I have been a software tester for the last 12 years. I have primarily worked with .NET based development and have spent the last few years working with an ASP.NET Web Forms application. I have a passion for software development. I enjoy reading tech blogs & books, listening to podcasts, doing tutorials, and watching videos from tech conferences to keep up on the latest and greatest in the dev world.

I started learning and using jQuery about three years ago and it seemed a bit revolutionary how it made client-side development so fun and easy. Recently, I started using the jQuery Templates plugin as well. As someone that used to love working with XML/XSL transform scenarios, I felt right at home sending JavaScript objects through these templates. Soon, I wanted all of my data to come as JSON via web service calls.

This seemed like a promising way to do some lighter weight client-side development on its own, until I started using KnockoutJS. I had heard about it first on this .NET Rocks episode and it seemed interesting, but not something that I had a need for at the time. I looked at it again, just before Steve Sanderson made an appearance on this Hanselminutes episode and gave it another shot.

KnockoutJS is the glue that I needed to really orchestrate the actions by jQuery and the jQuery Templates plugin. It was like a light bulb went off. Keeping the data layer separate on the client-side and watching your UI react to changes in this data is really a treat. I find the library to be very approachable, easy to understand, and customizable.

I have been spending some of my spare time trying to help people on the KO forums solve their issues. I always feel that the best way to learn a technology is to attempt to solve real problems with it. The forums have given me many of these problems in bite-size pieces to help learn the ins and outs of the library. I hope to continue participating in the forums regularly.

What do you like about KnockoutJS? Did you have that light bulb moment when you first started using it?