Matt Berseth shows how to build styled color Progress bar control with changeable skins on ASP.NET 3.5. Matt writes:

«If you use AJAX in your web app's, you no doubt have made use of some sort of progress/status indicator that lets the user know that some operation is currently executing. In the app I am currently working on we use an animated gif for this. It works great, but sometimes you might find it nice to have more control over the indicator - i.e. interacting with it via JavaScript and styling it using CSS.»

Source: Matt Berseth blog

Matt Berseth post an intresting article about inserting data in ListView control. In thiis atricle he tells how to build web page with Excel like grid. He writes:

«I am working on a project that needs a new screen for bulk entry tasks. We have a few business scenarios coming up where we have people inputting 5 to 8 records of data at a time. I met with a few of our analysts last week and hashed out a rough outline of what they were looking for. About 10 times or so during the 30 minute meeting some form of the phrase 'kind of like excel' was mentioned. Our data entry personnel are familiar with excel and our analysts thought an excel styled grid would make a lot of sense. 'An excel grid with a Submit button' was the phrase I had underlined twice in my notes.

I wasn't too worried about the grid's styling, but I wasn't quite sure what the best way to handle the 'bulk insert' requirement. Most of our other grids require an explicit mouse click to insert an item - and often times this click includes navigating the user to a separate page that is made to handle inserts. Of course for mass data entry tasks this can get a little old - tabbing through the cells is much nicer. So I took my notes back to my desk and started building a small prototype. You can check out the live demo to watch the grid in action. And a few of my implementation notes can be found under the screen shots below.»

You can view the live demo and get the sources from the Matt Berseth blog.

        AJAX combines the power of existing Web technologies to build powerful user interfaces that offer benefits often found in desktop applications. Over the past couple of years, Web developers have embraced AJAX in their own development efforts as well as via third-party toolkits.

Once you use an application built with AJAX, it’s easy to see the benefits: The user experience improves, as page reloads are reduced, and features such as automatic type-ahead facilitate data entry.

Michaekl Schwarz writes about using sockets in the recently released Silverlight 2 beta. He writes the following:

«The new beta of Silverlight 2 introduces Sockets. The security model enforced by the System.Net.Sockets namespace in Silverlight 2 allows for a connection only back to the site or host of origin. So Silverlight 2 applications will be allowed to connect only to the host from which they were downloaded.»

One of the most common problems in AJAX programming is the speed of downloading the web pages with the AJAX controls on it. There is a intresting article on Encosia site in which authors describing how to reduce time needed for the web page loading. Here's the small excerpt from the article:

«In this post, I’m going to show you one way to circumvent that problem. By placing ancillary content in user controls and delaying their load until the core page content has been displayed, you can drastically improve perceived performance.

When broken down into digestible chunks, the technique is easy to implement and lends your application a level of polish that your users are sure to appreciate. The four steps required to accomplish this will be: building the user control, statelessly rendering the control as HTML, providing progress indication, and using ASP.NET AJAX to request and inject that HTML.»

Scott Mitchell writes about the customizing the ASP.NET GridView Control in his blog. In this post he showing how to add sorting arrows to GridView control. He writes:

«I recently needed to implement this functionality in a GridView control. Rather than adding this code to an ASP.NET page, like I did with the DataGrid demo, I decided to instead create a custom Web server control that extended the GridView control, adding the necessary functionality. In this article we will look at the steps for building such a custom control as well as how to use the control in an ASP.NET page. The custom control's complete source code and a demo application are available for download at the end of this article.»

XAML is the one of the main componens of the .NET 3.0/3.5 framework. With XAML you can build the user interfaces in declaratitive XML-like style. Sometime you may want to build a control with unusuals shape. There is an intresting tutorial in Switch on the Code blog about creating customs shapes on WPF with XAML language. From this tutorial tou will learn how ?? work with various custom shapes in XAML and see some practical example that you can use in you re applications

Minsk, Belarus, October 13, 2006 - Scand has announced the release of dhtmlxGrid v.1.1, JavaScript grid component which brings Excel-like functionality on the web. Besides Ajax support, rich cell editing capabilities and client-side sorting presented in previous version, dhtmlxGrid v1.1 delivers some new functionality including cells merging (colspan functionality), freezed columns, improved cross-browser compatibility and others.       

Scand is proud to announce the release of dhtmlxTree v.1.3, the most versatile JavaScript component for creating feature rich hierarchical trees. dhtmlxTree v1.3 incorporates robust performance and fashionable way of asynchronous data loading via Ajax. Wouldn't it be nice if you could make your ordinary tree view richer, faster and more interactive? Due to its dynamic nature, dhtmlxTree allows you to liven up your tree views.

Ok Imagine we are writing some rich Ajax asp.net control and we need to use javascript file. Of course we can do something like that(from msdn):

if (!cs.IsClientScriptBlockRegistered(cstype, csname2))
    {
      StringBuilder cstext2 = new StringBuilder();
      cstext2.Append("<script type=text/javascript> function DoClick() {");
      cstext2.Append("Form1.Message.value='Text from client script.'} </");
      cstext2.Append("script>");

Hi today I’m going to show you the power of ASP.NET 2.0 Client Callbacks and how could it help us to implement real life Ajax web control.

The main idea to show you how to implement control which will allow you to submit some data without postbacks. It will be CompositeControl consist of

• HtmlInputButton
• TextBox

Actually it will be TextBox with button. When you click the button or press the Enter the data from TextBox submit to server and then response from server returns to client where it processed by the client side code.