Ajax Control Toolkit: new controls, bug fixes

Thursday, October 1, 2009

(c) Bertrand Le Roy 2006 And we have a new release of Ajax Control Toolkit. I didn’t work on this one but there are some nice things in there nonetheless :)

First, new controls!

SeaDragon: I’ve blogged before about Seadragon, the JavaScript-only way to do Deep Zoom. It became a lot easier to use a few month ago when the need for tools disappeared and you can just point to any image on the web and immediately get the URL and script tag to put on your page:

Now with this release of Ajax Control Toolkit, including and controlling Deep Zoom from an ASP.NET page is also very easy:

<ajaxToolkit:Seadragon ID="Seadragon"
    CssClass="seadragon" runat="server"
    SourceUrl="sample.xml"/>

James Senior just released a screencast on how to create Deep Zoom contents for the new Seadragon control:
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/jsenior/Seadragon-Ajax-Control-Quick-Start-Guide/

AsyncFileUpload: This is by far one of the most requested controls for ACT. File upload fields, while a part of HTML, do not work with Ajax/XHR requests (for security reasons, JavaScript can’t access the contents of the field). The only way to use them is to get the browser to do a real form post.

This new control makes it a lot easier to handle file uploads from your Ajax applications by providing an abstraction on top of the form posting:

<ajaxToolkit:AsyncFileUpload
    OnClientUploadError="uploadError"
    OnClientUploadComplete="uploadComplete" 
    runat="server" ID="AsyncFileUpload1"
    Width="400px" UploaderStyle="Modern" 
    UploadingBackColor="#CCFFFF"
    ThrobberID="myThrobber"/>

It works pretty much as advertised: just drop the control on the page, and you can upload files without a full postback. It looks just like Ajax and requires no plug-in of any kind. AsyncFileUpload

The control has client and server-side events that get triggered when the file has been uploaded. On the server-side, you have access to the uploaded file’s byte stream, which you can save to disk (or database, or whatever).

Bug fixes: This release also has some new bug fixes (courtesy of Obout) for some of the top-voted issues.

Download the new release here:
http://ajaxcontroltoolkit.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=33804

Try the live demos here:
http://www.asp.net/ajax/ajaxcontroltoolkit/samples/

Stephen's in-depth post about this release:
http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2009/10/01/new-ajax-control-toolkit-release.aspx

16 Comments

Great to see that the control toolkit is still alive.

It would be neat with some release notes, or a summary of fixes and changes in this release.

I tried to figure out how to extract a fix list from the 'top voted issues' thing you have linked to but it is not totally clear to me which ones have been fixed and which ones are just popular bugs...(?)

KristoferA - Thursday, October 1, 2009 4:19:04 AM

C'etait notre ballade au Mt. Pilchuck ca :) Cool!

Fabien - Thursday, October 1, 2009 6:45:25 AM

Great news, especially Async File upload.

But I can see the samples website is not updated. Clicking on the control names goes to 404 page and browsing the samples page list does not show them in it.
Can you check ?
Thanks.

Mohamed Meligy - Thursday, October 1, 2009 10:41:39 AM

These look great, although the links to the control pages are giving 404s and i can't see the new controls listed on the Live Demos link.

Also, are these 3.5 only or is there a 2.0 version? Ta :)

Town - Thursday, October 1, 2009 11:53:08 AM

AsyncFileUpload demo page is erroring.

maxp - Thursday, October 1, 2009 2:59:41 PM

nice to see new additions on ACT. I do not think http://www.asp.net/AJAX/AjaxControlToolkit/Samples/Samples/Seadragon/Seadragon.aspx is working

nmreddy83 - Thursday, October 1, 2009 4:44:53 PM

Thanks to all who reported the 404s on the sample pages: The sample site has not yet been updated.

@Town: ACT has been 3.5 and up for more than a year now, sorry. In principle, it should still be possible to compile to 2.0, I suppose, but I cannot promise it will work.

Bertrand Le Roy - Thursday, October 1, 2009 5:44:15 PM

Update: the sample site has been updated and the live demos of the upload and deep zoom controls are now available.

Bertrand Le Roy - Thursday, October 1, 2009 8:41:42 PM

@CraigG: yes, the live sample site has a dummy URL as the upload address. That it happens in your app is more curious and probably a misconfiguration. Hard to say without seeing your code. You can contact swalther at microsoft if you need more assistance.

Bertrand Le Roy - Friday, October 9, 2009 7:10:43 PM

The ASYNC Fille Upload example demo is not working on IE8 and FireFox 3.5

AZ - Sunday, October 18, 2009 10:13:34 AM

hai,

when the page is postback,navigated or revisited The ASYNC Fille Upload is not clear.can u give idea

subha - Monday, October 26, 2009 11:18:14 AM

@subha: you should file a bug here: http://ajaxcontroltoolkit.codeplex.com/WorkItem/Create.aspx and/or ask your question on http://forums.asp.net/1022.aspx

Bertrand Le Roy - Monday, October 26, 2009 5:58:49 PM

AsyncFileUpload doesn´t work with the opera 10 browser yet... (25Nov2009)

Jm6 - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 6:14:45 PM

@Jm6: did you file a bug?

Bertrand Le Roy - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 6:45:26 PM

From where can I get either either DZI processed or unprocessed image you have used in this webpage?
In fact, I am very much interested in the Bicycle image used to showcase deep zoom functionality on Seadragon official page as well.
Do you have the image or its references, from where i can download?

Ankur Nigam - Monday, July 18, 2011 4:51:46 PM

@Ankur: The image I used above is a composite of pictures I took on top of Mount Pilchuck, WA. I do not know the pedigree of the sample images the Seadragon team used for their samples. You'd have to ask them.

Bertrand Le Roy - Monday, July 18, 2011 6:10:26 PM

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