Finally, it has become possible to easily add AJAX file uploading capabilities to ASP.NET applications. The newly released version of the AJAX Control Toolkit ships with two new controls, one of them is called AsyncFileUpload control which was designed specially for the above mentioned purpose. It’s really great that a new version of AJAX Control Toolkit has arrived, because the project seemed to be dead, especially since ASP.NET MVC had taken its place on the stage and many developers switched to it and to jQuery which can also be used with ASP.NET WebForms.

Anyway, it is the time to introduce the control for asynchronous file uploading. More...

As you may already know, it is required to create a web service to make use of some ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit controls. However, you can use static methods of your pages instead, you just have to mark them with the [System.Web.Services.WebMethod] attribute and not set the ServicePath parameter in the ACT controls. More...

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Creating dependant drop-down lists is a very common task, for example, when making a registration form, you usually have to add a country and a state fields, the contents of the state drop-down depends on the selected item in the country drop down field. Actually, it's not so difficult to implement that with the standard controls of ASP.NET. However if you don't want the page to be reloaded every time a user selects a value in the drop-down list, you should make use of AJAX. While you can use UpdatePanel for this task, it will be difficult if you have 3 or even linked drop-downs. Hopefully, you don't have to add a lot of UpdatePanels, instead you can pick up the CascadingDropDown Control from ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. More...

In the previous articles I wrote about how to use the extender controls available in ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, how to process them on the server, validate the data. It mainly dealt with a server-side part. Today, I'll show you how to add client-side events to the extender controls. More...

In the previous article I told you about ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, I explained its purpose, listed the available controls and showed an example. However, I think some things should be explained a bit more detailed. Today I'm going to talk about the extenders controls, I already mentioned them in the previous article, but I can repeat. An extender is a control that is a based on an ASP.NET web control, but provides an additional client-side functionality. Slider is a good example of an extender, in looks like a real sliding control in desktop applications, but in fact it just extends the TextBox control. More...

I often see questions in the forums regarding ASP.NET books, usually people ask not only about reference style books, but about more advanced books that explain not only ASP.NET basics but teach you to write real world applications.

I know a really good book on that topic. This book focuses on building a web portal including news system, guest book, user registration, e-shop and many other features. Actually, this portal is a popular starter-kit called "E-commerce starter-kit" or "The Beer House" that you can find here.

The book is called "ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution".

The new edition that describes ASP.NET 3.5 including LINQ and ASP.NET AJAX will soon arrive.

So, the books are highly recommended by many professional ASP.NET developers.

Introduction

Nowadays web isn't a web as it was 10 years ago. Web isn't a collection of static pages anymore. Actually, there was JavaScript and DHTML, but still web sites were far behind desktop applications in terms of interactivity. After the invention of AJAX it became possible to build really interactive web applications that are nearly the same as desktop applications except they are run in a browser.

Writing AJAX JavaScript code is a pretty routine task, so it's sensible to use a library that already has the necessary functionality. While Visual Studio 2008 has built-in ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 library, it doesn't contain many useful things we need when we are writing rich Internet applications.

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit or simply ACT is a thing that can help to write rich Internet applications. Basically, it's set a of useful interactive web controls that we usually find in desktop applications, but missing in web applications. These controls include sliders, pop-up calendars, modal dialogs and many others. We don't have to write any JavaScript code to use them in our applications, we just need to use ACT controls that are very similar to ordinary ASP.NET controls.

ACT is run both by Microsoft and community, so everybody can take part in the creation of the decent AJAX toolkit. More...