Updated ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Release and New ASP.NET AJAX Videos/Articles

Last week the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit team released Build 10618 of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.  This fixed a few issues discovered with the release earlier this month including:

  • A fix for the Tabs naming container
  • A fix for a VS design-time dependency
  • FilteredTextBox Navigation and control key issues

This build also contains additional performance optimizations for the new "script combining" feature provided by the new ToolkitScriptManager control.  This feature can help significantly improve performance for pages with multiple AJAX scripts that previously needed to be downloaded separately.  David Anson has a nice blog post that talks about these improvements here.

New ASP.NET AJAX Videos

Joe Stagner has recently posted five new (free) ASP.NET AJAX videos on www.asp.net:

You can download and watch the videos here.  These new videos are available to download in a variety of video and audio formats including: WMV, Zune, iPod, PSP, MPEG-4, and 3GP.

New ASP.NET AJAX Articles

Here are a few recent ASP.NET AJAX articles you might also want to check out:

  • ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel Tips and Tricks: This is a great MSDN Magazine article by Jeff Prosise that covers: update highlighting, how to cancel updatepanel updates, optimizing with conditional updatepanels, and using page methods.
  • AJAX Control Toolkit Patch Utility: If you are not an official contributor to the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit project, but would like to submit a bug fix or small feature into the toolkit, you can read this article to learn how to create and submit a patch to the team for them to review and potentially include.

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Books

As I've mentioned in other recent posts, the first books specifically targeting the final ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 release were recently published.  Below are links to two of them that are shipping today:

Both books also include a chapter on using the controls within the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.

Hope this helps,

Scott

11 Comments

  • Is there a process for installing an update for the Tool Kit? As there is no "install" but more a file copy and set refrences processes - should the current version be completely removed?

  • Thanks for constantly adding videos! I think this is a GREAT way to spread the knowledge. Certainly it is time consuming to create videos like this, but the results are superb and it definitely makes it easier for noobs like me to learn. This is yet another reason for me to intrigue everybody to develop with ASP.NET. Thanks alot Microsoft! Keep up the wonderful work, Scott!

  • Is there a scheduled upgrade for the 1.0 release of ASP.Net Ajax? I've heard rumors of such, but can't seem to find a release schedule.

  • The Book list should contain ASP.NET AJAX in Action of Alessandro Gallo

  • Hi Vikram,

    To upgrade the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, you only need to copy over the AJAX Control Toolkit assembly into the \bin directory (no other code changes required).

    ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 itself needs to be registered in the GAC of the server you are running. There is a trick to avoid registering it in the GAC which is to run the application with full trust, and then place it in the \bin directory of the application. This isn't recommended because it means the assembly can't be updated/serviced by Microsoft - but will work.

    Note that most hosters run applications under medium trust - in which case this approach won't work. But if you have full control of the server you can do it.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • Hi Rashid,

    I can't wait for Alessandro's new book to come out (I'm actually writing the forward to it now). The reason I didn't put it (and others like Wally's new book) in the list is that they aren't shipping just yet. Once they do I'll definitley add it to the list.

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • Hi M Reed,

    .NET 3.5 (which enters B2 go-live beta in a few weeks) has built-in support for ASP.NET AJAX, and has a number of improvements and optimizations over ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 in it. This is the next upgrade we'll be targeting.

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • Good Job!
    To 'script combining' I'd like the 'CombineScriptsHandlerUrl' which setting to my custom Httphander

  • Hi Guys,

    I designed a database a couple of years ago that works very well for what I needed it to do.

    It is just a small MS Access database fronted by ASP VBSCRIPT pages.

    Here is the problem I am having...

    On Windows XP all I need do is set up the ODBC connection and then configure IIS to run the site and thats it...all is well.



    On Windows Vista however.... all is not well!

    I have created the ODBC Connection to the access database, but as soon as i try to open my default page in the explorer I am getting an error saying that the file type is not recognised.


    I am so unfamiliar with IIS7 and I can not seem to find an article that defines my problem exactly. I guess that I need to enable *.ASP pages somewhere within IIS7.....


    Any ideas would be grately appreciated.


    Thanks Guys

    Simon

  • Hi Jonathan,

    That looks like a cool control!

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • Hi Deepak,

    The source code for the control toolkit is available for download, along with a project solution that makes it trivial to build your own local copy within visual studio.

    When you want a change/bug-fix/feature made to the control toolkit, you can do one of a number of things:

    1) make it yourself using the source. this enables immediate fixes/changes.

    2) post a bug report and ask the control toolkit team to fix it. they typically post fixes to the source depot several times a week, which means you can pick them up immediately.

    3) post a bug report and wait till the next released build ships. These ship every few weeks and provide binary role-ups of all improvements and fixes. the release above is an example of one, and includes fixes for the the last two weeks.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

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