Tuesday, May 26, 2009

JavaScript Finally Gets Red Carpet Treatment

Visual Studio 2010 – you complete me.

In addition to the well advertised javascript intellisense (no longer a meager add in) and jQuery integration, I read something today that is further evidence  of JavaScript’s “here to stay (so you better get on board)” status: The JavaScript profiling features built in to Visual Studio 2010. Read more about it here on the VS Profiler Team Blog:  http://blogs.msdn.com/profiler/archive/2009/04/21/website-performance-talk-at-mix09.aspx

Can’t wait for Visual Studio 2010? You can get the predecessor to this feature today in the form of the VS 2008 AJAX Profiling Extensions. Soma Somasegar’s blog has a good post on this: http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/04/29/vs2008-ajax-profiling-extensions.aspx

What is cool is that there are no client requirements for all of this – JavaScript is modified on the fly from the server to include instrumentation that captures the performance data. This may sound a little redundant if you are familiar with the profiling features built in to the latest browsers/add-on’s, like IE8’s profiler or FireBug. These are great tools, but I think making a browser-independent ‘tool’ is almost more useful, since in general if you are using IE8 or FireFox with FireBug installed, you are probably NOT experiencing performance problems! I see a particular value here in determining the delta between antique browsers and those who stay reasonably current with technology. That is another way of saying this will help U.S. gov’ment users still using IE6, as most of them still are.

I may experiment with this in the near future and post my results. If there’s time.

No comments:

Post a Comment

 
© I caught you a delicious bass.
Back to top