Hey, how are you doin'? I know long time no written, this is not because I became a lazy guy or something, that's because I am now in the end development's phase of our (the rest of the members were kept in secret - for now...) private web application called crashcourt.com (temporary name)  - I have to say that the outcome is very impressive - the hard word has worthwhile.

BTW, if you want to be a part of our unique friends & family BETA testers/users, just leave me a comment here, I will be glad to send you an invitation soon...

Regarding the post' subject, if you are using the great AJAX toolkit from Microsoft, it's important you to know that a new version was released by this project members. The major improvements (by the authors) are: ListSearch and AutoComplete.

You can read some more details about it at Delay's blog here.

I Read very nice post that has written by Matt Berseth regarding debugging asp.net AJAX applications. In his post he examples  a tool that has been written by the YUI project team has developed and compares it to the Trace Console AjaxControlToolkit Control that belongs to Microsoft.

If you are a asp.net developer that uses AJAX extensions or even not, this post can help you debugging AJAX events and actions.

You can read it here.

Have you also had some mysterious AJAX error/bugs/strange behavior? If does, this following link maybe will be helpfull for you... Dave Ward speards 2 common mistakes about it here.

BTW, Found it through ScottGu's blog.

Enjoy

Lately I am focusing more and more on the Ajax.Net extenstions and framework in order to assimilate it wisely in my woring on web application. In general the .NET guys did here great job, created here realy a whole framework that includes new controls, namespaces etc... The outcome of it is good, it supplies us what we want doing it in quite easy way, there are nice webcasts, tutorials and lots of documentation that explains how to use it, but it's has also a (little?) disadventage - the actions' performance are quite bad in comparison to other open source tools, like Anthem.Net and more, you can impress of it here.

Until here is the post's intro... ;)

I investigated some the UpdateProgress control, it is nice one and supplies great usage and can gives us great UI results in a few minutes of simple actions. By investigating the source code of a web page that uses this control, I resolves this related code:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
Sys.Application.initialize();
Sys.Application.add_init(function() {
$create(Sys.UI._UpdateProgress, {"associatedUpdatePanelId":null,"displayAfter":500,"dynamicLayout":true}, null, null, $get<Update_Progress_Control_Client_ID>));
});
// -->
</script>

It's nice and being generated automatically of course, but what if you need to do some more actions while the callback action is under progress (you can think of tons client side actions, right?).

In this case I would suggest to abandon the UPdateProgress (great!) control and to implement this action by yourself in javascript using the Ajax client-side API, take a look of this one:

<script type="text/javascript">
    Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager.getInstance().add_beginRequest(
        function ()
        {
            // Do your actions...        
        }
    );
    
    Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager.getInstance().add_endRequest(
        function ()
        {
            // Do your actions...
        }
    );
</script>

Using the Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager object, you can add/remove handlers to the Ajax client-side Life-Cycle events and do your stuff in a focused and single place -> much more easier to handle and to maintain.

I had installed the AJAX extesions framework on my computer in order to assimilate it in my web application that I am working on right now. I added some AJAX controls such as <asp:ClientScript>, <asp:UpdatePanel> and more, and damn... I find that the markup intellisense no longer works for these controls, or for any controls nested within them.

This happens because my ClientScript control is defined in the master page, and when I tried to drag (create) some other AJAX control in the other aspx pages that inherits the master page, the intellisense was lost.

I found a great solution/trick in ScottGu's Blog, that says that in order to see that intellisense in the rest of aspx pages, we need to leave the master page designer open (isn't it little bit ackward?)

For some more information and tricks (in ScottGu's Blog) you can click here.