Updated Toolkit Release Now Available

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We had a bit of a haitus from Toolkit releases when we were focused on MIX.  Since the show, though, we've been cranking through bugs and community asks.

The new bits are available.  This is another solid release with lots of resolved bugs (about 125!) as well as work items we've been wanting to get to:

Highlights:

Designer Support for the TabContainer. This has been one of our top asks.  You can now choose, add, or remove tabs directly from the designer.  Note you can not onlyi directly edit the content but the tab title as well.

Tab Designer

ASP.NET validatiors now work properly with the Toolkit controls, another top ask from the community.

Extended event support - we've added a lot more events to allow better interaction with Toolkit components on the client side.  For example, we've added events that are raised when a ModalPopup is shown or hidden.

Automated Page Method callback generation.  Tired of fishing through the samples trying to figure out how that callback method should be declared?  No more, one click does it all.

If you're using a WebService, you can just cut and paste this code right out of the page and into your service. 

 

Script Combining.  With the Toolkit, we made the decision to have components be responsible for their own scripts, as opposed to having one mondo-script file with all the script for the whole Toolkit.  This was the right call, as it allows adding to the Toolkit without having everyone pay a penalty for the added items.  However, for components with deep dependancies, this could add up to a lot of individual script files which caused multiple requests back to the server - a problem on slower connections.  We've not got functionality such that all of the scripts needed for all of the Toolkit components on the page will be dynamically combined into just one script file and sent down that way.

So I created a simple page with a bunch of extenders on it: AutoComplete, CascadingDropDown, Accordion, Animation, and Calendar.  Here's how the network traffic looked before this change:

18 requests (11 of which were for Toolkit scripts), and 1.3s total time in my very non-scientific test.

Now, with ScriptCombining enabled, we get...

A very small size savings (4KB - but remember FireBug is reporting the final size of the scripts, not the size over the wire; we support GZIP and DEFLATE so the transmission sizes are much smaller), but a big savings in requests -  we now get one request for Toolkit scripts instead of 11.  In this scenario, we also got about a 50% download speed improvement by only having one request.

To enable Script Combining simply change your ScriptManager to be an Ajax Control Toolkit "ToolkitScriptManager" and you're set...

Dynamic Context support for components doing callbacks.  One of the things we were missing on some of our components was an ability to send arbitrary context back with the webservice callbacks.  The idea here is that you want to be able to share a WebMethod among multiple extenders, so you need somewhere to stuff the context that differeniates them.  We've made this standard across all the components that make these AJAX callbacks.

We had a lot of fun with this release, and got some great help from our contributors and even some great patch-fixes from the community.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 06, 2007
    Microsoft Ajax Control Toolkit Update!

  • Anonymous
    June 06, 2007
    Microsoft Ajax Control Toolkit Update!

  • Anonymous
    June 06, 2007
    Excellent!! Keep up the good work! Just a comment: Is there / will be any documentation available about the new ToolkitScriptManager? Juan

  • Anonymous
    June 06, 2007
    Hi Juan - I think David will be writing a post about it.  Basically all it does is optionally add the combining behvior.  It derives from ScriptManager directly and has a "CombineScripts" property should you want to disable it.  The regular ScriptManager still works fine as well. Hope that helps, Shawn

  • Anonymous
    June 06, 2007
    Juan, Using the ToolkitScriptManager is as easy as replacing "asp:ScriptManager" with "ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager" and optionally decorating your own extender DLL (if you have one) with the AjaxControlToolkit.ScriptCombine attribute. How ToolkitScriptManager does what it does is a little more involved and I'll try to write a bit about it in an upcoming post.

  • Anonymous
    June 06, 2007
    Earlier today we made available the 10606 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit . This release focused

  • Anonymous
    June 06, 2007
    You've been kicked (a good thing) - Trackback from DotNetKicks.com

  • Anonymous
    June 07, 2007
    Details here . -Marc

  • Anonymous
    June 07, 2007
    Details here . -Marc

  • Anonymous
    June 07, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 07, 2007
    Hmm - okay - Please file a bug at www.codeplex.com in the AJAX Control Toolkit project and attach the project to the issue report.  We'll take a look at it and see what's going on.

  • Anonymous
    June 07, 2007
    摘要本期共有8篇文章：ASP.NETAJAXControlToolkit版本更新技巧和提示：ASP.NETAJAX1.0和用户控件创建自定义Provider在Windo...

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2007
    Asp.Net Ajax Toolkit的最新release，修复了一百多个bugs以及若干新功能。

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2007
    Yesterday the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit team released an updated version . You can download it from

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2007
    Yesterday the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit team released an updated version . You can download it from

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2007
    Yesterday the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit team released an updated version . You can download it from

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2007
    Looks like there's been another great release of the Microsoft AJAX Control Toolkit up on CodePlex .

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2007
    A new release (10606) is out, that you might download on CodePlex . I quickly tried out the script combining

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2007
    È stata rilasciata una nuova versione dell'AJAX Control Toolkit, scaricabile da qui. Devo ancora provarla,

  • Anonymous
    June 10, 2007
    Yesterday the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit team released an updated version . You can download it from

  • Anonymous
    June 12, 2007
    Hey ffry1, I encountered this problem while trying to open a new tab in IE7. I know it's the oldest trick and must have to do with spyware, BUT this aint going away. It's a shame; kinda liked working with tabs in IE7. So remember : when i press CTRL-T this message shows up : File download - security warning do u want to save this file ? Name : tabswelcome Type : unknown filetype 12.3 kB From : ieframe.dll & so on.... save cancel ...& so on

  • Anonymous
    December 12, 2007
    摘要 本期共有8篇文章： ASP.NETAJAXControlToolkit版本更新 技巧和提示：ASP.NETAJAX1.0和用户控件 创建自定义Provider ...

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2008
    New ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Release