10 jQuery Tips and Tricks for Visual Studio

The widely popular jQuery JavaScript library is open source, cross browser and CSS3 compliant. You can use it to simplify your JavaScript coding tasks and to manipulate (add, edit or delete) DOM elements in your HTML content. This article presents 10 useful tips and techniques for using jQuery efficiently with Visual Studio.

What You Need

To get started with jQuery in Visual Studio you should have the following installed in your system:

• Visual Studio 2008
• Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• jQuery Library
• Visual Studio 2008 jQuery Plugin

Alternatively, you can simply download and use Visual Studio 2010 as it comes with in-built support for jQuery. If you have Visual Studio 2010, you will have the jQuery library with it by default.

Before we delve deep into how easily we can use jQuery to manipulate DOM elements in a Web page, let's take a quick tour of jQuery and its benefits.

Some Useful jQuery Tips

The striking features of jQuery include support for:

• Browser independence: jQuery is supported by most browsers.
• A simplified event handling model: jQuery supports an excellent, easy-to-use, normalized event handling model with greatly reduced code. The jQuery event handling model is consistent across all browsers. The event object is a cross-browser normalized object, and one event object is always passed as a parameter to an event handler.
• Seamless extensibility: jQuery provides support for extensibility through an easy-to-use plugin API that enables extending the jQuery core library seamlessly.

This section presents some useful tips and techniques to leverage these and other jQuery features.

1. Preloading Images Using jQuery

It is always a good practice to preload images, because is speeds up the rendering of Web pages. The following piece of code preloads images using jQuery:

jQuery.preloadImages = function() { for(var x = 0; x").attr("src", arguments[x]); }};

2. Disabling the Context Menu Using jQuery

The following code snippet illustrates how you can disable the context menu in jQuery:

$(document).ready(function(){ $(document).bind("contextmenu",function(e){ return false; }); });

3. Adding and Removing CSS Class in jQuery

It is easy to add and remove CSS classes in jQuery.

//To add a css class, you can use the following piece of code if($(id).hasClass('testClass')) { $('#div1').addClass('testclass'); } //To remove a css class, you can use the following piece of code if($(id).hasClass('testClass')) { $('#div1').removeClass('testclass'); }

4. Checking If a Particular Element Is Available

You can easily check whether an element exists in a Web page using jQuery. Here is an example:

if ($('img').length) { alert('Image elements available'); } else { alert('Image elements not available'); }

5. Detect Browser Type Using jQuery

Different browsers execute scripts differently, but you can easily detect browser type in jQuery and then execute your custom code accordingly. Here is how you can detect browser type:

if (jQuery.browser.mozilla) { // Code to execute if browser is Mozilla } if (jQuery.browser.msie) { // Code to execute if browser is IE } if (jQuery.browser.safari) { // Code to execute if browser is Safari } if (jQuery.browser.opera) { // Code to execute if browser is Opera }

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