ASP.NET AJAX Under the Hood Secrets by PageFlakes.com Creator

PageFlakes.com is a cool, award winning, Web 2.0 startup (they were #1 in the Start Pages SEO awards category this year - beating both Google and Microsoft Live).  Even cooler, it is built using ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET AJAX. 

Omar Al Zabir, the core architect of PageFlakes, recently published a great article called "ASP.NET AJAX Under the Hood Secrets" that discusses some advanced topics involving ASP.NET AJAX's javascript networking library (specifically he discusses batch requests, browser queues, caching, and get vs. post requests).  This is a great read if you are looking to build a high-volume site that uses the client-side AJAX javascript libraries and heavily leverages custom network callbacks.

Hope this helps,

Scott
Published Sunday, December 03, 2006 7:42 PM by ScottGu
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Comments

# re: ASP.NET AJAX Under the Hood Secrets by PageFlakes.com Creator

Monday, December 04, 2006 3:49 AM by vikram

Yes Read that, I have also heard a lot about this guy and hats off to his effort

# re: ASP.NET AJAX Under the Hood Secrets by PageFlakes.com Creator

Monday, December 04, 2006 4:17 AM by Michael Schwarz

Hi Scott,

the only bad thing there is that it is possible to send and read others mail if they put the page public. In this scenario you can get the mail user credentials and server details, too. This is not an ASP.NET AJAX problem, of course.

I like the page because it is not using UpdatePanels while moving panels from one column to the next one.

During the Windows Vista/Office 2007 Roadshow in Frankfurt I wrote a simple ConsoleApplication that was able to move panels from one column to another, resize the columns and to change my password, really cool to use.

Michael

# re: ASP.NET AJAX Under the Hood Secrets by PageFlakes.com Creator

Monday, December 04, 2006 11:02 AM by Thomas

I'm interested in how the panels are moved from column to column. Any pointers on where to find code samples?

# re: ASP.NET AJAX Under the Hood Secrets by PageFlakes.com Creator

Monday, December 04, 2006 1:50 PM by Jeremy Wadsworth

Very cool site. I hadn't heard of this project yet. I'm actually considering switching from the google personalized page to the pageflakes.

It seems to load much faster than my google personalized page.

# re: ASP.NET AJAX Under the Hood Secrets by PageFlakes.com Creator

Tuesday, December 05, 2006 11:31 AM by olivier

Anyone succeeded in publishing an AJAX Web site to a production server ? What is required to have a site successfully running upon publishing ?

Here is the error with a page that use UpdatePanel :

Parser Error Message: Unknown server tag 'asp:UpdateProgress'.

Source Error:

Line 112:                                                ToolTip="Exporter le jeu de résultats au format CSV">HyperLink</asp:HyperLink></TD>

Line 113: <TD height="5" align="right">

Line 114: <asp:UpdateProgress ID="AtlasUpdate" runat="server">

Line 115:                                                <ProgressTemplate>

Line 116:                                                    <div class="Chargement">

# re: ASP.NET AJAX Under the Hood Secrets by PageFlakes.com Creator

Wednesday, December 06, 2006 12:05 AM by ScottGu

Hi Oliver,

Have you installed ASP.NET AJAX on the production server?  You need to make sure it is installed to work.

Thanks,

Scott

# re: ASP.NET AJAX Under the Hood Secrets by PageFlakes.com Creator

Wednesday, December 06, 2006 2:29 AM by olivier

Hi Scott,

Yes, 'ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX extensions' are installed on the production server.

# re: ASP.NET AJAX Under the Hood Secrets by PageFlakes.com Creator

Wednesday, December 06, 2006 7:13 AM by Jivi

Scott,

So are you okay with the hacks he's applying in the atlas runtime - or does the ASP.Net AJAX team intend to implement them anytime soon ?

# re: ASP.NET AJAX Under the Hood Secrets by PageFlakes.com Creator

Friday, December 08, 2006 10:04 AM by Noel Marshall

Oliver,

I had the same problem with the Beta 2 AJAX framework.

You don't even have to install it on the server (which doesn't get the .designer dll because it is only installed on machines with VS.NET).  Register it on your development machine (make sure it builds and runs and the dlls are referenced in your web.config)

Then publish your code to the web server and drop the Microsoft.Web.Extensions.Design.dll and the Microsoft.Web.Extensions.dll in the bin directory.

It's a hack, and I hope that the next installer fixes the problem for web servers.

I got the work-around from the ASP.NET AJAX forums.  They're a good resource.