Dustin Horne XNA / .NET / Silverlight / Web

AJAX is a powerful tool for making asynchronous requests from the client.  Unfortunately, this is often limited to same domain requests due to security restrictions put in place to prevent cross site scripting.  This also makes it difficult to consume external data such as RSS feeds if a security policy hasn't been put in place to allow cross domain callers with javascript.  In these cases it's necessary to use your server to proxy the data back to your page. More...

Lately I've been toying around with the idea of incorporating Metro style elements into web designs.  It seems to be a trendy thing to do lately and a lot of sites have been doing it so I started experimenting with using jQuery to achieve some of the effects.  There are already several Metro plugins for jQuery and jQuery UI but I wanted to write my own code and see what kind of effects I could achieve.  I've setup a demo site that I'm using my my Metro UI playground. 

If you want to see what I've setup you can view the source however I'll caution you that I'm just hacking it together for now and it's nowhere near production ready.  The purpose of the site and code for now is to just incorporate the visual and functional elements.  Once I'm happy with the results, I'll be rewriting and refactoring all of the javascript to make it suitable for use and especially easier to theme with CSS (currently alot of the CSS is being implemented stricly with javascript so I can tweak it easily).

I have several demos setup already.  The live tiles use setInterval and run on a constant loop currently but I will be modifying them to use a setTimeout and make them "pausable" and allow the animations to be changed and removed as well, and hopefully a more solid base of animations.  I'll also be working on compatibility with touch screen devices.  Here is a list of the currently available demos:

Live Tiles
List
Scrollbox
Pivot

I'm a big fan of website statistics.  I examine my own daily and very carefully to see how people are finding my blog.  The vast majority of my traffic is from organic search and is relevant to articles I have, however, the last couple of weeks I've noticed multiple searches similar to "ajax mvc3 rating system".  Given that someone really wants to find an AJAX ready rating system I decided to write one as a jquery plugin. More...

Recently I was working on a project that required upload of images.  I wanted to upload the images AJAX style without refreshing the page and thought jQuery would be a good fit.  Using jQuery to post standard forms is extremely simple, but when posting multi-part forms for uploading files it's not so intuitive.  This is due to browser security restrictions and sandboxing.  Today I'm going to show you how to fake an asynchronous upload without reloading the page and get a result back from the server. More...