Sonu on .NET

MVP award for 2009

2008-10-01T14:25:00Z

I just received the notification from Microsoft that I have been re-awarded for the MVP 2009. Its a great feeling to get awarded from Microsoft. I truely appreciate that.

Thanks MS.

Data Structures and Algorithms - First Draft

2008-08-27T18:17:00Z

Today we launched a new project on which Granville and Luca have been working on. The result is a nice PDF e-book that you can download for free here on DotNetSlackers.

For more info visit: http://dotnetslackers.com/projects/Data-Structures-And-Algorithms/

Ajax Futures Preview 4 is available

2008-07-22T14:00:00Z

I just saw on Bertrands blog (via DotNetSlackers), that the Ajax Futures Preview 1 is available. It also includes client-side template rendering. I have been waiting to try that feature out to see how it differs from the AjaxDataControls project here at DotNetSlackers. Besides that, it also includes several other features. I will be looking into the client-side template rendering engine and let you know my thoughts.

Call to submit feedback for the AjaxDataControls

2008-06-27T13:41:00Z

If you are one of the users that is using our AjaxDataControls, then we need your help. We are planing to work on the AjaxDataControls to fix current bugs and to add new features - this may be released as a SP or as a new release. We are not sure about this yet.

Nonetheless, we need your help to submit feedback and feature requests to us. Please visit our wish list forum and submit your feedback there:

http://dotnetslackers.com/Community/forums/wishlist/73.aspx

Thank you

AjaxDataControls (ADC) FAQ - How to get started with the AjaxDataControls and Visual Studio 2008?

2008-06-24T04:04:00Z

This is a followup small how-to on my previous post:

AjaxDataControls (ADC) FAQ - How to get started with the AjaxDataControls with Visual Studio 2005?

The basic idea is the same, however to make it easy to get started with VS2008 and ADC, I will repeat some steps that were used in my previous post.

Fireup up Visual Studio 2008 and select File->New Website. The first thing you will notice is that there is no "Ajax Enabled Website" template anymore. The reason is simple: ASP.NET Ajax is already built into .NET 3.5. Therefore we will go ahead and select "ASP.NET Web Site". I will call my project simply ADCSampleWebsiteVS2008 - feel free to change this to whatever you like.

Once you have created the empty project, you need to make sure that you add the necessary AjaxDataControls.dll, which you can get from:

http://codeplex.com/ajaxdatacontrols

However make sure that you get the binaries that were compiled for .net 3.5.

Once you have added the dll, we need to make some small changes to the web.config and add the following line between the <controls> section:

Your section should look like this now:

<pages>
<controls>
....
<add tagPrefix="AjaxData" namespace="AjaxDataControls" assembly="AjaxDataControls"/>
</controls>
</pages>

If you want to return DataTables from your webservice or pageMethods you will also need to declare the following converters:

Besides that you will need to download the ASP.NET Futures and add the binaries Microsoft.Web.Preview.dll to your website project - make sure that you use the .net 3.5 binaries here as well.

This should go in between the <scripting>/<webServices> section.

You are now done with the web.config.

The rest is basically the same as described here. You need to add the webservice - a test function and the script code. Follow the steps in the mentioned post and you should be ready to go.

You can download the ADCSample VS2008 Website from here.

DotNetSlackers Ranking System - first beta

2008-06-18T13:25:00Z

We have finally launched a new ranking system at DotNetSlackers. You can read about it here:

http://dotnetslackers.com/ranks

Any feedback is appreciated.

AjaxDataControls (ADC) FAQ - INDEX

2008-06-14T02:58:00Z

Welcome to the AjaxDataControls FAQ.

If you feel there are questions missing in this FAQ, please feel free to email us through the contact form.

Please note that this page is under constriction

Last Updated: 24-June-2008

AjaxDataControls (ADC) FAQ - How to get started with the AjaxDataControls with Visual Studio 2005?

2008-06-14T01:52:00Z

This is a quick how to post for everyone that would like to get started with the AjaxDataControls. I will cover all steps one by one to show you easy the controls can be used.

Open Visual Studio 2005 and create a new ASP.NET Ajax Enabled Website:

Add a reference to the AjaxDataControls.dll to your bin folder. You can download the binaries from here.

Once you have added the dll, we need to make some small changes to the web.config and add the following line between the <controls> section:

Your section should look like this now:

<pages>
<controls>
    <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.UI" assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0,
    Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>
    <add tagPrefix="AjaxData" namespace="AjaxDataControls" assembly="AjaxDataControls"/>
</controls>
</pages>

If you want to return DataTables from your webservice or pageMethods you will also need to declare the following converters:

Besides that you will need to download the ASP.NET Futures and add the binaries Microsoft.Web.Preview.dll to your website project.

This should go in between the <scripting>/<webServices> section.

You are now done with the web.config.

Now let us start with a simple webservice that will return some test data. Right click on the project and select "Add New Item" and select "Web Service" and give it the name DataService.asmx.

Open the DataService.vb and add the following namespace:

Imports System.Web.Script.Services
Imports System.Data

Replace this line:

<Global.Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices.DesignerGenerated()> _

with:

<ScriptService()> _

Add a test function that will return a DataTable with some test data:

<WebMethod()> _
Public Function TestData() As DataTable
Dim dt As New DataTable("t1")
dt.Columns.Add("image")
dt.Columns.Add("title")

For i As Integer = 0 To 10
dt.Rows.Add(New Object() {"c:\img" & i.ToString() & ".jpg", "image-" & i.ToString()})
Next

Return dt
End Function

Open the default.aspx and drop an AjaxData Gridview into the page and give it the id MyGrid. By default it will autogenerate the columns for you based on your datasource. Next we need to set the webservice that we created earlier into the ScriptManager:

<asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server">
<Services>
<asp:ServiceReference Path="~/DataService.asmx" />
</Services>
</asp:ScriptManager>

Below the GridView markup add the following BLOCKED SCRIPT

The first function is called automatically by the asp.net ajax framework whenever the page has loaded. In that function I retrieve an object of the Gridview control and store it into a local variable. Then I make a webservice call to the TestData function and pass the onLoadSuccess function to it, which will be called when the call has finished.

The onLoadSuccess takes the returned data sets the datasource via the set_dataSource function and binds the grid. Here is the result:

You can download the ADCSample Website from here.

AjaxDataControls (ADC) FAQ - Loop through the items

2008-06-13T14:03:00Z

Sometimes you may want to loop through all the items in any of the ADCControls after it has been bound. The following code demonstrates this:

function loopItems()
{
    var items = dataList.get_items();
    for (var item in items)
    {
      // do something.
    }
}

Now in the case you are searching for a certain bound property inside the control you can add the following code section inside the loop:

var dataItem = items[item].get_dataItem();
// We are looking for the image where the image name is "img0"
if (dataItem.image == "img0")
{
index = items[item].get_itemIndex();
break;
}

Here is the completed function:

AjaxDataControls (ADC) FAQ - get_items()[index]

2008-06-12T13:45:00Z

Remember that you can always use the the following javascript code to get the desired item from any of the data controls.

var index = 3;
var item = adcControl.get_items()[index];
item.findControl("your control");

AjaxDataControls (ADC) FAQ - DataList - SelectedIndexChangedEvent

2008-06-12T12:59:00Z

I am going to start an AjaxDataControls FAQ on my blog with the most knowen properties/events and show them how you can use them. The first series will cover the DataList control - an index will be added as soon as there are more FAQ's posted. In this first post, I will show you how you can make use of the SelectedIndexChanged event inside the datalist control.

Basically there are two steps that you need to do.

You need to define the SelectedIndexChangedEvent in the properties of the DataList control.
You need to define the commandName property on the html elements.

Here is an example:

<AjaxData:DataList ID="ImagesList" runat="server" Visible=True
ItemDataBoundEvent="OnItemDataBoundEvent"
SelectedIndexChangedEvent="OnSelectedIndexChangedEvent">
    <ItemTemplate>
      <span id="spanPhoto" commandName="select"></span>
      <span id="spanTitle"></span>
    </ItemTemplate>
</AjaxData:DataList>

You can even set the commandName on both span's if you want.

In your JavaScript you would define the OnSelectedIndexChangedEvent in the following way:

function OnSelectedIndexChangedEvent(sender, e)
{
var item = _dataList.get_selectedItem();
var span = item.findControl("spanPhoto");
var inner = span.innerHTML;

// now you could basically do whatever you want with the image.
}

Jason Gaylord joins the ADC team

2008-06-09T13:26:00Z

I am very happy to announce that Jason Gaylord has joined the Ajax Data Controls (ADC) team. Jason has tons of experience with AJAX and I am pretty sure that he will be a great benefit for the project.

Jason has just uploaded the binaries for Visual Studio 2008 - you can grab them from here.

If you need Ajax Data Controls in your asp.net project - then ADC is the way to go :)

ASP.NET MVC - KIGG

2008-02-19T03:10:00Z

We are proud to announce the release of KIGG - a real world live application build with ASP.NET MVC. You can see the live application at the following link:

http://kigg.dotnetslackers.com

The source is released under open source and can be downloaded from codeplex. As usual we would love to hear some comments from you. Take a look at it and let us know what you think about it.

AjaxDataControls on Ajaxian

2008-02-13T15:32:00Z

I am happy to see that ADC got mentioned on Ajaxian.com (see here). Kazi and the other team members have been working very hard on the v1.0 release and I personally think that these are very robust components. I have been using them for a while without any problems. Why don't you try it and let us know what you think about it? We would love to hear some feedback from you guys.

AjaxDataControls v1.0 Goes Live

2008-01-14T14:35:00Z

As Kazi mentioned on his blog, we are finally live with the first release (1.0) of ADC. A big thanks goes to Kazi for creating these nice and easy to use controls along with all those fancy ajax features. I would also like to thank the developers and members that have submitted bug reports, fixes and suggestions to us. I strongly recommend the ADC. I have been using it for a while for an internal project and they work very nice - the learning curve is 0% if you have already worked with the standard Gridview, Repeater, Datalist controls.

You can download the first release from here:
http://www.codeplex.com/AjaxDataControls/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=8312

Kazi's blog post with some screenshots:
http://weblogs.asp.net/rashid/archive/2008/01/14/ajaxdatacontrols-v1-0-goes-live.aspx

Some live examples on DotNetSlackers:
http://dotnetslackers.com/projects/AjaxDataControls