ASP.NET

ASP.NET Ajax Controls Book Coming Soon

Adam Calderon — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:07:00 GMT

Over the last year Joel Rumerman and I have been working on a book for Addison-Wesley that is part of the Microsoft’s .NET Development Series that Addison-Wesley publishes. It has been a long haul but the fruits of our labor are starting to take hold. The book is entitled Essential ASP.NET Ajax Controls and covers both the JavaScript and .NET side of creating controls in ASP.NET Ajax and the Ajax Control Toolkit. The book has been a blast to write and we hope you will enjoy it. The topic is something Joel and I have been involved with since the early Alpha as part of the ATLAS First Access program that began in early 2006.

Error adding the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit to toolbar in Orcas Beta 1

Adam Calderon — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 09:05:00 GMT

I have spent a few hours trying to figure this out and finally got this to work. When I first tried to add the toolkit DLL to the toolbar to get the controls added I got the error below.

I tried to google (I mean Live Search ) to find the result and could not find any real solutions so now I started hacking.

I tried to add a reference to the file AjaxControlToolkit.dll from the C:\Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit\SampleWebSite\Bin directory (this is where I installed my toolkit). Still I had no luck. I then noticed that the System.Web.Extension dll was not in my references (this seems to be the default in Orcas right now) so I went to add it. I was now faced with a decision on what version of this dll to use. I went ahead and chose the newest version 2.0.0.0 and went for it. I was then able to add the control toolkit to the toolbox.

There are a few things to keep in mind as you work with the toolkit.

Sometimes the old version of the System.Web.Extensions dll will appear in the assemblies section of your web.config. If so just remove it since you would have two entries in this case since the 2.0 version is added automatically by the Web template in Orcas.
Once this is done the toolbox will have the controls for each project you create but you will still have to references the DLLs in your project.

Latest Workflow Article in .NET Developers Journal

Adam Calderon — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 16:20:00 GMT

My latest article Using Workflow Foundation in creating dynamic navigation applications in ASP.NET is now available online. The sample application referenced in the article is unfortunately not on the website so I included it here.

File Attachment: WebNavigationDemo.zip (248 KB)

January San Diego .NET Developers Group Talk ASP.NET Data Binding

Adam Calderon — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 10:09:00 GMT

Thanks to everyone who attended the meeting and I apologise again for being sick. Here are the slides and code from my presentation. The demo code requires the Northwind database and currently the web.config is setup to use SQL Server and not SQL Express so you will need to make changes in the web.config if you use another server than SQL Server.

File Attachment: DataBindingASPNET.ppt (2307 KB)

File Attachment: DataBindingDemo.zip (31 KB)

January San Diego .NET Developers Group Talk ASP.NET Data Binding

Adam Calderon — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 18:06:00 GMT

File Attachment: DataBinding in ASP.NET 2.0 v2003.pptx (136 KB)

File Attachment: DataBindingDemo.zip (31 KB)

Code Sample for Discover What’s New in ASP.NET 2.0 Web Services (ASMX)

Adam Calderon — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 10:08:00 GMT

Here is the sample code from my MSDN webcast

Discover What’s New in ASP.NET 2.0 Web Services (ASMX)

ATLAS December CTP Changes

Adam Calderon — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 10:47:00 GMT

The Atlas CTP is out with some very interesting and positive changes. To get an overall picture of the new changes read Nikhil Kolthari’s latest blog posts Quick Tour of December Atlas CTP and Atlas Script Manager Control. The atlas server controls like are now gone. This in my opinion is a good thing. The use of these controls seemed awkward and really took away from the momentum that was started with the ASP.NET server site controls. The introduction of the new UpdatePanel control with the ability to drag ASP.NET server controls onto it is a much cleaner approach. This new atlas control along with the new ScriptManager control allow you to perform partial rendering on you aspx page (the thing you wanted from Atlas all along) with the ease of developing using ASP.NET server controls. So how does this actually work. What I did to find out is create a simple MasterPage (see sample code below) and placed my main layout and ScriptManager control in it and created a simple WebForm page that utilized the main layout of the MasterPage. In this WebForm page I added a button to cause a postback and an UpdatePanel control that contained a GridView control. To understand how the data was moving from the client to the server I used the Web Development Helper Tool that Nikhil create to log the HTML traffic as I performed the partial postback. The findings were very interesting. The postback calls the Default.aspx page (the WebForm page I created) sending up my ViewState and the button. On the backend, the page itself goes through all of the normal cycles and returns a very interesting response via the Atlas XMLHTTP request/response mechanism. It returns the UpdatePanel content inside of an xml structure (and not in JASON format) with a root tag of . This type of response is akin to something you might have see a few years back when using XML data islands. As you can see by the Content-Length entry in the response header we are returning quite a bit of data but in this case the GridView controls data is quite large (100 rows). The content return however would be far less than the total page size in cases where you had a lot more content outside of the UpdatePanel. For those of you who have worked with ASP.NET 2.0 you can’t help but think how this seems similar in concept to Implementing Client Callbacks Without Postbacks in ASP.NET Web Pages but without all of the setup hassle. Keep it coming Atlas team!

The Simple Page Before PostBack

The Simple Page After PostBack

HTML Logs of PostBack

Request

Response

Response Content Expanded

Untitled Page

title><style type="text/css">

.atlas__delta { font-family:Lucida Console; }

style>head><form name="aspnetForm" method="post" action="Default.aspx" id="aspnetForm">

<div>

div>

<span id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_NewRegion"><![CDATA[

="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_Label1">This is the current time: 10:10:05 AMspan><br />

<br />

<div>

<tr>

<th scope="col">AddressIDth><th scope="col">AddressLine1th><th scope="col">AddressLine2th><th scope="col">Cityth><th scope="col">StateProvinceIDth><th scope="col">PostalCodeth><th scope="col">rowguidth><th scope="col">ModifiedDateth>

tr><tr>

<td>756td><td>855 East Main Avenuetd><td> td><td>Zeelandtd><td>35td><td>49464td><td>7cc420b7-b43c-4e40-98ed-6c10cec91c54td><td>8/1/2001 12:00:00 AMtd>

tr><tr>

<td>654td><td>308-3250 Casting Roadtd><td> td><td>Yorktd><td>14td><td>Y024 1GFtd><td>9d67c322-8698-440a-8f3e-5e1e30edbd0dtd><td>8/1/2003 12:00:00 AMtd>

tr><tr>

….. additional rows removed for clearity

tr>

table>

div>

]]>span>

<div>

div>form>rendering><deltaPanels>ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_NewRegiondeltaPanels><xmlScript><page xmlns:script="http://schemas.microsoft.com/xml-script/2005">

page>xmlScript>delta>

Sample Code

Sample Partial Postback Application

WebParts and Firefox

Adam Calderon — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 07:56:00 GMT

With all of the talk of the new push to support Firefox I was surprised to find out that WebParts have limitations when displayed in Firefox. When I first ran across this issue I began searching the web to see what was going on. I found responses in newsgroups and various blogs from the ASP.NET team that in fact WebParts do not work in Firefox and that they were unable to remedy this before release. So what happens when you run WebParts in Firefox? Well for one the ability to put the page in design mode and move WebParts around does not work. Then there is the issue of the drop down menu that normally appears in any mode (Close, Min, etc..). It becomes a series of hyperlinks in the WebPart title bar area. I hope in the future this does get resolved but I am sure in the short term we are just going to have to live with this. For you reference I have included links that talk about this subject.

ASP.NET 2.0 Webparts don't support Firefox out of the box

FireFox Compatability

WebPartVerbRenderMode and Firefox