The blog of dlaa.me

Just a short while ago we made available the 61121 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. I'd barely finished posting the release bits to CodePlex and was still in the process of verifying them when I saw that we'd already had our first eight customer downloads. Wow, those people must really want the latest stuff! :)

The 61121 release was all about addressing some of the biggest pain points for our customers. Of particular note were two workarounds for ASP.NET AJAX Beta 2 issues:

• The first addresses an issue where the Toolkit had a hard dependency on Microsoft.Web.Extensions.Design.dll, a file that isn't installed by ASP.NET AJAX Beta 2 on machines that don't have some flavor of Visual Studio already installed. This dependency can cause obvious issues for web servers since they usually do not have development tools like Visual Studio installed.
• The second addresses an issue where ASP.NET AJAX Beta 2 doesn't render the ScriptManager/extenders out to the page during an async postback if EnableEventValidation=false - meaning that the relevant extenders simply don't get recreated after an UpdatePanel postback. We reported this issue to the ASP.NET AJAX team prior to Beta 2, but there wasn't time for them to fix it in that release (don't worry, they'll be fixing it in their next release!). We'd implemented a workaround for this issue in our earlier 61106 release, but it applied only to CascadingDropDown (which is the only control that requires EnableEventValidation=false). Subsequent customer feedback prompted us to move that workaround up a level for this release so that it now applies to the entire Toolkit.

In addition to those two "big ticket" items, we also fixed a handful of other issues, most of which we chose based on customer feedback and work item voting on CodePlex. (Voting is a fairly recent addition - have a look at how it focuses attention on issues that are important to the community!). The other fixes in the 61121 release address the most popular issues in our CodePlex queue and include fixes for ModalPopup server-side show/hide, ClientState within an UpdatePanel, Accordion pane size updates, multiple DragDrop panels, CommonToolkitScripts, and web.config updates to get things working seamlessly with IIS7.

This being small-scale release, we didn't have time to include any new controls this time around. :( However, that's an explicit goal for an upcoming release which we hope to make available before the end of the year. We've got some neat stuff in the prototype stage and it'll be great to get some of it polished and released to the world!

Recall that you can sample any of the controls right now (no install required). Then you can 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 (or email me)!

I previously blogged a sample demonstrating how to use the AJAX Control Toolkit's dynamic population functionality with a data-bound ModalPopup. That sample was well received, but some of the changes that happened as part of the ASP.NET AJAX Beta 1 and Beta 2 releases have rendered the sample code I originally posted un-runnable on current builds.

No worries - it's a simple matter to update the sample and the exercise should serve as a good example of some of the things that need to be done as part of an upgrade. (For a far more in depth guide to upgrading, please refer to Shawn's AJAX Control Toolkit Migration Guide and follow-up about upgrading Web Services/Methods.)

Referring to the sample code I posted earlier as a starting point, the 5 things we need to do to update it are:

1. Change the tag prefix for ScriptManager from "atlas" to "asp" to point to the new location for ScriptManager
2. Change the @Register tag to refer to the AjaxControlToolkit by its new name ("AtlasControlToolkit"->"AjaxControlToolkit" twice and "atlasToolkit"->"ajaxToolkit" once)
3. Change the corresponding tag prefix for ModalPopupExtender from "atlasToolkit" to "ajaxToolkit"
4. Copy the properties of the ModalPopupProperties element to the ModalPopupExtender element and remove the empty ModalPopupProperties element now that the XxxProperties elements are no longer used
5. Update the web method definition by making the GetContent method static and adding the [Microsoft.Web.Script.Services.ScriptMethod] attribute

That's it! As you can see, it's mostly simple "find-and-replace" naming changes that can easily be applied to an entire site at once. The XxxProperties change is slightly more involved, but requires very little effort since it's basically just a "cut-and-paste" operation. The web method changes are also a little bit of effort, but the changes themselves are simple and it's easy to find where to make them by searching for the pre-existing "WebMethod" attribute. Nothing here is risky or error-prone and - with the exception of the web method changes - the compiler will report all of them as errors until they're fixed correctly.

For completeness, here's a reminder of what dynamic population looks like in action:

And here's the complete sample code after the changes discussed above have been applied. This sample runs fine on the ASP.NET AJAX Beta 2 and the AJAX Control Toolkit 61106 release:

Enjoy!

On Monday we made available the 61106 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. We did this in parallel with the release of ASP.NET AJAX v1.0 Beta 2 in order to accommodate some breaking changes introduced in that release. As such, we did not make any functional changes to the Toolkit in the 61106 release, though we did take the opportunity to fix one or two small bugs that we'd found.

Recall that you can sample any of the controls right now (no install required). Then you can 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 (or email me)!

As I blogged earlier, I presented the AMS302: "Atlas" AJAX Control Toolkit Unleashed: Creating Rich Client-Side Controls and Components session at the Microsoft ASP.NET Connections conference a few hours ago. This was my first ever presentation at a conference and it was a lot of fun! I hope those of you who attended enjoyed the talk and learned more about the Toolkit - it was great to have an opportunity to talk to you in person!

I've attached my slide deck and the demo content to this post so that anyone who's interested can download it and play around on their own machines.

We're always looking for more contributors and additional control ideas, so please let me know if you want to contribute!

It wasn't as easy as anybody claimed it would be, but my team just published the 61020 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit (formerly the "Atlas" Control Toolkit)!

What's new in this release? Umm, pretty much everything. :)

Kidding aside, we probably touched just about every line of code in the Toolkit during this release. Why? Well, because we sim-shipped (simultaneously shipped) with the new ASP.NET AJAX v1.0 Beta, a pretty fundamental set of changes to the framework formerly code named "Atlas". The many changes are detailed on their web site, so I won't bore you with the details here. Suffice it to say that their changes impacted the Toolkit in a major way since we build directly on top of them. Some of the specifics of the Toolkit migration process itself are detailed on Shawn's blog, so I won't repeat them here, either.

What I *will* do is highlight our new controls for this release:

• DropDown: Provides a dynamic drop-down functionality
• MutuallyExclusiveCheckbox: Allows pick-lists of mutually exclusive values
• ValidatorCallout: Adds great client-side UI to ASP.NET validators

I'd also like to single out four of our contributors who made significant contributions to the code that's part of this particular release. To be sure, we have other contributors who've been tremendously helpful in numerous ways and who we'd be lost without. However, these four folks made specific contributions to this release that were very much appreciated. My new best friends are:

• Ronald Buckton
• Alessandro Gallo (Garbin)
• Paul Glavich (Glav)
• Pierre Lagarde

And thanks to *everyone* who helped get this release out the door!

As usual, the release notes outline a bunch of other changes 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!

If you have any feedback, please share it with us on the support forum (or email me)!!

I'll be presenting the AMS302: "Atlas" Control Toolkit Unleashed: Creating Rich Client-Side Controls and Components session at the Microsoft ASP.NET Connections conference on November 7^th in Las Vegas. The session's description is:

The "Atlas" Control Toolkit is a set of controls and extenders designed to help ASP.NET developers easily integrate rich client UI features into their Web applications. As a community effort, the Toolkit contains controls written by Microsoft and non-Microsoft developers who have joined forces to create a powerful, shared-source library for all to use. You will learn how to integrate Toolkit components into your application as well as get an idea of how easy it is to create "Atlas" extenders using the Toolkit.

If you will be attending the conference (or otherwise in the area) and would like to get together, please let me know and we'll make plans!

One of the more frequent requests we've gotten for the "Atlas" Control Toolkit is some way to easily alter the content of a popup before displaying it to the user. Typically, page authors want to have a single popup element on their page that is used from multiple locations (often the rows of a data-bound server control) and they want the popup to display information specific to each location that displays it. For example, a page displaying multiple products might want a popup associated with each product to display additional details for that particular product.

There was previously no easy way to accomplish this task, but with the 60914 release of the Toolkit, we've made it simple! The HoverMenu, ModalPopup, and PopupControl now all derive from new DynamicPopulate*Base classes (see the "Other neat stuff" page for details) and automatically expose four new properties: DynamicControlID, DynamicContextKey, DynamicServicePath, and DynamicServiceMethod. These properties behave just like they do for the DynamicPopulate control (please follow that link for more details) and the existing controls have been modified to call the "populate" function as part of their popup actions.

What this means for page authors is that it's simple to add dynamic population to new/existing pages - what it means for control authors is that it's simple to add dynamic population to new/existing controls!

Here's what dynamic population looks like in action (I've arbitrarily chosen ModalPopup for the demonstration):

The complete code for the sample follows; noteworthy sections have been bolded to make them stand out. The important things to note are:

• The page content is generated by data binding an XmlDataSource to a DataList. The data are simple CSS style declarations that are used to decorate the dynamic content when it renders. The user can select which decoration to apply by choosing any of the links on the page.
• Each row of the DataList includes a ModalPopupExtender declaration that pops a modal panel when the CSS style declaration is clicked. All ModalPopupsExtenders share the same popup element in order to avoid unnecessary duplication. The text of the row and the DynamicContextKey of the ModalPopupProperties are both set by a (data bound) call to Eval.
• The popup (Panel1) contains both static content and dynamic content (Panel2). The static content includes the "OK" button that dismisses the popup. The dynamic content consists of the current server time which is styled according to the selected row's CSS style declaration and displayed in a random color.
• The dynamic content is generated by a page method which uses its context key parameter to identify the specific row that is being dynamically populated. (Here, the context key is the CSS style declaration, but typically it might be a database index or row number.)

That's all there is to it!

Just save the following code to an .ASPX file in the SampleWebSite directory of a Toolkit installation if you want to try it out for yourself:

If you found this "How to" helpful or if you have any suggestions for ways in which future "How to"'s could be improved, please let me know. Thank you!!

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)!!

One of the questions that comes up every now and then on the "Atlas" Control Toolkit support forums is how to point both the PopupControl and the TextBoxWatermark at the same TextBox. The straightforward implementation doesn't work quite right because both controls assume they have complete control over the TextBox. What happens is that the PopupControl's result gets written directly into the TextBox where it partially overwrites the watermark that's already there. But the TextBoxWatermark doesn't realize anything has happened and assumes the TextBox is still empty. Nuts...

The solution to this problem is not immediately obvious, so I thought I'd post a simple example to help show how it's done using the 60731 release of the Toolkit.

First, here's what the sample code below looks like when it's running:

The complete code for the sample follows - most of what's there is just to get the necessary elements on the page hooked up properly. There are a few things worth noting, though:

• The unique "ID" attributes on the PopupControlProperties and TextBoxWatermarkProperties elements prevent the automatically assigned IDs (which are based only on the TargetControlID (that's common to both elements)) from clashing.
• The CommitProperty on the PopupControlProperties defines a custom expando property of the TargetControlID (TextBox1) into which the result of the popup will be placed. This keeps the PopupControl from blindly stomping on the text/watermark in the TextBox.
• The CommitScript on the PopupControlProperties points to a script that gets run when the popup returns (after the CommitProperty has been populated). In this case, the script simply gets the popup result from the CommitProperty and uses the TextBoxWatermark behavior's set_Text method to safely set the text into the TextBox without breaking the watermark behavior.

That's all there is to it!

Just save the following code to an .ASPX file in the SampleWebSite directory of a Toolkit installation if you want to try it out for yourself:

If you found this simple "How to" helpful or if you have any suggestions for ways in which future "How to"s could be improved, please let me know. Thank you!!

I'm happy to announce the 60731 release of the "Atlas" Control Toolkit (which came out two weeks ago)! (I'm also happy to announce the 60626 release of the "Atlas" Control Toolkit which came out about a month and a half ago - but that's old news by now and is only included here for completeness.)

Why the delays?

Well, there was a good reason for keeping the 60626 release a little quiet. The "Atlas" team released an updated version of their binaries just a few days after our 60626 release came out - so the bits it included were suddenly out of date. We expected to integrate the new "Atlas" bits and put out an updated release of the Toolkit a day or two later, but various issues came up and we weren't able to do so. By the time we'd resolved all of the issues, it was just about time for the 60731 release!

So that's why there was no announcement for 60626. But why the delay for the 60731 release?

No good reason, really, other than that I've been busy with other stuff and haven't posted to my blog in a while... :|

 

Without further ado (or excuses), here are the highlights of the new releases:

• 8 new controls
  • Accordion: Displays one pane at a time from a set of multiple panes
  • DynamicPopulate: (Re-)populates any element with HTML content downloaded from the server
  • FilteredTextBox: Prevents unwanted characters from being typed into a text box
  • NumericUpDown: Lets you attach flexible up/down "spinners" to any TextBox
  • PagingBulletedList: Adds flexible paging and sorting to any bulleted list
  • PasswordStrength: Provides interactive feedback about the strength of a password being created
  • Rating: Displays a "4 out of 5 stars" interface for ranking
  • ResizableControl: Makes any control resizable
• A complete automated testing framework along with tests for all 21 controls in the Toolkit
• Data binding support for extender properties declarations
• Support for the July CTP of "Atlas"
• An established process that allows anyone to contribute to the project (5 of the controls above were by people who aren't on the Toolkit team!)

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)!!