Back in September last year (2008), I posted a demo about Username Availability Validator Control. This control developed by the community on a contest initiated by Dave Ward on August 2008 as I remember. At that time the control was in beta.

On October 2008 the control was released to public on its first version. And finally I wrote a a very simple documentation on the project Wiki.

In this post I am going to update my previous demo as well as provide new feature on the control which is SuccessMessage property to be displayed if the Username is available. This update is not available so far on project at CodePlex. This is a private update which I provided on this post only. [View Demo]

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In the previous part I talked about how to build the client control. In this part I'll show how to put it all together to build an ASP.NET AJAX Enabled Server Control. You can view the demo that demonstrate control usage here.

The good thing about ASP.NET AJAX is that it supports fully programmable interface for both Server and Client control. And make a connection between both control. So you just need to put the control declaration on the ASPX page and ASP.NET will make it work for you. On the other hand, you have full access to the client APIs so that you can do some manual calls to the client APIs as well.

Building the Server Control:

This is an ASP.NET AJAX Extender control. Means it extends existing ASP.NET control to enable ASP.NET AJAX on it. In this case this extender extends ASP.NET Panel control, that is why it is called CollapsiblePanelExtender. Here is an article to show you in details How To build Extender Controls.

Basically jQueryCollapsiblePanelExtender I am building here inherits directly from ExtenderControl. This required to implement 2 methods GetScriptDescriptors and GetScriptReferences which I am going to explore later. But now, I want to take your attention that I am using jQuery, and I wanted the developer to have the option to specify the path of the jQuery library. If he/she did not specify the path, the default path is used, which is the the one hosted by google at http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.min.js. To do that I made a property and Call jQueryScriptPath that gets and sets jQuery javascript library path.

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At the end of the last month (September 2008) Microsoft announced that it will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. It was a great news for all ASP.NET developers who are jQuery fans as well as jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX folks like me. Before and after that, there were many posts made around the same subject. It will take a full post to list all these posts. But it would be easy for me to list ASP.NET jQuery heroes around such Rick Strahl, Dave Ward and Matt Berseth. There are many other heroes around such as Bill Beckelman who made a great collection of ASP.NET with jQuery Demos.

For specific posts around ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery I recommend to refer to the following posts by Dave Ward's blog:

• Using jQuery to display a modal UpdatePanel confirmation.
• Using jQuery to enhance ASP.NET AJAX progress indication.
• Avoid this tricky conflict between ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery.
• Use jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX to build a client side Repeater.

Introduction:

We all heard about and maybe worked with ASP.NET AjaxControlToolkit! A set of wonderful controls, but they are heavy, maybe not all of them but many of of them. Beside they require lots of script files which increase the response size.

I was thinking of building jQuery UI Widgets to clone some of AjaxControlToolkit controls. And after Microsoft announcement about jQuery I had another idea! I always liked how ASP.NET AJAX component model, both client and server models. It is easy to build ASP.NET AJAX Enabled Controls especially for ASP.NET control developers. ASP.NET AJAX client and server architecture really ease the development ASP.NET AJAX Enabled Controls and also the core ASP.NET AJAX client library has no massive performance issues, and it is widely used.

On the other hand, I loved the ease of using jQuery as well, how fancy it provides UI Effects and manipulation of DOM. Many many things I wished to have in ASP.NET AJAX were exist in jQuery. So I though of building an ASP.NET AJAX Enabled Control to clone the existing AjaxControlToolkit's control CollapsiblePanelExtender. And use ASP.NET AJAX client and server component model while using jQuery for UI Effects. In this case it would be collapsing (Slide Up) and expanding (Slide Down). [View Demo]

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UPDATE: ALWAYS DOWNLOAD LATEST SOURCE CODE FROM PROJECT PAGE ON CODEPLEX

Few weeks ago Dave started the Advanced ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls book giveaway contest. And yesterday he announced that the control is almost completed, but the contest door is still open. So I thought to grape the bits and start testing it and build a simple sample. [View Demo]

The sample that I am going to demonstrate here will use ASP.NET Create User Wizard control with UserName Availability Validator. In this sample I'll show the important properties of this control as well as the current issues exist.

Prerequisites:

I'll assume that you already know how to configure and use the existing built in ASP.NET Membership provider. You'll need a sample database with ASP.NET Membership services installed on it.

The sample provided has ASP.NET Membership already installed and configured, you can download the sample and start explore it.

You page must have ScriptManager control on it, of course this is an ASP.NET AJAX control at the end.

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Introduction:
I was thinking of building ASP.NET AJAX Supported controls inorder to practice both ASP.NET AJAX extensions as well as Script# tool.

Actually I liked the work done by Matt Berseth regarding ASP.NET AJAX very much. So I decided to use his ideas, convert them with Script# and add extra view things. So 99% of this post credit returns to him, I will just show how to use Script# and work around few things [Demo].

Original Reference:
I picked a control Matt built as GridView Extender (Behavior).And he provided few posts about and here they are:

• Improving the Presentation of an Extra-Wide GridView
• GridViewControlExtender - Row MouseOver and Click Styles
• GridViewControlExtender II - Header Cell MouseOver Styles and a Few More Live Examples

Simply the idea is to improve the look and feel of the simple GridView with extra styles. For example when hover over a grid cell/row or when click on a row. The control was built as AJAX Extender also known as Behavior that can be applied on a GridView. More...

Back to April 2007 I posted about building an ASP.NET AJAX ComboBox. It was an attempt to rewrite a ComboBox Control I made to fulfil certain issues I faced with 3rd Party Controls. One of those issue was performance as most of 3rd Party control are rendering heavy HTML because of extinsive features they put on their controls which I do not need. So This post is supposed to be an extensions to my old post as well as my article about building Simple ASP.NET ComboBox.

Attached to this post is the ASP.NET AJAX ComboBox. The archive is also containing 3 other very simple controls. The controls are developed using ASP.NET AJAX 1.0. Client Side Controls are written using Script#. I've posted earlier about Script# and my experience with it, so feel free to have a look at that post.

Now back to ASP.NET AJAX ComboBox. The control is very simple, you can consider it as composite control of simple ListBox and TextBox, however it doesn't inherit from CompositeControl. It directly inherit from ListControl to support binding out of the box and many other features that do need any to be rewritten. More...