IliaJ on .NET

The Ext Team has released Ext JS 2.1 and changed the licensing model. Now the choices are: GNU GPL license v3 (and sure, you must make your application open source), OEM or a commercial license. LGPL 3.0 has been removed. If you use LGPL Ext in a commercial project you should probably re-evaluate the licensing or stick to Ext 2.0.2.

We use the excellent Ext JS JavaScript framework in the development of some ASP.NET Web Applications. Unfortunately the JavaScript IntelliSense in Visual Studio 2008 cannot work with the library. There were some possible workarounds like using a special .js file only for the IntelliSense (here is an example).

This week the Visual Web Developer team published a better workaround:

In a file that runs before ext-base.js, or on the first-line of ext-base.js itself, add the following code:

window.addEventListener = false;

geoffrey.mcgill wrote some important comments on the original post:

• The fix must be added to an external .js file. Adding the line of code to an inline script block does not work.
• The fix disables events from attaching in Firefox and Safari and should be a design-time only fix.
• It takes a while (10-30 seconds) until Ext shows up in IntelliSense the first time the page loads in Visual Studio.

The official fix for the problem will be available in the next Visual Studio service pack.