After Microsoft decided to ship and use jQuery library for its JavaScript needs in Visual Studio, hosting jQuery on Microsoft CDN servers is actually a logical and good decision. Yes, some of us might argue that Google already hosts jQuery, but Microsoft can not recommend to use its competitor’s services, can it?! :)

Anyway, intention of this post is not to discuss why Microsoft introduced its own jQuery hosted servers, bu to share links to Microsoft hosted jQuery library. Here we go:

jQuery 1.4.x
http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.2.js
http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.2.min.js
http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.1-vsdoc.js

jQuery 1.3.2
http://ajax.Microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.3.2.js
http://ajax.Microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.3.2.min.js
http://ajax.Microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.3.2-vsdoc.js
http://ajax.Microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.3.2.min-vsdoc.js

Microsoft also host jQuery Validation and jQuery UI files.

Currently Microsoft AJAX CDN hosts only jQuery version 1.3.2, but they will add more releases in the future. To see a full list of the JavaScript libraries and their URLs that are already hosted on CDN cache go here: www.asp.net/ajax/cdn

In this post, I would like to share a little jQuery code snippet that makes getting URL parameters and their values more convenient.

Recently, while working on one of my projects, I needed to read and get parameter values from URL string of the current page that was constructed and sent by PHP script. I came across this short and sweet JavaScript code snippet by Roshambo that does just that.

// Read a page's GET URL variables and return them as an associative array.
function getUrlVars()
{
    var vars = [], hash;
    var hashes = window.location.href.slice(window.location.href.indexOf('?') + 1).split('&');
    for(var i = 0; i < hashes.length; i++)
    {
        hash = hashes[i].split('=');
        vars.push(hash[0]);
        vars[hash[0]] = hash[1];
    }
    return vars;
}

The function returns an array/object with your URL parameters and their values. For example, consider we have the following URL:

http://www.example.com/?me=myValue&name2=SomeOtherValue

Calling getUrlVars() function would return you the following array:

{
    "me"    : "myValue",
    "name2" : "SomeOtherValue"
}

To get a value of first parameter you would do this:

var first = getUrlVars()["me"];

// To get the second parameter
var second = getUrlVars()["name2"];

To make the script syntax to look more jQuery like syntax I rewrote it as an extension for jQuery:

$.extend({
  getUrlVars: function(){
    var vars = [], hash;
    var hashes = window.location.href.slice(window.location.href.indexOf('?') + 1).split('&');
    for(var i = 0; i < hashes.length; i++)
    {
      hash = hashes[i].split('=');
      vars.push(hash[0]);
      vars[hash[0]] = hash[1];
    }
    return vars;
  },
  getUrlVar: function(name){
    return $.getUrlVars()[name];
  }
});

Now, if you include the above code in your javascript file, you can get URL parameter values in the following way:

// Get object of URL parameters
var allVars = $.getUrlVars();

// Getting URL var by its nam
var byName = $.getUrlVar('name');

That’s it! You might also find the following jQuery related articles on this blogs interesting:

1. Cross-domain AJAX querying with jQuery
2. Javascript for() loop vs jQuery .each() performance comparison
3. Create jQuery custom selectors with parameters
4. JavaScript / jQuery password generator