Check out this list of new controls and features for ASP.NET editor controls in the DXperience 2009 volume 2 release.

First, the common ASP.NET editors like the textbox, combo box and others are finally get their due respect. Yes, these ASP.NET editors, or ASPxEditors, will have their very own demo section in the DXperience 2009 volume 2 release! Preview the editors online or send out direct links to management as you convince them about how much you need these features.

We needed the new demo because the ASPxEditors packs so much functionality with new controls and exciting features:

New ASP.NET ColorEdit Control!

This slick new control displays a set of colors so that you and your users can customize website pages.

Here’s technical breakdown:

• ASPxColorEdit has the Color property whose type is System.Color
• Client-side methods available: GetColor / SetColor
• ASPxColorEdit works with both color codes(#ff00ff, #D8D8D8) and standard colors (red, green, silver)! The standard colors are converted into color codes
• ASPxColorEdit is a text editor with a dropdown window

The power of suggestion! The ASPxColorEdit was implemented from your suggestions in the support center. Thanks and keep em coming.

New ‘Drop-down Edit’ Control !?!

Another new control in 2009 volume 2 is the ASPxDropDownEdit. The DevExpress ASP.NET team have created a new derived editor to support custom popup windows. These custom popup windows allow you to easily embed things like the ASPxGridView.

DropDownEdit vs ComboBox

The ASPxDropDownEdit is not a combo box control. Instead, it’s really a textbox with a dropdown window template. Place just about anything into this window template. For example, by using the ASPxDropDownEdit, create an extended lookup control (with editing) using the ASPxGridView or implement a folder selection dropdown using the ASPxTreeList.

Styles for NullText and Focused Event

By adding the NullTextStyle and FocusedStyle properties, you’ll have more control of your ASPxEditors’ look and feel at runtime.

Display Format for all ASP.NET Editors!

All the ASPxEditors now support the DisplayFormat property including the combo editors! Here’s the full control list: (ASPxTextBox, ASPxButtonEdit, ASPxMemo, ASPxSpinEdit, ASPxDateEdit, ASPxComboBox, ASPxDropDownEdit)

Multiple-Selection List Box and Combo Box!

The ASPxListBox control will now provide three selection modes:

• Single – Allows end user to select only one item
• Multiple – End users can select several items at once by using the mouse and keyboard keys: Shift (to select a range of items) and Ctrl (to add an item to a current selection)
• Check Column – provides multiple selection by using a specific checkbox column (end users don’t need to use the Ctrl and Shift keys).

Using the new ASPxDropDownEdit control and the multiple selection list box, you can easily create a dropdown(combo box style) check list box of your own.

With all these sweet new controls and features, I’m very excited about the DXperience 2009 volume 2 release. Which of these controls and features are you most excited about?

WebAii Testing Framework enables developers to automate AJAX or Silverlight applications in all major browsers and simplifies testing of RadControls

NEWTON, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Telerik, the leading vendor of development tools and user interface components for .NET, today announced a new addition to its portfolio – WebAii Testing Framework (Beta), a product by ArtOfTest. WebAii Testing Framework is a free web automation framework that helps developers and Quality Assurance professionals easily write functional tests for AJAX and Silverlight applications. The framework offers one consistent application programming interface (API) that allows users to automate the user interface (UI) of web applications as part of regression testing. Besides Silverlight support, a key benefit of WebAii Testing Framework is the browser abstraction, which allows developers to create a test once and execute it against all major browsers.

“WebAii Testing Framework has been designed in partnership with ArtOfTest to address developers’ challenges in testing modern web applications. Many people are not running functional testing because the tools are difficult, expensive, and lag behind from a technological standpoint,” said Svetozar Georgiev, Telerik CEO. “The WebAii Testing Framework is free, supports complex AJAX scenarios on all major browsers, and most importantly supports Silverlight! Telerik’s WebAii Testing Framework removes the barriers to functional UI testing.”

The WebAii Testing Framework has been specifically built to cater to users’ advanced testing needs. AJAX-based applications can be easily automated including complex UI actions like Drag’n’drop, Hover, Right-click, and more. Waiting on document object model changes is also supported as well as the option to invoke JavaScript functions from test code.

In addition to testing AJAX-based applications, Telerik’s new WebAii Testing Framework also incorporates Silverlight Extension which makes automating Silverlight applications finally possible. It has a UI object model that mimics the complete list of UI XAML elements in Silverlight allowing developers to access everything as if inside the Silverlight application. Beside the ability to perform basic automation actions like clicking, moving and setting text, it also gives access to all properties such as brushes, borders and even transform matrices.

Telerik’s WebAii Testing Framework is integrated with special wrappers for Telerik RadControls for AJAX and Silverlight exposing rich functionality that helps developers save time and effort when writing functional tests, even for very complex web applications built with the Telerik controls.

“The addition of the WebAii Testing Framework to the Telerik portfolio of .NET tools and components is another step in our strategy of serving the developer community in more aspects of the application development lifecycle,” continued Georgiev.

Availability

WebAii Testing Framework is available for free download at Telerik Testing Tools section of its website or as a part of RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX and RadControls for Silverlight licenses. General availability of the free WebAii Testing Framework will be available later in the second quarter 2009.

About Telerik

Telerik is a leading vendor of development tools and components for the Microsoft .NET platform. Developers from most of the Fortune 2000 companies, many of the world’s leading educational and non-profit organizations and thousands of consultants rely on Telerik products to build applications with unparalleled richness, responsiveness and interactivity. Read more at http://www.telerik.com/

DevExpress.com is proud to announce the upcoming release of the ASP.NET List Box dropdown control – a feature-rich standalone multi-select component to simplify website design and allow end-user customization of ASP.NET-AJAX webpages.

Features of the new ASP.NET List Box control include:

- Single Select Mode – Allows end users to select only one item.
- Multi Select Mode – End users can select several items at once by using the mouse and keyboard keys: Shift (to select a range of items) and Ctrl (to add an item to a current selection)
- Checkbox Select Mode – Provides multiple selection by using a specific checkbox column (end users don’t need to use the Ctrl and Shift keys).

These features will be released as part of DXperience v2009 vol 2 in July 2009. Sneak peeks and more information on these features are available on the DevExpress Community Site at: http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/aspnet/archive/2009/06/23/sneak-peek-new-asp-net-editors-features-and-demo.aspx

To learn more about DevExpress and to download a free evaluation copy of DXperience, visit them online at
http://www.devexpress.com/Downloads/NET/

For more information, contact Kevin White by email at kevinw@devexpress.com or by phone at (818) 844-3383.

All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

TV.DevExpress.com is proud to announce the immediate availability of its online tutorial series for software developers using Visual Studio 2008 and the ASP.NET web platform. These on-going tutorials describe and demonstrate ways in which to develop advanced and feature-rich web and Windows applications.

Launched in April 2009 and hosted on the DevExpress Channel, the DX Airways tutorial series provides step-by-step instruction on the development of a fictitious airline application. To date, the following videos have been published:

- Introducing DX Airways – A Case Study: http://tv.devexpress.com/DXairways01.movie
- System Architecture: http://tv.devexpress.com/DXairways02.movie
- Database Design & Conventions: http://tv.devexpress.com/DXairways03.movie
- Software Configuration Management: http://tv.devexpress.com/DXairways04.movie
- Setting up the Data Access Layer Using XPO: http://tv.devexpress.com/DXairways05.movie
- XPO Continued: Collections, Associations, and Best Practices: http://tv.devexpress.com/DXairways06.movie
- Website Layout & Navigation: http://tv.devexpress.com/DXairways07.movie
- Setting up the Home Page: http://tv.devexpress.com/DXairways08.movie
- Web Site Membership and Authorization: http://tv.devexpress.com/DXairways09.movie
- Flight Availability Search: Setup and Essentials: http://tv.devexpress.com/DXairways10.movie
- Flight Availability Search: Intro to the Client-Side API: http://tv.devexpress.com/DXairways11.movie

To learn more about DevExpress and to download a free evaluation copy of DXperience, visit them online at http://www.devexpress.com/Downloads/NET/

For more information, contact Kevin White by email at kevinw@devexpress.com or by phone at (818) 844-3383.

All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

###

Are people still actively moving to Ajax?

Are they using MVC or WebForms with their Ajax?  Which ones of the *many* ajax frameworks out there are they using?  Feel free to write-in Silverlight if that is your current preference for this style of application.

Very interesting data… and while clearly not a scientific survey, it is an interesting data point as Simone has agreed to publish all the data he gets.

Here is what he has so far.

So please take a few minutes and fill out the survey and pass it on to your colleagues.

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB22973CYKW2H

The first function figures out if the user is online:

 1protected bool GetIMStatus(string screenName, string protocol)
 2...{
 3    protocol = protocol.ToLower();
 4
 5    string imStatusUrl = "http://www.imwrapper.com/" + protocol + "/"
 6                       + screenName + "/standard";
 7
 8    System.Net.HttpWebRequest imStatusRequest =
 9        (System.Net.HttpWebRequest)
10        System.Net.WebRequest.Create(imStatusUrl);
11
12    imStatusRequest.Accept="image/*";
13    imStatusRequest.AllowAutoRedirect = true;
14
15    System.Net.HttpWebResponse imStatusResponse =
16        (System.Net.HttpWebResponse) imStatusRequest.GetResponse();
17
18    return imStatusResponse.Headers["Content-Disposition"].
19Contains("online.png");
20}

GetIMStatus takes the following parameters, and returns a boolean, where true indicates that the user is online.

If that’s all you want to do, then you only need that function. But I wanted a snap-in, linked status indicator.

So, we need a function to display something based on this information. A big part of this will be the link location. Most protocols support a way to launch a message window to a user via a link, so we’ll need to construct a link for each protocol.

 1protected string GetIMStatusString(string screenName, string protocol)
 2...{
 3    return GetIMStatusString(screenName, protocol, "standard");
 4}
 5
 6protected string GetIMStatusString(string screenName,
 7                                   string protocol,
 8                                   string iconSet)
 9...{
10    string html = "";
11
12    try
13    ...{
14        protocol = protocol.ToLower();
15        iconSet  = iconSet.ToLower();
16
17        string imStatusUrl = "http://www.imwrapper.com/"
18                           + protocol + "/"
19                           + screenName + "/"
20                           + iconSet;
21
22        string statusString =
23         ((GetIMStatus(screenName, protocol)) ? "Online" : "Offline");
24        string linkStart = "";
25        string linkEnd   = "";
26
27        // jabber : xmpp:<sn>
28        // skype  : skype:<sn>?chat
29        // yahoo  : ymsgr:sendIM?<sn>
30        // aim    : aim:goim?screenname=<sn>
31
32        switch (protocol)
33        ...{
34            case "aim":
35                linkStart = "<a href=\"aim:goim?screenname="
36                          + screenName
37                          + "\">";
38                linkEnd   = "</a>";
39                break;
40            case "yahoo":
41                linkStart = "<a href=\"ymsgr:sendIM?"
42                          + screenName
43                          + "\">";
44                linkEnd   = "</a>";
45                break;
46            case "jabber":
47                linkStart = "<a href=\"xmpp:"
48                          + screenName
49                          + "\">";
50                linkEnd   = "</a>";
51                break;
52            case "skype":
53                linkStart = "<a href=\"skype:"
54                          + screenName
55                          + "?chat\">";
56                linkEnd   = "</a>";
57                break;
58        }
59
60        html = String.Format("<img src=\"{1}\" alt=\"{0}\" "
61                           + "align=\"absmiddle\" /> {3}{0} as {2}{4}"
62                            ,statusString
63                            ,imStatusUrl
64                            ,screenName
65                            ,linkStart
66                            ,linkEnd
67                            );
68    }
69    catch
70    ...{
71        // ...
72    }
73
74    return html;
75}

GetIMStatusString takes the following parameters, and returns the HTML for an icon for the client and status, a string describing the screen name and status, and (where possible) a link that will launch a message window to contact the screen name.

 1<%@ Control Language="C#" %>
 2
 3<script language="C#" runat="server">
 4    private string _screenName = "";
 5    private string _protocol   = "aim";
 6    private string _iconSet    = "standard";
 7
 8    public string ScreenName
 9    ...{
10        get ...{ return _screenName;  }
11        set ...{ _screenName = value; }
12    }
13
14    public string Protocol
15    ...{
16        get ...{ return _protocol;  }
17        set ...{ _protocol = value; }
18    }
19
20    public string IconSet
21    ...{
22        get ...{ return _iconSet;  }
23        set ...{ _iconSet = value; }
24    }
25
26    // [ THREE FUNCTIONS FROM ABOVE HERE ] //
27</script>
28
29<%= GetIMStatusString(ScreenName, Protocol, IconSet) %>

1<%@ Register tagprefix="akxl"
2             Tagname="IMStatus"
3             src="/controls/IMStatus.ascx">

1<akxl:IMStatus id="akxlIMStatus"
2               runat="server"
3               ScreenName="ImTooSmartForMe"
4               Protocol="AIM" />

Current functionalities

• Auto generates thumbnails.
• Animated Slide Show
• Display images in modal dialog

More Informations:

• Live Example: http://www.notesfor.net/post/NotesForGallery-ASPNET-AJAX-Photo-Gallery-Control.aspx#Demo
• Bugs: If you’re using it and found a bug, please check the “Issue Tracker” tab prior posting it.
• Latest Bits: If you want to download the latest stable version, use the “Releases” tab, and if you want to get the latest source codes, check out the “Source Code” tab.
• Blog: http://www.notesfor.net/
• How to install? http://www.notesfor.net/post/NotesForGallery-ASPNET-AJAX-Photo-Gallery-Control.aspx#Install
• Future release: Release notes 2.0 (expected summer 2009) http://www.notesfor.net/post/NotesForGallery-future-release-Release-notes-20-(expected-summer-2009).aspx

FileUpload AJAX :: ASP.NET

Newest version: 1.2 (7/27/2007)

FileUploadAJAX is an open source ASP.NET 2.0 custom control that is similar to the predefined FileUpload control but with a key difference: AJAX behavior

And what does this means? This means that with the FileUploadAJAX we can upload files in an asynchronous way and without reloading the page… that’s all!

Furthemore there are a lot of configuration options that you will discover on the How to section

In order to begin, we show an easy example with very few code that will allow us to upload up to 5 “.gif” of less than 5KB each one. Test it yourself: upload “.gif” images, delete them, try to upload other kind of files, from more than 5 KB, etc.