I've recently been digging pretty deep into the most recent Atlas bits from Microsoft and so far so good. 

Today we ran into a farily big snag with the Update Panel. We managed to get it fixed and its quite obscure so I wanted to write it down for later....

We have a simple form, with or without a masterpage, and in that form we place the typical ScriptManager and UpdatePanel.  In the UpdatePanel we put a Button and a Label.  Pretty simple stuff, right?

The button, when clicked did the typical Atlas style, inline, postback to the server and the method was getting called, but the UI in the UpdatePanel itself was not getting updated.  I ran fiddler and it showed the request to the server and the correct content coming back from the server; but still the UI in the UpdatePanel was not updating.

So we started to eliminate all the extra stuff around the interface and it boiled down to our CSS documents and specifically the <link /> tags.  It seems that if these link tags are not well formed XML (ie properly closed) then you see this behaviour.

Something to watch out for in the future.

14 Comments

• Rob Chartier said Tuesday, June 13, 2006 7:31:54 PM

  Smells like an item for the FAQ to me!

• Glav said Tuesday, June 13, 2006 8:13:11 PM

  Good catch Rob and thanks for the heads up. I do take great pains to make sure everything is well formed but it is easy to miss and you can pour over these small things for ages.

• Ted said Wednesday, June 14, 2006 9:27:57 AM

  Much thanks for the heads up - sooner or later we would run into that one.

• gregor suttie said Wednesday, June 14, 2006 10:34:57 AM

  Similar things happen with anthem.net

• Mike Meyers said Sunday, August 6, 2006 8:34:10 PM

  many thanks for the tip - I thought I would add another find to the mix. While dealing with the same problem, I found (and verified) that comments in javascript blocks are also touchy. I had a comment in the form of '// --- comment' and wasn't getting any update. Changing the comment to '//' fixed the problem.

• Phil C said Wednesday, November 29, 2006 4:13:39 PM

  I was frustrated with my Master page (containing the ScriptManager) and my Content page (containing a ScriptManagerProxy, UpdatePanel and some Async Triggers). After some scouring, I found that web.config shouldn't have this line: I removed it, and BINGO. Hope this helps someone in the future.

• Neil M said Sunday, February 18, 2007 10:10:34 AM

  Phil C, you da MAN. Your comment just concluded weeks of frustration with seemingly inoperable update panels.

• Jignesh said Thursday, March 8, 2007 3:43:50 AM

  i have gone through all the above given scenarios but still my updated panel is not updating the contents.

• software development outsourcing said Friday, November 23, 2007 6:09:37 AM

  i think it is a joke that Atlas Update Panel, not updating i cannot understand it

• Jason said Monday, January 28, 2008 3:59:42 PM

  Ran into this problem but it was from an unexpected malformed tag -- the built-in ASP.NET page trace output. (Did not analyze the output to see what line caused it.) Turned trace on...and panel would not update...turn it off (or reach requestLimit) and it started working. Running VS 2008 and 3.5.

• Jiten Shah said Wednesday, April 16, 2008 5:41:42 AM

  Thanks a Lot Phil.... It helps me a lot of comenting in web.config file...

• Elegant MicroWeb said Friday, April 24, 2009 12:25:43 AM

  Thanks a Lot Phil.... It helps me a lot of comenting

• Heer said Monday, April 5, 2010 3:33:41 AM

  What is future of Atlas Update Panel?

• Alok Kumar said Monday, April 26, 2010 10:08:50 PM

  I was wondering for quite as I am getting this problem and it had created a hell for me. but this article really helped. Thanks