So, its been a long time (has it been over a year, really?) since I’ve been to one of the Dayton .NET Developers Group meetings. I got the notification last week about the upcoming meeting, and it reminded me of how much I used to enjoy going to those meetings. So I worked it out with my wife to go to tonight’s meeting.

Now, I have to be completely honest here…the biggest motivator for me in going to the meeting tonight was the fact that they were giving away free copies of Visual Studio 2008. Why was that my primary motivation? Mostly because the topic for the meeting didn’t sound exceptionally exciting: “A lap around Visual Studio 2008″. Oh no…I’ve heard that one before. A bunch of marketing speak about all of the “fabulous” new features of the IDE that make developers lives “easier”. You know the stuff I’m talking about…the designer enhancements, the wizards, the “look-how-much-I-can-do-without-writing-a-single-line-of-code” kind of presentation. Blah blah blah…I’ve heard it all before. And I was right.

Partially.

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Today I was trying to figure out a way to apply some functionality to a given set of anchor tags on a web page. Basically, I wanted to be able to add a function to all of the anchor tags on a page that link to an image file. The first thing that came to mind for how to handle this, was jQuery. It was made for this sort of thing. I knew I could do it with jQuery, it just took me a little bit to figure out the right syntax for doing it. So, I had to figure out a way to write a jQuery selector that said “give me all of the anchor tags on the page where the href attribute contains an image file extension”. So I did a little bit of searching, and stumbled across this article on how to use predicate selectors in jQuery. The syntax I ended up with was:

   1: $("a[@href *= '.jpg']")

BRILLIANT! (yes, I know, I still need to figure out how to OR the other image type extensions (.gif, .png, etc) together into the “contains” predicate, but that’s the easy part really). I couldn’t put it any more clearly than, or agree with this statement any more (pardon the language):

The more I read up on jQuery, the more I realize how sweet-a** it is. jQuery is the “Easy” button of the user interface world.

That says it all for me right there. Before I was introduced to jQuery, I hated doing JavaScript of any kind in my web apps. Now, having jQuery, I go out of my way to look for ways to use it…its THAT cool.