ExtJS and Script#

Over the past few weeks, I’ve come to the realization that trying to organize more than 10,000 lines of JavaScript code is just a silly idea… and by “silly” I mean really ridiculously painful.

I’ve been building a highly complicated software solution over the past six months at my office, and our UI is built entirely on the ExtJS framework (hooray for AJAX!). The solution runs on SQL Server, and the backend is written in C#.

Since our team of developers uses Visual Studio for our IDE, I thought it would be awesome to find a tool which might allow me to more easily organize and document the UI code. Visual Studio handles C# documentation and unit testing as part of the build process (compile-time) — a task which completely ignores anything to do with JavaScript (runtime).

After searching Google for a day or so, I stumbled across some cool C# extensions: Script# and Ext#.

Script# basically allows the developer to write C# classes which are compiled into a JavaScript file for execution in the UI. Since the classes are written in C#, you get the added benefit of easy documentation and the abilty to write unit tests.

Ext# a project that attempts to translate the ExtJS libraries into Script#. According to their site, they’re up to version 2.1 (current ExtJS version is 2.2).

What did I find?

1. Script# is not well documented. It was a pain in the arse to get working, and has errors in Firefox.
2. Ext# is a great idea… but with Script# being a pain and not widely supported, I can’t trust it.

Despite my initial feelings on Script#, I would be using it IF the MVC platform worked with it. MVC is incompatible with the way Script# renders its JavaScript code at runtime, which sucks as our software solution is based on MVC.

Back to the drawing board…