Programming Articles

This article continues my series on how to enhance the user experience (UX) of your MVC applications, and how to make them faster. In the first three articles, entitled Enhance Your MVC Applications Using JavaScript and jQuery: Part 1, 2, and 3, you learned about the starting MVC application that was coded using all server-side C#. You then added JavaScript and jQuery to avoid post-backs and enhance the UX in various ways. If you haven't already read these articles, I highly recommend that you read them to learn about the application you're enhancing in this series of articles. In this article, you continue learning how to add more Ajax to your MVC application to further speed up your Web pages.

In this article I am continuing my series on how to enhance the user experience (UX) of your MVC applications, and how to make them faster. In this article you are going to build Web API calls you can call from the application to avoid post-backs. You are going to add calls to add, update and delete shopping cart information. In addition, you are going to learn to work with dependent drop-down lists to also avoid post-backs. Finally, you learn to use jQuery auto-complete instead of a drop-down list to provide more flexibility to your user.

In this article, I'm continuing my series on how to enhance the user experience (UX) of your MVC applications, and how to make them faster. You're going to continue to add additional client-side code to the MVC application to further enhance the UX as you work your way through this article. You'll learn to expand search areas after the user performs a search, hide certain HTML elements when printing a Web page, and create custom jQuery validation rules to enforce business rules on the client-side.

In this first of a multi-part article series, I'm presenting an MVC application written with all server-side code to which you are going to add client-side code to make the user experience better and to make the application more efficient. Some of the things you'll learn in this article display a 'Please Wait' message for any long operations, complete with a spinner from Font Awesome. You're going to disable all buttons and links, and gray the background, while long operations take place so the user can't accidentally click on something else. You're going to learn how to use Bootstrap events to toggle collapsible areas so only one is open at a time. In addition, you'll learn to use the setInterval() function to display a countdown until the user's shopping cart is cleared.

In my last article (CODE Magazine, November/December 2015), I showed you how to manipulate data in an HTML table using only JavaScript and jQuery. There were no post-backs, so the data didn't go anywhere. In this article, you'll use the same HTML and jQuery, but add calls to a Web API to retrieve and modify product data. It isn't necessary to go back and read the previous article; this article presents all of the HTML and the calls to work client-side and add the server-side code as well. I'll be using Visual Studio and .NET to build the Web API service, but the client-side coding is generic and can call a Web API built in any language or platform.

As developers, we're always asked to do more for our users. They want their Web pages faster, smaller, and with more features. This means that you have to start working more in JavaScript and jQuery on the client-side. By doing more client-side coding, you reduce post-backs to the server, thereby increasing performance. In this first article of a series on working within HTML and the Web API, I'll show you how to add, edit, and delete data in an HTML table using JavaScript and jQuery, but no post-backs. In subsequent articles, you'll learn how to take that data and use the Web API to retrieve and modify this data.

Many businesses have invested thousands of man-hours into ASP.NET Web Forms. These same businesses don't have time to rewrite their systems using the latest Web technologies, such as MVC. However, with just a little reworking of your Web Forms, you can still get all the advantages of modern Web techniques, such as HTML 5, CSS 3, Bootstrap, and jQuery. Lately, I've been assisting many clients as they upgrade their Web Forms applications to take advantage of Bootstrap, jQuery, JavaScript, Friendly URLs, and many other modern Web application techniques.

It seems like everywhere you read, everyone is talking about using ASP.NET MVC to create mobile Web applications. But what about programmers still working in Web Forms? We want our projects done using the latest techniques, we want to build mobile Web apps, and we want to use jQuery and Bootstrap, too.

If you are like many developers, you are using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to provide services to Windows Forms, WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET and possibly Windows 8 Store applications. Now your boss is asking you to develop some mobile applications using HTML 5 and jQuery. You know you can reuse many of your WCF services, but you are having trouble calling them from jQuery without breaking your existing applications. In this article, I will walk you through the steps for taking a sample WCF service from working just for .NET applications to working with jQuery as well. Don't worry, your existing applications will still work with the changes you are going to make.