Recently I started using KnockoutJS as a key component in my web development toolset. KnockoutJS has simplified my code while also allowing me to create richer web UIs. I have always disliked the amount of postbacks I was doing using a more traditional ASP.Net development approach. KnockoutJS eliminates many of the pain points associated with ASP.Net development and lends itself to a more modern AJAX based style of development. In this series of articles I’ll discuss some of the basics of developing ASP.Net applications using KnockoutJS. In future articles I’ll walk through some of the more advanced features of KnocktoutJS and show how you can use it in your DotNetNuke development.

After working with ASP.Net Webforms for the past decade, the time has come to move on. I have enjoyed using Webforms and I was pretty good at bending ASP.Net to my will. Having recently tried some newer web frameworks I find that I am more productive than ever before. Over the past couple of years I have dabbled with ASP.Net MVC, jQuery and even WebFormsMVP but none of them truly held my interest for long. I never felt like they really offered solutions to problems that I was worried about. Because of my involvement with DotNetNuke, and the fact that it relies heavily on Webforms, I found that I couldn’t justify the use of some of these technologies. Things like WebFormsMVP added too much friction to the way I was used to working. ASP.Net MVC couldn’t really work in any meaningful way with DotNetNuke. And jQuery was a nice add-on, but it didn’t fundamentally change the way I developed modules.