Ups and down with Microsoft Ajax

I follow the development of Microsoft Ajax aka Atlas since the beginning but I never had the chance until now to write a project using it.

Indeed I wanted a clean new project from scratch and I got the opportunity to build one recently. It's an administration tool, nothing exciting, but useful for a lot of my colleagues.

Far from the shiny demos Microsoft is showing on their site, I can tell my experience has been so far mitigated.

Yes it's a great step for mankind, but we are still far from Mars! It's a good first version, but hopefully the toolkit will be more integrated in the next version of Visual Studio.

Few comments:

- One major drawback is the lack of official documentation. I bought few books, more or less good, most of them referring to Atlas and not Microsoft Ajax, so it's difficult to know if the author include the official release or just the beta.
Yes of course I found some interesting resources to help me, but it's really time consuming.
Check this handy page to get a maximum from all the resources available.

- To go with the previous point, the lack of useful samples. One example, the Controls extender toolkit is a really powerful idea, like the animation, the modal popup, etc... But sadly difficult to cover every possibility quickly without detailed samples.
Do you know some good samples let me know!
I have in mind one control I needed absolutly the Tabs container. This is a fantastic set but so difficult to get it working.
For instance, a Tab click don't have any mechanism to trigger directly a server event, so you have to call a client side script to trigger your event.
Just for this, three days of hard googling and research. I would like to get more details about the methods and properties of each controls.

- The spaghetti code is back with Microsoft Ajax. Yes true because of the way Microsoft interpret the DOM, it is not straightforward to access a control value.
Example:

In your page, you have an input box nested in a Tab panel itself in the Tab container. In Javascript if you want to read the value from an Input control, you can't do this anymore:

var InputValue=document.getElementById('MyInput').innerHTML;

instead you do:

var InputValue=document.getElementById('<%=TabName.ClientID%>_MyId').innerHTML;

(see more details in this forum page)

I got stuck also for a while because some of my scripts were not working anymore, so after moving them to the Body section after the ScriptManager tag, everything back well.

So unless you use a Masterpage it's a bit messy to get the scripts outside the Head section in the Body part. Of course I am not a Javascript so maybe I miss something!

- Cross browser support is far from perfect! OK my project don't need to run with Firefox, but I have some strange behaviors with some of the controls, like missing tabs or text rendered outside their divs, etc...
If Firebug is enabled, it stucks all the time in the Ajax client libraries on some of the code for no reasons.
So for this reason I won't recommend using the Ajax toolkit for a public site without cautious debugging.

- The UpdatePanel is a great idea but I find myself putting too much of them in a page. Nothing I can do really there, otherwise some of my 'classic' controls don't work anymore.
So partial rendering is a great notion, but it has to be implemented in a better way.

So far even if I have some critics on Microsoft Ajax, I can say it worth it to have a look if you code a web administration project.

I never be a big fan of Ajax libraries, so maybe my point of view is biased, I prefer to craft some nice Ajax request when I want where I want.