Nearly breaking news ["Atlas" Control Toolkit updated again!]
My team just [okay, *almost* just :) ] published the 60914 release of the "Atlas" Control Toolkit. Here are the highlights from the release notes:
- 4 new controls
- Animation: Adds powerful, easy to use animations to any element or control
- NoBot: Applies simple rules to prevent automated bots or scripts from posting to a page
- Slider: Adds an elegant scrollbar-like user interface for setting numeric values
- UpdatePanelAnimation: Animates page elements corresponding to hidden postback activity
- Made Microsoft.AtlasControlExtender.dll functionality public and integrated it into AtlasControlToolkit.dll
- Added animation framework that makes creating and running complex animations easy
- Added Atlas profile service support to the extender base class to make persisting values easier
- Added DynamicPopulate*Base classes to make it easy to add DynamicPopulate functionality to any extender
- Added PageRequestManagerID property to BehaviorBase to allow behaviors to easily hook up to partial update begin/end events
Of particular note are the integration of Microsoft.AtlasControlExtender.dll and the new animation framework:
- Microsoft.AtlasControlExtender.dll contains the extender framework itself and was formerly available only in binary form. By making that code public under the same permissive license that the rest of the Toolkit has, customers are now able to change anything they want about how the Toolkit works. The ability to debug into the extender framework makes finding problems with extenders even easier - and is a great opportunity to understand how things work behind the scenes!
- The new animation framework makes extremely powerful and flexible animation capabilities very easy to add to new code or integrate with existing code. In addition to supporting a simple XML-like declarative language for specifying arbitrary animation behaviors (including support for sequential, parallel, and conditional animations), it's possible to invoke simple animations with just one "goof-proof" line of code!
The release notes outline a bunch of other improvements we've made. Please take a moment to read about the new stuff. While you're at it, sample any of the controls right now (no install required). Then browse the project web site and download the latest Toolkit so you can start creating your own controls and/or contributing to the project!
As always, if you have any feedback, please share it with us on the support forum (or email me)!!