM is probably much closer than for previous releases of Visual Studio.

jQuery 1.4 released

Great news for jQuery lovers, jQuery 1.4 is released on 14-Jan-2010 and it has got amazing new features. Please click here to see 15 new features of jQuery you must know.

What’s New in jQuery 1.4?

jQuery is probably the most popular JavaScript framework on the web. Many developers insert the script by habit (yes W3C.org, I’m referring to you!), so the jQuery team needs to be extremely cautious when creating new releases.

The code base has been heavily restructured to reduce complexity and increase performance. There are some impressive bar charts on jquery14.com which highlight how good the optimizations are.

207 bugs have been fixed and the framework now passes 100% of all tests in IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Firefox 3.5, Safari 3.2, Safari 4, Opera 10.10, and Chrome.

There is a substantial number of new methods and two new events: focusin and focusout. These are equivalent to focus and blur, but they implement an event bubbling-like technique (focus and blur do not normally bubble)

What Will Break If You Upgrade?

The jQuery team has provided a list of the most likely problems. I suspect the following issues will cause the most confusion:

1. jQuery() returns an empty set
In previous versions of the library, running jQuery() (no arguments) returned jQuery(document). It now returns an empty set, although the jQuery().ready() event will still fire as expected.

2. Ajax requests must use valid JSON
If you’re passing JSON data in Ajax calls, you must ensure it’s not malformed.jQuery now use the browser’s native JSON.parser in preference to eval when possible.

3. jQuery.browser returns the engine version
If you’re sniffing for browsers, jQuery.browser now returns the rendering engine version rather than a specific browser type, e.g. “webkit” rather than “chrome”.

I mentioned how difficult user agent parsing had become in a previous post. The jQuery developers have reduced complexity and increased speed by simplifying the returned information.

Although jQuery still supports browser-like detection, I strongly recommend you avoid it and use feature/object detection instead.