KnockoutJS is taking the ASP.Net world by storm. DotNetNuke 6.2 will include several core features which rely heavily on KnockoutJS. In Part 1 and Part 2 of my Introduction to KnockoutJS series I discussed some of the basics of bindings which are at the heart of KnockoutJS. Later this week, I’ll continue my series on KnockoutJS. In the meantime I wanted to highlight a great learning opportunity for those who are interested in learning how to use KnockoutJS with DotNetNuke. Given its usage in DotNetNuke 6.2 it should come as no surprise that KnockoutJS will be prominently featured at the Charlotte Day of DotNetNuke on June 2nd.

In Part 1 of this series I discussed the basics of data binding in KnockoutJS. In this post, I’ll dive a little deeper in the the binding behaviors of KnockoutJS and show how you can build really responsive web apps using client side development techniques.

While data binding is an important part of KnockoutJS development, it is only part of what makes KnockoutJS so attractive. KnockoutJS is a JavaScript based implementation of the MVVM design pattern which is a derivation of the Presentation Model as described by Martin Fowler. Martin Fowler sums up the Presentation Model like this:

The essence of a Presentation Model is of a fully self-contained class that represents all the data and behavior of the UI window, but without any of the controls used to render that UI on the screen. A view then simply projects the state of the presentation model onto the glass.

As Fowler explains, the Presentation Model class should represent both the data and the behavior which are then bound to the view. Let’s dive into how KnockoutJS handles binding behaviors to your HTML.

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.