Community Blogs

We just published our roadmap for ASP.NET Ajax . In this document we describe some of the proposed features that we are considering investing in future releases of ASP.NET AJAX, Visual Web Developer, and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. We really appreciate your feedback, so this document is intended as much for you to provide an input to our direction as well as to give some indication of what the teams are investing in. http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=14924 Read More...

I wrote a short column in Dino Esposito 's latest MSDN Magazine article to introduce two new features that we will ship with the next version of ASP.NET Ajax . The features will enable you to declaratively instantiate client-side components and to build data-driven HTML from simple templates. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc546561.aspx Read More...

Miljan from ComponentArt announces the 2008 release of their charting engine . It's a really interesting engine for Ajax developers because it has a full client-side object model . Check it out. http://www.componentart.com/charting/gallery/ Read More...

ASP.NET Ajax 3.5 SP1 contains a new feature that enables the application developer to combine scripts in order to reduce the number of downloaded files . But in order to do that, the developer must have a way of discovering what scripts are being used in a page or application. To make that easier, I've developed a small control that you can drop onto a page and that will render out the list of script references that are being used by the page. It is then easy to copy and paste that list into the CombinedScripts property of the script manager and combine all those references into one. The control also renders two links that enable the developer to download the debug and release versions of the combined scripts. Those scripts can be downloaded...

I recorded a 5 minute screencast that shows how to use the new script combining feature in ASP.NET Ajax 3.5 SP1: http://asp.net/learn/3.5-SP1/video-296.aspx Read More...

I'll switch to French for this post as the talk will be in French. Je parlerai ce soir devant le groupe d'usagers de .NET de Montreal à partir de six heures dans les locaux de Microsoft. Je parlerai de Visual Studio 2008 (et SP1), d'ASP.NET Ajax et du toolkit s'il reste du temps. Venez nombreux! UPDATE: merci à tous ceux qui se sont déplacés, et grand merci au groupe d'usagers , à Dominic Sévigny et RunAtServer pour leur accueil. Read More...

DotNetSlackers just published my article on how to make UpdatePanel accessible: http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/ajax/AccessibleUpdatePanel.aspx Read More...

I've been seeing more and more authors lately dismissing partial rendering (a.k.a. UpdatePanel) as a poor man's version of Ajax, something you should only choose if you're too lazy to implement "true" Ajax. I think that view not only has a slightly pedantic ring (isn't laziness one of the most powerful driving forces in computer science? isn't it perfectly ok to choose the most productive approach in some contexts?) but also misses the point that there are cases where server-side rendering absolutely makes sense. For example, search engines don't execute JavaScript today, which means that if you're doing all the rendering on the client, your contents won't be indexed. If you want search engines to index...

I've just published an issue on Microsoft Product Feedback Center about a strange behavior I've found in the last two days. I'm working with Visual Studio 2008, developing an AJAX Enabled application that use massive javascript code. I take advantage of new Visual Studio 2008 intellisense for Javaxript that applies to files using <reference> tags but I saw that using an embedded resource javascript library cause Visual Studio 2008 to lock exclusively the resource assembly and fail during compilation with this error: Unable to copy file "obj\Debug\ClassLibrary.dll" to "bin\Debug\ClassLibrary.dll". The process cannot access the file 'bin\Debug\ClassLibrary.dll' because it is being used by another process...

The application I wrote some months ago is not published in the BEST ITA Apps showcase through the MSDN Italy weblog. I put into this application all my knowledge about Silverlight 1.0 and ASP.NET AJAX. The application has been write to support a realtime monitoring system that works with GPS informations send by the vehicles on a central server. It show the position and the duty of public transportation vehicles, with tools to display races delay and current status. It has been build using a transparent Silverlight layer on a map, and receive pseudo-realtime data from an AJAX ScriptService. The data is updated every few seconds and the vehicles marker move on the map. The application take advantage of AjaxControlToolkit to give a better user...