The blog of dlaa.me

Last night we published the 10920 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. This release continued our trend of focusing on the most popular bugs and work items identified by the user community in the support forum and online issue tracker. A number of popular issues got fixed in this release, addressing nearly 1000 user votes!

The release notes from the sample web site detail the improvements:

General fixes:

• Controls with Embedded styles (Calendar, Tabs and Slider): Toolkit controls no longer need explicit style references when loaded asynchronously. For example, if a Calendar control is placed inside an UpdatePanel and made visible on an UpdatePanel postback, the embedded styles are now loaded properly.
• PopupBehavior positioning (AutoComplete, Calendar, DropDown, HoverMenu, ListSearch, PopupControl and ValidatorCallout): PopupBehavior now respects the position of its parent element even when the browser window is very narrow or the parent element is close the window edge.
• Focusing extended controls (Accordion, CollapsiblePanel, DropShadow, Tabs): Pages that use Toolkit controls which re-parent DOM elements can use a workaround to focus a specific element on page load. The new method Utility.SetFocusOnLoad ensures that the desired control receives focus.

Control specific fixes:

• Calendar: Property to specify the position of Calendar, a default date feature that allows the calendar to start out with a selected date, and a consistent show, hide and focus story that makes the Calendar user experience more intuitive.
• ModalPopup: Ability to disable repositioning of the ModalPopup in response to window resize and scroll.
• ConfirmButton: ModalPopup functionality now supported in addition to the regular windows alert dialog.
• MaskedEdit: Extended Textbox no longer uses Invariant culture if no CultureName is specified and falls back to the Page Culture.
• AutoComplete: Allow users to associate additional data with the AutoComplete suggestions.
• Slider: Slider can be easily customized using its various CSS properties.

As with the previous release, we have published "source" and "no-source" versions for .NET 2.0/Visual Studio 2005 as well as for .NET 3.5/Visual Studio 2008 (still in Beta). Unique to the 3.5/2008 versions are the following:

Features:

• JavaScript IntelliSense support: We have added reference tags to all Toolkit JavaScript files that enables you to take advantage of new features in Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. With the multi-targeting support in this Visual Studio Beta, IntelliSense will be available for the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 flavor of the Toolkit as well. This article discusses the reference tag feature in detail.
• Extender designer support: Enhanced designer support for Toolkit controls using the new "Add Extender" user interface.

One thing we'd hoped to include with this release didn't quite make it in: our new automated testing framework. This framework is based on a different approach than our current framework - one that makes it easy to add additional test cases and leverage existing ones across new scenarios. The new testing framework has already dramatically improved our test coverage, helped identify new issues, and made fixing existing issues less risky!

But we've been iterating on the new framework for the past couple of weeks and faced the usual decision when it came time to finalize this release: slip or ship. We slipped our release date a little in the hopes that we'd be able to include the new framework with this release, but eventually decided not to delay all the great new Toolkit code any longer. We wanted our users to take advantage of the new bits ASAP - so stay tuned for more on the new testing framework in a future release!

As always, it's easy to sample any of the controls (no install required). You can also browse the project web site, download the latest Toolkit, and start creating your own controls and/or contributing to the project!

If you have any feedback, please share it with us on the support forum!