I received an invitation to create first Egyptian Twitter like community on Yonkly.com. Thanks to Emad Ibrahim Creator and Founder of Yonkly.

Before I go further; you might ask What is Yonkly? My answer is: it is an enhanced twitter like mini blogging service. It is an open source project based on ASP.NET MVC. It is one of the first projects developed with early preview releases of ASP.NET MVC. This project was developed by Emad Ibrahim.

More information about Yonkly can be found at http://www.emadibrahim.com/category/yonkly/. You can download bits of this project from CodePlex.

2 different flavours of Yonkly are available through Yonkly.com, and Yonkly.net. The public Twitter clone is available at Yonkly.net, this is exactly like twitter with additional features like Groups. The other flavour which I am going to call community like edition is available under Yonkly.com. At Yonkly.com you can create your own community like Egyptian Yonklies I just created for Egyptian Tweeters. Both are in Beta as ASP.NET MVC itself is beta. Currently it require an invitation to be able to create your own network under Yonkly.com.

I think what is available on Yonkly.net should be available for each network under Yonkly.com. But this is something Emad should decide.

Today I was exploring Yonkly features while I was setting up egyonklies.yonkly.com. I was amazed by the provided features which I am sure is going to be enhanced and improved upon the release of ASP.NET MVC and in the upcoming releases of Yonkly.

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I posted about how to build and extender control using ASP.NET AJAX with jQuery. During my work I fall into few issues that I resolved and wished to share them with you.

These issues are related to callback functions in jQuery. For example when calling slideUp(speed, callback) or slideDown(speed, callback). Same thing when calling each(callback) function except that the callback in each(callback) function takes 2 arguments while those in Effects functions take no arguments by default -refer to jQuery documentation for more details-.

What are the issue exactly?

In all callback function in jQuery, "this" keyword will reference the DOM Element. For example in slideUp or slideDown functions if you specified a callback like this:

//Collapsed is your callback function
$('#elementId').slideDown(Collapsed);

function Collapsed() {
  //"this" refers to dom element
}

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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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Amr Elsehemey started to blog about ASP.NET MVC. He picked up a good subject to blog about; Building ASP.NET MVC Blog Engine using ASP.NET MVC and jQuery, he named it "jBlogMvc" Yesterday he posted his first post in the series, and myself I am waiting for the rest of the series as for it is going to be very interesting, because I have couple of ideas in mind.

He is going to explore the code and posting samples as he developing this simple blog engine. We have been talking about this subject for few days now, and really he has some cool ideas to present. Keep tuned with Amr, I am sure he is going to amuse us with some kicking posts just as he did in his Design Time Support post series.

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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I've been worked with localization and globalization for a while now. During that period I faced issues and learned many things about the subject. Here I am going to share some of my own ideas and tips to avoid falling in certain issues. It worth to mention that I am talking from GUI point of view and not Application Data point of view.

Consider using Resource Files ".resx" or Database:

Well this is a matter of your needs. But I highly recommends to always consider ASP.NET Resource Provider. Then it doesn't matter to work with ".resx" of Database. By default ASP.NET has a provider for XML based resources which is resource files ".resx" But also you can get a great Database Resource Provider for free from here.

Actually to choose between both you should think about that all your UI localizable terms should be stored in one central location. I mean, do not put some in resource file and some other in Database. Like you define labels on resource files and grid headers in database!! or maybe error or information messages. Just build it right from the beginning and define one central location.

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Last year, Matt posted a cool post about How To: Use the HoverMenuExtender for GridView RowCommands. Last month I got an e-mail from Justin Riggs, he was trying to combine to things. The usage of HoverMenuExtender as described in Matt's post, and the Master\Detail GridView with CollapsiblePanelExtender I posted about few months ago.

He already made the sample which ease the job for me in this post, but he had and issue that the functionality wasn't work properly. So I fixed that and thought to share it here in case anyone would love to apply same feature. You can view demo here.

It is a must that you return to How To: Use the HoverMenuExtender for GridView RowCommands by Matt, and Building a grouping Grid with GridView and ASP.NET AJAX toolkit CollapsiblePanel by me before you go a head in this post.

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Available for download, both WSS 3.0 SDK and MOSS 2007 SDK Updates. I really love MS Download notifications

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Software Development Kit (SDK)
The Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 software development kit (SDK) contains conceptual overviews, programming tasks, samples, and references to guide you in developing solutions based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Read more and download here. Or You can also view the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SDK online in the MSDN Library.

SharePoint Server 2007 SDK: Software Development Kit
The Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SDK contains conceptual overviews, “How Do I…?” programming tasks, developer tools, code samples, references, and an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) starter kit to guide you in developing solutions based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Read more and download here. Or you can also view the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SDK in the MSDN Library.

Well, I'm done with this article that show in details how to build on demand loaded details from master data using GridView and CollapsiblePanelExtender control. Read the article.

Earlier this year Matt Berseth posted about Building a Grouping Grid with the ASP.NET 3.5 LinqDataSource and ListView Controls. Then I followed his post with 2 other posts discussing same idea but with different implementation:

• Building a grouping Grid with GridView and ASP.NET AJAX toolkit CollapsiblePanel
• Building a grouping Grid with GridView and JQuery

Later I got few comments about how to implement that using AJAX, in order to display the details data on demand. At that time Dave was demonstrating the usage of jQuery AJAX on his post Using jQuery to consume ASP.NET JSON Web Services. So I came up with another demo to apply on demand loading of details data in my post GridView Grouping Master/Detail Drill Down using AJAX and jQuery.

Again I got few other comments on how to apply same approach, but using ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit CollapsiblePanelExtender control. So here I'm going to provide how to do that using CollapsiblePanelExtender and ASP.NET AJAX PageMethods call to apply on demand loading of details from the master data. You can read my article and view Demo here.

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