AJAX Control Toolkit updated

An article by Laurent Kempé 2 Comments

No new controls but some great fixes!

Installation Files

Please visit the AJAX Control Toolkit Project Page on CodePlex

Release Notes

Major Fixes

• ValidatorCallout supports styling the popup using CSS and server-side validation.
• ListSearch has enabled the options of searching for sub-strings in the list items and clearing the search query if no match is found.
• AutoComplete only queries for matches when the user types a character.

Community effort

This release includes over 10 patch fixes provided by members of the Toolkit community. We would like to specially thank all the patch contributors for their effort which helped make this release possible. We recognize their names on the Toolkit Patch Hall of Fame.

Setting up the environment to use the Toolkit: This Toolkit release targets two different versions of the .NET Framework:

• Version 3.5.20229 for .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008:

  Download the AjaxControlToolkit-Framework3.5.zip or AjaxControlToolkit-Framework3.5-NoSource.zip.

• Version 1.0.20229 for ASP.NET AJAX version 1.0 and .NET Framework 2.0:

  Download the AjaxControlToolkit.zip or AjaxControlToolkit-NoSource.zip.

Note: Toolkit version 3.5.20229 is only for users who are building on top of .NET Framework 3.5 using Visual Studio 2008. If you are using .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 then you should use Toolkit version 1.0.20229.

Hello Kirti : Toolkit Release 10920

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

This has been a long awaited release and has lots of important bug fixes. We were unable to get the Test Framework ready in time and hope to get that out later. The release notes talk about it in detail at this new sample website location. The binaries can be downloaded from the Toolkit Release page.

Please try it out and let us know if you run into any issues.

Hello Kirti : Toolkit Release 10920

Optimization of a Web Site - Using Content Expiration (IIS 6.0)

An article by Laurent Kempé 8 Comments

As you might know, I am running the French .NET portal Tech Head Brothers and I am always searching for good way to optimize it and make it run better.

Following the post of Jeremy Zawodny's blog: "How To Add Good Expires Headers to Images in Apache 1.3" I decided to check this on my server running Tech Head Brothers on IIS 6.0.

You can read more about the way to configure this option on technet "Using Content Expiration (IIS 6.0)".

After several tests I must say that yes it increase the performance of the site. I used the wonderful httpwatch 4.2 to run the tests.

The other optimization I did in the past:

1. added compression to the site to optimize the load time of all the ASP.NET AJAX and Control Toolkit scripts and the page html
2. modified the site to use less external files, I had multiple css files so migrated to almost one
3. usage of the AJAX Control Toolkit - ToolkitScriptManager

ModalPopup and Silverlight

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

If you place on a web page a ModalPopup and a Silverlight control, you might end up with the ModalPopup hided by the Silverlight control.

To avoid this at the time you call Sys.Silverlight.createObjectEx you need to give the following property to true:

isWindowless:'true',       // Determines whether to display control in Windowless mode.

And then everything works again and you see your ModalPopup.