For starters, I bumped my MvcAjax plugin to 1.0. I was having anomalous issues with the row height in various browsers so I added a browser check. I wish I could have used jQuery.support(), but I’m not sure which browser feature(s) are causing the issues I was seeing. For a future release.  Right now the paging and sorting works excellently on Chromium, Firefox, and IE, and I’ll be testing Opera and Safari soon enough.

I really enjoyed working on this plugin, as I’ve found that too many people are focusing strictly on client-side sorting and paging, passing the entire dataset to the client for presentation.  The sparse server-side options define their grid inside of their jQuery calls, and in my opinion that is not the best place for them.  Currently, MvcContrib has the best way of creating grids that’s in keeping with the spirit of Asp.Net MVC, and I think it’s Grid() extension method is a good starting point for any Asp.Net MVC developer who needs to present tabular data.

In other exciting news, I’m going to be presenting at the Tampa MVC Open-Mic in a few weeks.  I will be demonstrating the Spark View Engine, and how a developer can use it in place of (and frankly, side by side) the standard Asp.Net MVC view engine.  I’ve been using Spark for over a month now (though I’ve been otherwise disengaged the past two weeks), and I think it’s provides a wonderful, syntactic way of writing one’s views without much of the tag spam.  There’s an adage that teaching others about something is a surefire way to boost your own knowledge in a subject, so I can’t wait to get up in front of 75 of Tampa Bay’s best developers and strut my stuff.