ASP.NET AJAX Timer Trouble? Location is key.

AJAX, ASP.NET, JavaScript, Performance By Dave Ward on September 19th, 2007

If you’ve made much use of the ASP.NET AJAX Timer control, you may have noticed that it can behave somewhat unexpectedly. In this post, I’m going to take a closer look at how the Timer works and the most significant factor that influences it: Location.

Where the timer is placed on the page actually varies how it operates. As a Timer’s delay interval approaches the processing time of its resulting PostBack, the difference that the Timer’s location makes becomes very significant.

Click here to read the rest of this post »

Seamless inline text editing with ASP.NET AJAX

AJAX, ASP.NET, JavaScript, Performance, UI By Dave Ward on August 23rd, 2007

Inline text editing animationThis is a technique that I really like. It’s excellently suited to intranet sites and administrative interfaces, where your users are typically familiar enough with the application to know which text they can click to edit. It’s actually very easy to implement, with a small amount of JavaScript.

Click here to read the rest of this post »

Updated your web.config, but Sys is still undefined?

AJAX, ASP.NET, JavaScript By Dave Ward on August 16th, 2007

Sys is not defined error message

If you Google the error you’ll find a lot of results about updating your web.config to enable ASP.NET AJAX (which is a necessary step), but what if you’ve already done that? Not only will your search be an exercise in frustration, but it will lead you down the wrong path completely. Maybe I can help.

Click here to read the rest of this post »

Easily refresh an UpdatePanel, using JavaScript

AJAX, ASP.NET, JavaScript, UI By Dave Ward on July 13th, 2007

I’ve noticed a lot of discussion lately regarding methods to refresh an UpdatePanel via client script. This is very easy on the server side, of course. You can just call UpdatePanel.Update(). However, on the client side, the most common solutions I’ve been seeing just don’t feel right.

Many will advise you to use a hidden button control inside the UpdatePanel, manipulated via button.click(), to trigger a partial postback of the UpdatePanel. While it does work, I never have been able to get past the kludgey nature of that solution.

Click here to read the rest of this post »