.NET news » Search results

The article will demonstrate the benefits of having a consistent approach to navigation and data passing in a Web Forms application, showing how this bears fruit when building Single-Page Interfaces. Although all the current buzz is around ASP.NET MVC, it will present a compelling argument for using the Navigation for ASP.NET Web Forms project I host on codeplex together with standard ASP.NET Ajax and DataBinding.

In many Web applications, when a user selects an option from a dropdown list, the set of options on another list must change, a challenge known as the "dependent list problem." The CascadingDropDown control solves the problem with aplomb.

Many websites display a news ticker of one sort or another. A news ticker is a user interface element that displays a subset of a list of items, cycling through them one at a time after a set interval. For example, on Cisco's website there is a news ticker that shows the company's latest news items. Each news item is a one sentence link, such as "Desktop Virtualization Gathers Steam," or "Cisco Reports First Quarter Earnings." Clicking a headline whisks you to a page that shows the full story. Cisco's news ticker shows one headline at a time; every few seconds the currently displayed headline fades out and the next one appears. In total, Cisco has five different headlines - the ticker displays each of the five and then starts back from the beginning.

This article is the first in a series that explores how to create your own news ticker widget using jQuery and ASP.NET. jQuery is a free, popular, open-source JavaScript library that simplifies many common client-side tasks, like event handling, DOM manipulation, and Ajax. This article kicks off the series and shows how to build a fairly simple news ticker whose contents can be specified statically in HTML markup or created dynamically from server-side code. Future installments will explore adding bells and whistles, such as: stopping the news ticker rotation when the mouse is hovered over it; adding controls to start, stop and pause the headlines; loading new headlines dynamically using Ajax; and packaging the JavaScript used by the ticker into a jQuery plugin.

Read on to learn more!

A client of ours recently contacted me with the question: We use Keynote, WebPagetest and dynaTrace AJAX – but we get different results with these tools/services. WebPagetest tells us that our page is very slow – but dynaTrace on my local machine does not. What can be the problem here? What’s the difference? I took a look at their page on my own laptop – running WinXP and IE8. I saw a small JavaScript performance hotspot but nothing major. Then it occurred to me that WebPagetest is probably using a different browser which made me notice a feature of IE that I haven’t yet explored enough.

read more

Validation is one of the most important part of any website. Nowadays, mostly new era websites are having very rich UI, and very much user friedly.User-friendly includes every thing, very good look n feel, excellent user friendly and well placed messages according to the different scenarios.

So here, I am going to discuss all the validators provided by the ASP.NET and for rich UI I'll also discuss in detail the calloutextendor that is part of latest AJAX Tool Kit.

In the past year, new technologies from Microsoft have changed how we can add ink to Web sites and the change is definitely for the better! One small property added to ASP.NET 2.0 server controls, OnClientClick, has had a big impact on simplifying the process of moving ink from the Web page to the Web server. The capability that OnClientClick provides, allowing developers to tie both a client-side event and a server-side event to one Click event, was actually achievable prior to ASP.NET 2.0 using control attributes, but it was more complex to set up and not very discoverable..

With WebForms, each ASP.NET page's rendered output includes a <form> element that performs a postback to the same page whenever a Button control within the form is clicked, or whenever the user modifies a control whose AutoPostBack property is set to True. This model simplifies web page development, but carries with it some costs - namely, the large amount of data exchanged between the client and the server during a postback. On postback the browser sends the values of all of its form fields (including hidden ones, like view state, which may be quite large) to the server; the server then sends back the entire contents of the web page. While there are some scenarios where this amount of information needs to be exchanged, in many cases the user has performed some action that requires far less information to be exchanged. With a little bit of forethought and code we can have the browser and server exchange much less data, which leads to more responsive web pages and an improved user experience.

Over the past several weeks I've been writing an article series on accessing server-side data from client script. Rather than rely solely on forms and postbacks, many websites use JavaScript code to asynchronously communicate with the server in response to the page loading or some other user action. The server, upon receiving the JavaScript-initiated request, returns just the data needed by the browser, which the browser then seamlessly integrates into the web page. There are a variety of technologies and techniques that can be employed to provide both the needed server- and client-side functionality. Last week's article, Using WCF Services with jQuery and the ASP.NET Ajax Library, explored using the Windows Communication Foundation, or WCF, to serve data from the web server and showed how to consume such a service using both the ASP.NET Ajax Library and jQuery.

In a previous 4Guys article, Creating an Online Boggle Solver, I built an application to find all solutions in a game of Boggle. (Boggle is a word game trademarked by Parker Brothers and Hasbro that involves several players trying to find as many words as they can in a 4x4 grid of letters.) This article takes the lessons learned in Using WCF Services with jQuery and the ASP.NET Ajax Library and uses them to update the user interface for my online Boggle solver, replacing the existing WebForms-based user interface with a more modern and responsive interface. I also used jQuery Templates, a JavaScript-based templating library that is useful for displaying the results from a server-side service.

In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to use MultiHandleSlider extender to choose or display year and month in a range. This control eliminates the need to use four DropDownlist controls to hold the range values and validation control for validating user selection. Then we will use the Column Chart to display number of cars on Sesame Street based on the selected range values.

WatiN is a great .NET library for writing automated browser based tests that uses real browser to go to websites, perform actions and check for browser output. Combined with a unit test library like xUnit, you can use WatiN to perform automated regression tests on your websites and save many hours o

The UpdatePanel is the workhorse of the ASP.NET Ajax library. It is responsible for defining regions of a web page that trigger partial page postbacks (as opposed to full page postbacks). Such partial page postbacks transfer less information between the client and server and have their user interfaces updated seamlessly, thereby leading to a more interactive user experience. (For more information on UpdatePanels, refer to Using the UpdatePanel.) One side-effect of a partial page postback is that the HTML elements within the UpdatePanel are replaced with the markup returned on postback. This behavior is not noticeable and is not an issue unless you have client-side event handlers wired up to the elements within the UpdatePanel. Such client-side event handlers are lost after a partial page postback.

Consider a very simple UpdatePanel that contains just a TextBox and a Button. Furthermore, assume we have JavaScript on the page that creates an event handler for the TextBox's focus and blur events, which "highlights" the TextBox when the user focuses it and unhighlights it when losing focus. Initially, this script works as expected - clicking on the TextBox will "highlight" it. However, things break down once the Button is clicked. When the Button is clicked the UpdatePanel triggers a partial page postback and submits an asynchronous HTTP request back to the server. The requested ASP.NET page then goes through its life-cycle again, but this time only the markup in the UpdatePanel (and the hidden form fields on the page) are returned to the browser. The UpdatePanel then overwrites its existing markup with the markup just returned from the server. Unfortunately, this overwriting obliterates the focus and blur client-side event handlers, meaning that selecting the TextBox no longer highlights it.

In short, if there are client-side event handlers attached to HTML elements within an UpdatePanel it is imperative that they be rebound after a partial page postback. This article looks at three different ways to accomplish this.