I’ve committed release candidate 4 of LABjs.Net at GitHub.  It contains a few minor bug fixes, and also adds a few useful features.

• LabScriptCombine allows you to make use of the automated runtime script combining features of ASP.Net 3.5 in combination with LABjs script chaining.  To get the optimum script load time, combine scripts between each wait() call into a single HTTP request, so long as you are consistently using that combination of scripts across your pages.
• Added some useful constructors to several of the LABjs.Net classes.  These constructors make it easier to build a LABjs chain in your code rather than in your .aspx files.
• Made a slight change to the LabWait constructor that accepts an inlineScript parameter.  It will now default DetectScriptTags to False if you use this constructor, since you shouldn’t be including the script tags if you are building your chain in code.  You can still set this Property back to True if needed.
• Added AlternateRef property to LabScriptReference.  If you’re using the experimental CDN failover extension to LABjs, it allows you to specify a full set of options for the alternate script.  The AlternateRef property allows you to make use of those options if you want to, by providing a full LabScriptReference class to use.  This is optionally used instead of the simpler Alternate property that just provides a URL.

Binaries
GitHub

LABjs is an excellent javascript library that performs asynchronous loading of javascript files. This can help to greatly increase the load speed of your web pages. Now, instead of blocking while one file is being downloaded, other scripts further down the chain can be downloaded while waiting. On top of that, it can maintain processing order, waiting to process certain scripts until others are complete, and optionally executing code on completion.

All of this is great for the client side. But how do you define which scripts to include in the LABjs chain on the server side?

Since for work I primarily operate in ASP.Net, I’ve created an ASP.Net solution to the problem, LABjs.Net. This library provides two key controls, LabScriptManager and LabScriptManagerProxy. These controls loosely follow the behavior of the AJAX ScriptManager and ScriptManagerProxy controls, at least their script loading aspects.

Key supported features include:

1. Refer to script files using application relative paths (i.e. ~/js/jquery.min.js)
2. Load script files from assembly resources
3. Specify if debug or release scripts should be used, or use the debug setting from the web.config file
4. Ability to set any of the options provided by LABjs
5. Include wait() calls in the chain, and provide inline functions to be executed after the wait
6. Use LabScriptManagerProxy to add scripts and waits to the chain in content pages and user controls
7. Use LabActionGroup inside LabScriptManagerProxy to add script() calls at a specific point in the primary chain
8. LABjs debug and release versions are embedded in the DLL and automatically referenced, but you can opti0nally override this with your own URL
9. Experimental support for the cdnLABjs library I am working on, which provides automatic failover to a local file if a file fails to load from a CDN (for information about why, see Using CDN Hosted jQuery with a Local Fall-back Copy)

Below you will find links to the current release candidate, 1.0rc1.  Please review it and give me any feedback you might have.

Download Binaries
Readme File
Git Repository

Update 2/8/2010: Updated to version 1.0rc4

I’ve uploaded a revised jQuery UI Spinner widget, version 1.10, based upon a lot of excellent feedback from the jQuery UI team. New features include mousewheel scrolling, decimal support, customizable prefixes/suffixes for currency/percents, improved input masking and maxlength handling, HTML5 markup support, lots of bug fixes, and more.

jquery.ui.spinner Git Repository
jQuery UI Spinner Widget Example

As it turns out, the jQuery UI team already had a spinner widget sitting in their files that hadn’t been worked on in a while, so I’m working with Ca-Phun Ung to see if we can finish getting it up-to-date, polished, and with some of the new features from my widget incorporated into it. Stay tuned for more info.

A problem that I have commonly run into is trying to secure communications using SSL or other encryption for a intranet application. In this scenario, it is unnecessary to have a secure certificate signed by an expensive Internet authority. And often it is intended for deployment in a small-scale scenario where there might not be a Certification Authority running on a Window Server. In this case, you want to create a self-signed certificate and use the thumbprint of the certificate for phishing prevention.

Microsoft does provide a utility, makecert, which can create a self-signed certificate. However, it isn’t distributed with Windows, is command line only, and definately NOT end user friendly. I wanted a method for creating a certificate just by clicking a button, without using a shell calls and distributing a copy of makecert with my applications.

To this end, I created a VB.Net class that calls out to the CryptoAPI and creates a self signed certificate with a 2048-bit RSA key. The certificate and private key are stored in the Local Machine store. In the Local Machine store it can be accessed by system processes and services. I’ve attached an example of the class to this post, feel free to use it as you see fit.

In a project I was working on I was using jQuery UI and wanted to put a spinner on a numeric text box.  Then I discovered that jQuery UI, while an excellent UI library, doesn’t yet have a spinner widget.  So I decided to write one myself, and hope that one day it gets included in the core jQuery UI release.  Until then, please feel free to use the widget for yourselves, it’s a simple plugin for the jQuery UI core.

jquery.ui.spinbuttons Git Repository