AJAX Control Toolkit

Just for kicks I've been writing a new website (the previously mentioned taskify.net) and to a.) Increase the usability of the UI and b.) just learn more about ASP.NET AJAX, I've been implementing a lot of the AJAX controls into the site.  I've got to say, I think Microsoft really hit a home run on this one. 

I'll admit, at first it's very hard to grasp the concepts you must put in place when working with AJAX.NET, but much like .NET as a whole, once you figure out the patterns and the practices used to develop the tools, it's easy to pick up on all of the tools.  You'll never know how satisfying it is to refresh the data in a GridView without a full page refresh until you try it :-)

Head over to http://ajax.asp.net to check out the AJAX Extensions and the Control Toolkit.  You can also click the button below to see a live demo.

...but there are problems.  I have had major issues trying to work on an Ajax.net application on my laptop and desktop and syncing my changes.  My DLL references get randomly lost which then throws up an error everywhere that there is an AJAX tag.  A lot of my problems were fixed by changing the TagPrefix property on my ASPX pages to "Ajax" instead of "Asp".  Apparently there is an issue with using Asp as your prefix, but I'm still having issues when copying files over.

 

Usually removing the reference to the DLL and adding it back fixes the problem.  Oh bother.

EncapsulateAll Released!

We've just released a new C# project, EncapsulateAll. This program will take a list of private variable declarations (in C#) and generate the public properties to encapsulate those fields. We wrote it because we're tired of having to use the Visual Studio 2005 refactoring engine to encapsulate our fields 1 at a time. The code is simple, but the program seems to work like it's supposed to. Check it out if you're a C# developer!