Web Development Helper and ASP.NET Ajax

Its been a long while since I last updated my Web Development Helper tool. I just published v0.8.4.0 on my projects site. First it has an installer, which should take care of most of the install problems people have had in the past, but should also allow it to work on Vista.

The main update for this release is the enhancement to HTTP tracing feature which now provides multiple types of response viewers. The response viewer feature is available when you double click on a logged HTTP request to view its details. In the past, the only option you had was to view the response as raw text or hex (if the response contained binary data). With the latest build you now get different viewers depending on the request and response. In particular there are three new views to check out: Image, JSON and Partial Rendering. The latter two should help folks doing AJAX development.

First the Partial Rendering response viewer. For a quick and brief description of the scenario, when you use ASP.NET AJAX and UpdatePanel server controls, the normal browser postbacks are suppressed, and instead the client makes the same requests to the server using XMLHttp instead. The client identifies these special requests with a request header (x-microsoftajax with a value Delta=true). The server responds with what we call a “delta” response. Essentially rather than sending down the entire page, it sends the markup for updated parts of the page along with some metadata. The Partial Rendering response viewer is activated when the special header I just mentioned is detected. Once activated, the viewer parses the delta response and provides a more structured view, as shown in the screenshot. Thanks to Eilon Lipton, a developer on the ASP.NET team responsible for a number of the features in ASP.NET Ajax, who put together the implementation, and btw, just started blogging.

The other viewer that is interesting is the JSON viewer. A lot of data interchange that happens via XMLHttp is often JSON, i.e. the response has a content type of “text/json” or maybe “application/json”. This is certainly the case if you're using Web services with ASP.NET AJAX. The screenshot below shows a simple JSON object in the viewer that is activated by the content type of the response. You can imagine more complex JSON object graphs being easier to view in this type of viewer rather than as raw text.

Finally, I've uploaded some documentation that describes all the features with short blurbs about using them, and screenshots as well. It also includes a description about the updates to provide even more flexibility around choosing what to log and what not to log when it comes to HTTP tracing. Check it out.

There are a few more features I am planning to add on the short term in terms of integration with ASP.NET AJAX. Examples:

• The notion of request viewers, so you can better visualize things like JSON formatted request bodies that happens with Web services.
• Picking up view state updates after async postbacks (currently only the view state sent in the initial request is viewable).
• A mini-classbrowser that allows you to browse the set of classes defined in script loaded into the page.

So stay tuned... as always feel free to send comments either down here, or via my projects site.