Wrapping up my series on some of ASP.NET AJAX’s less utilized client side functionality, this post will take a closer look at some of ASP.NET AJAX’s JavaScript UI helper functions. These methods are great because they abstract away most of the tedious work that comes with supporting cross browser compatibility, leaving us with a nice, consistent API.

Specifically, I’m going to show you examples of using addCssClass, getBounds, getLocation, and setLocation to accomplish a few client side UI tasks.

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If you’ve done much ASP.NET AJAX development, you’re no doubt familiar with JavaScript alert errors similar to the one pictured above. This particular one occurs on the official ASP.NET forums in FireFox, if you try to navigate away from viewing a user profile before the Recommended Reading panels asynchronously load.

Not only is the error message of “…” completely meaningless, but it blocks your intended navigation away from the page until you’ve dismissed the alert window. Hopefully, someone at Telligent will read this, because the ASP.NET AJAX framework gives us an easy way to replace the annoying JavaScript alerts and vastly improve the usability of our applications.

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This is a follow-up post, building on the foundation laid in ASP.NET AJAX username availability check. In this post, I assume you’ve read and understood the first post.

After originally implementing AJAX username availability checking in my applications, I noticed an edge case scenario that replayed itself too often to ignore. The availability check could potentially take longer than a particularly fast user would need to complete the form. To avoid any trouble in that scenario, I wanted to add a progress indicator to the checking process and disable the submit button’s until an available username was selected.

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When you have a name as common as mine, you run across the entire gamut of schemes to deal with username availability in membership systems. By availability, of course I mean denial and rejection. Out of all of the ways that I’ve had “Dave” rejected, inline AJAX verification is definitely the least annoying. Wanting to be less-annoying myself, I’ve added the same functionality to my ASP.NET AJAX sites. Let me show you how I did it.

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Your wishes are my command. Highslide JS .NET now includes support for captioning. The captions can be specified using the Caption property of each HighslideImage control, and can be easily styled using CSS.

Also, ~ is now correctly replaced with the application path in path properties.

Visit the Highslide JS .NET project page for more details and the download link for the new version.

My initial .NET server control version of Torstein Honsi’s Highslide JS .NET is now available. You can find it and information on implementing it at the Highslide JS .NET page here on my site.

For a quick video introduction of what the Highslide JS library is capable of, take a look at this basic demonstration:

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Update: Highslide JS .NET is available for download now.

I’ve been working on and off for some time to encapsulate Torstein Honsi’s excellent Highslide JS library into a .NET control. Finally, pending naming, it is ready for use. It should be available for download in the next couple days. Until then, here is a preview of it in action:

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I noticed that a lot of people found my mouse pointer as AJAX progress indicator example by using search terms suggesting they were looking for a more graphical indicator. So, here’s an example of doing something more… Web 2.0.

Like last time, I’ll base it on a standard UpdatePanel demo using a button control to set a time/date label, with an artificial delay:

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Update: If you’re looking for something more graphical, also see my example of using a CSS style as AJAX progress indicator.

The ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control provides us a quick and easy way to AJAX enable websites without changing our familiar design patterns. It’s certainly much better than using full postbacks in many situations.

However, it lacks usability. While the user waits on the async postback to occur, they are left without any of the usual indicators. We’ve spent decades training our users to wait when they see an hourglass icon. Why throw all that away for a spinning Web 2.0 progress indicator that means little to an average user?

Luckily, the ASP.NET AJAX framework provides us with tools to correct this shortcoming.

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