Friday, October 24, 2008 1:04:51 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

I picked up JsonFx yesterday as I could really do with a more.. declarative way of creating client-side controls when piddling about with Ajax for a browser-application type thing I am working on. JsonFX seems to provide a nice JBST system, along with data binding and support for compacting scripts/files on the fly, so I'm quite excited about getting into it.

I've had a few difficulties getting it working however, I just kept getting the glorious message "Error loading "~/scripts/sdctls/controls.merge". Either not found or a build error occurred." with no other information supplied. At the time of writing, this error message cannot be found on Google.

The actual JsonFX site is seemingly scant on documentation, and the starter kit was throwing the same wobbly, so I determined that it was either the way I was running the site, or something to do with the environment

Downloading the source for JsonFX and stepping through it, revealed a dependency on the MSScriptControl ActiveX component, presumably for validating scripts before shrinking them and sending them across the wire. Googling for the MSScriptControl dependency came up null though, for some absolutely bizarre reason, perhaps I am just fail at googling today.

Supposedly on not finding the component, an error is supposed to be added to the error handling system in JsonFX and therefore displayed, telling the developer to go download it, but this was not happening.

The ActiveX component can be found here, the Windows Script Control

Problem solved, I've got everything else working by looking at the rather excellent self-documenting starter-kit. If I come across any other gotchas I guess I'll post them, as this library seems rather new and there is very little on the internet about it