We will hold an online, free presentation showing what you can do with Gaia Ajax when building next generation web applications in a fast, lightfoot and intelligent way. Jan Blomquist will demonstrate the power of our latest 3.6 version and why abstracting away JavaScript and developing in a managed language is crucial for time-to-market.

5 winners will be chosen at random from the list of attendees. Each of them will win an annual subscription of Gaia Ajax (worth $595).

Wednesday March 10, 2010, 11:00AM (PST)
Get local time

LIDNUG event info

Direct link to Live Meeting

 

 

 

Thank you for your patience and continued belief in our product. It is our vision to bring you the finest quality for ajax development on the ASP.NET platform. The 3.6 version comes with practical innovation previously unavailable to ASP.NET developers. Hopefully it will bring "goosebumps" similar to the ones we had the first time Microsoft unveiled ASP.NET almost a decade ago. 

"3.6 is backwards compatible and introduces a paradigm shift called adaptive rendering"

Links and downloads

• Click here to download Gaia Ajax 3.6 "alpha"
  Exe with Visual Studio Integration 30 day trial
  
  
• Click here to download Gaia Ajax 3.6 "alpha" - Tar.gz binaries + source - for open source projects
• Click here to download Gaia Ajax 3.6 "alpha" commercial (requires subscription) 
  

Highlights from the Gaia Ajax 3.6 release

1. Adaptive Rendering
Adaptive Rendering is a mind-blowing concept that enables dynamic insertion, removal, moving and replacement of individual controls. The concept has far reaching implications and is the breakthrough technology that will make you hunger for Gaia as the building blocks for your UI layer

• Click here for a sample that demonstrates dynamic inserts and removals of controls and compare it to the usage of traditional partial rendering
• Click here for a sample of the chess game featuring dynamic control moves
• Click here for a sample of our "PageFlakes" sample that also features dynamic moves
• Click here to check out a sample that demonstrates all features of adaptive rendering, including control replacements via databinding

Jan Blomquist has written an extensive review of Adaptive Rendering on his personal blog.

2. Ajax GridView
The Gaia Ajax GridView is a premier example of adaptive rendering as it enables the worlds most advanced GridView for ASP.NET without much code at all. The GridView still supports all the operations like ( filtering, sorting, selection, deletions, updates, etc ) and it's all ajaxified thanks to adaptive rendering.  

• Click here for a sample that demonstrates the Gaia Ajax GridView in action

3. 100++ new Samples!
In the package you will find a total of 128 samples ranging from minimalistic ones to extensive, almost full applications in themselves. This is all packaged into a new samples framework that simplifies navigation, code view, VB.NET code availability, etc. 

Note: The samples are now utilizing the WAP project type

• Click here to go directly to the samples

More...

Gaia Ajax is a powerful web platform for both complex enterprise applications and fast-up-and-running web sites. In many ways Gaia Ajax completes what many developers are missing on the ASP.NET platform both in regards to how easy it should be to create a rich and responsive web experience, but also how to unleash the highest productivity in your daily development. Our customers say they increase their productivity by 30-60% when developing with Gaia compared to other approaches towards web development.

We're happy to announce two brand new courses this year. Based on the feedback we have received, we have split the courses into two different levels: Introduction to Gaia Ajax and Advanced Ajax development with Gaia Ajax. Each course goes over two days.

28-29th of September

Introduction to Gaia Ajax

Agenda

• Important ASP.NET semantics
• Get to know the Gaia Server Controls
• Introduction to the brand new Gaia Ajax GridView (new in 3.6!)
• Unleash your productivity with Aspects in Gaia
• Effect library
• Skinning Gaia
• Data management with Gaia
• Debugging, error handling and security with Gaia 

5-6th of October

Advanced Ajax development with Gaia Ajax

Agenda

• What's new in Gaia Ajax 3.6?
• Become a Gaia GridView pro! (New in 3.6)
• Introduction to Dynamic Inserts (New in 3.6)
• Advanced Aspects and Effects development
• Build your own extension controls
• Build your own aspects
• Advanced web application architecture - best practices with Gaia and ASP.NET 

 

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Registration: Use our contact form with number of participants and which course you'd like to attend.

Instructor: Jan Blomquist (MVP)

Target Audience: .NET Developers

Max Participants: 12

Language: English

Price: EUR 1100*
Incl.lunch. excl.hotel
* Excluding 25% VAT for Norwegian participants

Early Bird Extended
Save EUR 100 when reserving your seat before 20th of September 10th of September

Can you close your eyes and reel off the 12 points to better code. Do you have the Joel's test fresh in mind? The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code is extremly important for all software developers. In this blog we will cover the three first rules and how we have solved this in Gaiaware.

1. Do you use source control?
2. Can you make a build in one step?
3. Do you make daily builds?

Do you use source control?

We couldn't imagine a life without source control. In fact several studies show that firms without a good source control system cannot survive (ref; http://www.stevemcconnell.com/rd.htm ). For all software development at Gaiaware we are currently using Subversion.

Because we also truly believe in open development of our library we have decided to publish the SVN repositories for public access. That means you can just add Gaia Ajax source directly to your solution (via externals ) and benefit from the rapid development of Gaia Ajax

Here's the urls for the repositories of Gaia Ajax

• Gaia Ajax Core Library - svn://svn.gaiaware.net/repos/gaia-ajax/trunk
• Gaia Ajax Samples - svn://svn.gaiaware.net/repos/gaia-ajax-samples/trunk
• Gaia Ajax Skins - svn://svn.gaiaware.net/repos/gaia-ajax-skins/trunk

Tagged versions of Gaia Ajax (Released and archived)

• svn://svn.gaiaware.net/repos/gaia-ajax/tags

Can you make a build in one step?

Yes we can. We've built a customized build system that suits Gaia Ajax just perfectly. It's written in Ruby and uses Rake and COM interop to work with Visual Studio.NET. With Ruby's duck typing it's easy to read project properties, project items and different configuration settings. The build itself is also done with VS.NET using Ruby.

Do you make daily builds?

We've been making daily/nightly builds of Gaia Ajax for quite some time now and now we've finally decided to make them public.

The opening of the source and publishing of nightly builds allow you to post a bug/issue and have it fixed that very same day. Then you will have access to the bits within the next working day (even sooner if required). It should also be easy to pickup new bits that fit the requirements of your development. We will still post release dates for official relases which you can align with your project.

• Nightly builds of the Commercial version
• Nightly builds of the GPL version
• Nightly builds of the Trial version

Nightly builds of the commerical package is available for commercialusers. If you have an active subscription just click on the nightlybuilds link to access the nightly builds.

Update 2009-06-29: You can test our nightly build samples here

Summary

Don't cheat when it comes to Joel's 12 steps to better code. Stability and base quality is key. What good does a piece of code do if it simply doesn't work. Source control and automated builds are just some the absolute requirements to achieve higher code quality. The importance of this was also pointed out in this blog post ->  ( Principles of UI architecture for libraries )

Enjoy the builds!  

World renown book author and architect Dino Esposito paid Gaiaware a visit last week for technical discussions and to have evening presentations for the local Developer forum. It's no secret that Dino is particular fond of the Gaia Ajax toolkit.

"In the past few years, so many times I changed my mind on the most effective way to get AJAX in ASP.NET. In the end, it has to be a way that doesn’t force you away from the programming model of ASP.NET and offers new and effective tools for the new AJAX challenges. Gaiaware just does it. " - Dino
More...

In this article we shall discuss some of the core tenets when creating UI frameworks/libraries and how these principles guides us in the development of Gaia. Gaia is an Ajax library for the ASP.NET platform. It takes a philosophically radical different approach than it's platform counterparts, including Microsoft's own ASP.NET Ajax framework.

Many of the assertions here applies just as much to general software development as it does to framework development. It is however necessary with a stronger emphasis on a number of principles since you are now in the sphere of building software for other programmers and not general purpose end user applications. This leads us to one of the first postulates. The developer is the customer.

# The Developer Is The Customer

This gives us a little edge, because we are ourselves in fact developers. We know perfectly well how we want the product to be like. Unfortunately this statement does not always hold true. If it did, then all software libraries would be perfect which they are not. Another pitfall is not keeping your hands dirty, gradually moving away from day to day development work into abstract philosophical reflections in your ivory tower. Suddenly your product doesn't solve the developers itches anymore and it cannot survive.

The derived conclusion is to keep a close customer feedback loop with a focus on customer driven development. Including transparent tracking facilities, daily build system with unit tests and early/often releases. You must listen to the [voice of the customer].

This first postulate is mostly connected with the art of quality, but is deemed so important that leaving it out would make this work look poorer. Quality in your craft extends beyond the product itself and into the whole organization. The product is often just a manifestation of the quality.

Now that we know who the customer is, what can we do for him? This gives us the second postulate. More...