The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Has Been Updated

by Jonathan Allen on Sep 27, 2007 |

The AJAX Control Toolkit for ASP.NET 2.0 has been updated. Nothing new was added, but the bug fixes are sure to be welcome. In related news, a VS 2008 Beta 2 compatible version was also released with a couple of interesting features. And in case you did not know, they are now accepting patches.

The AJAX Control Toolkit is a set of open source controls for ASP.NET AJAX. Unlike most Microsoft products, this is following the release-early, release-often philosophy. As such it lacks some of the polish you find in other Microsoft libraries. On the other hand, being open source allows developers to crack open the library and make any changes they need.

In the past Microsoft was fearful of accepting outside patches. As Microsoft is a constant target of IP litigation, they are understandably shy when it comes to integrating code with a questionable pedigree. Over the last year this has been quietly changing. It turns out that the AJAX Control Toolkit project began accepting patches via a "Patch Utility" back in April with little fan-fair.

For Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, you get the same set of controls. Changes include support for JavaScript IntelliSense and designer support for attaching extenders. The IntelliSense features rely on "reference tags". These are specially formed comments that pull in the metadata from other scripts.

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AJAX padigim shift by navot peled Posted

AJAX padigim shift by navot peled

I would like to draw your attention to another alternative which is a paradigm shift for AJAX front ends. One should be aware that I am not, and do not pretend to be objective, never the less I believe that one can judge for himself. Visual WebGui is an open source rapid application development framework for graphic user interfaces of IT web applications. VWG replaces the obsolete paradigms of ASP.NET in both design-time and run-time which were designed for developing sites, with WinForms methodologies, which were designed for developing applications. Thus enabling designer that was designed for application interfaces (WinForms designer) instead of a word documents (ASP.NET designer). This provides the developer with an extremely efficient way to design interfaces using drag and drop instead of hand coding HTML Worth a look at www.visualwebgui.com