MSDN Community Distribution CD is and ISO image containing usefull resources about deferent technologies.
Resources like videos, articles, forums posts (Questions and Answers), installation (AJAX 1.0 package), research documents, web casts and many more.
The current release of MSDN Community Distribution CD is MSDN Community Distribution CD February 2007.
In this release there videos about how to work with XML using C# and VB.NET, SQL Server Express beginers videos + Installations with SP1. Also there are videos for Windows Vista "Building moder software, Modifiying Application to run on Vista" etc... They also added ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 packages with sample and Control Extension toolkit.
This is available to download for free and free to distribute.
I had some issues with the normal ASP.NET DropDownList control. One those issues is that you cannot limit the size of the drop down items, link in windows ComboBox Control. The other issues is that it is very normal, and you cannot extend its style and look & feel.
Well, about styles I can -for myself- ignore this issue at the time being. But I cannot ignore the drop down size. Because DropDownList drops a huge number of items when the list is really huge.
Now, I gave up and now I need a third party control! I had a look on the web, I saw Telerik ComboBox and someother controls, beside some articles written about how to build such ComboBox control.
I've reviewed Telerik, it wonderfull and solved all the issues I might face, but, and this is my evaluation, it has a poor performance when items grow, it nearly becomes like a DataGrid when items grow. It acquires a huge viewstate for the control itself, plus a viewstate for each ComboBox Item. Then the total render size for the control is also huge, suppose you have 3 or 4 ComboBoxes on one screen, May you are using Ajax to update these controls. Really it took observable time in case of Ajax updating, and I think this is because of re-rendering the control again after ajax response.
For my review for the other controls, I was afread to face the same issue, and for the articles they were good, but not completed enought to relay on.
Again, I'm back to where I started, I need a ComboBox. While I was thinking to replace DropDownList with ListBox to gain benefit from Rows property in ListBox. An idea jumped to my head. I can build a ComboBox that is compined of TextBox, ListBox and an Image. Simple idea isn't it. And I'm sure it was implemented on one of the article I read, but for some reasons I didn't like it because it didn't work with me from the first shot.
My ComboBox consist of TextBox and Image, combined with ListBox that is hidden and its visiblity is controlled through JavaScript.
I arranged these controls together in a Table "This is a weakness in my control I think" and it is now ready to be finished.
I tested the control with Teleric AjaxManager and AjaxPanel, it works just fine with those controls. I didn't test it yet with ASP.NET Ajax 1.0, but this is on the plan.
I'm going to post this control soon, so it might help someone or be improved with better ideas.