I am moving to budigelli.com and all my new blog entries will be on blog.budigelli.com. Please visit my personal domain, budigelli.com.
-Thank You.
AJAX UpdatePanel Causes Postback
Little Known Secrete ” UpdatePanel causes Postbacks”.
Even though it is good entry point in to AJAX programming using .NET technologies, UpdatePanel does not give you much performance over traditional PostBack model.
When used, UpdatePanel causes the postback similar to the traditional postback, instantiates the control tree, and at render time realizes to send only the required response (the content in the updatepanel).
So, apart from the reduced response bandwidth and nice looking flicker free UI, updatepanel is not really getting you much performance.
Having said that, i am sure you can get away with UpdatePanel for most of your needs.
I would try to supplement this with more information.
I am moving to my personal domain and you could also see this post at http://blog.budigelli.com/index.php/2007/06/16/ajax-updatepanel-causes-postback/
– thanks
ASP.NET Url Re-writing and Postback Problem Solution
If you are doing any web-applications, chances are you have heard of Search Engine Optimization, also know as SEO. Its all about getting better search engine ranking for your web-pages.
Even though, there are no fixed rules on what to do, there is a general consensus among web masters, on what helps your search engine rankings. And one of them is having a better URL, in other words, having the key words in your URL using URL Re-writing.
The problem with ASP.NET is that once you do URL rewrite, all your post back would stop working. This has been a dis-advantage when it comes to SEO of your pages. There were few tricks we could have done to have it work, but, they are more of a hack than pretty solutions. I have linked to one of those solutions here a while ago.
But, Now with the advent of CSS control adapters, it is not only very easy to URL rewrite and have the postbacks work but also clean [hack!].
Here is a very nice article on various options on URL rewitting from ScottGu’s Blog
All the solutions offered are very clean and i happen to use the CSS control adapter solution on couple of my sandbox projects,
1) An online classified site for my home state, Andhra Pradesh
2) Online Deal and Coupon Aggregation site
Also, I am moving to my personal domain and you could also see this post at http://blog.budigelli.com/index.php/2007/06/14/aspnet-url-re-writing-and-postback-problem-solution/
-Cheers,
Microsoft Popfly Alpha
I was working on a project and happen to go to the “Start Page” on my Visual Studio and noticed this Microsoft Popfly Alpha under Visual Studio Headlines.
As a technology enthusiasts, I ended up on http://www.popfly.ms and puzzled to see no information on the home page and liked the simple page.
You could Watch the Popfly screencast and it is invite only right now. I have requested for an invitation and waiting for a response. still waiting 🙂
Any how, it appeared to be cool application and looking forward for playing with it soon. It has a Visual studio plugin with which I hope you could write custom apps to upload to Popfly site.
-Cheers
AJAX Usability Question when the screen is being updated
I am working on a simple web application that aggregates RSS from different Online Deal Site in to one place. One of the things I wanted to do was to have one page and load the RSS details in to an Update Panel. I know Update Panel is not the best when it comes to performance but it does its job and with proper caching on the server side, it is very good for my purpose. And more over this blog is not about the merits and/or de-merits of UpdatePanel but on Usability from an end user perspective.
I was using “UpdateProgress” from AJAX control tool kit and it is working very well with simple “update message” while the update panel is being processed. But, there are times when there is not any delay and the “Progress Bar” is not coming up. This may not be the desirable condition as user might not recognize that the screen has new information.
So, I needed some thing more to say that the screen has been updated. I looked in to “UpdatePanelAnimationExtender” to work with the condition. This Extender supports Animations while the screen is being updated and after the update.
<cc1:UpdatePanelAnimationExtender ID=”UpdatePanelAnimationExtender1″ runat=”server” EnableViewState=”false” TargetControlID=”UpdatePanel1″>
<Animations>
<OnUpdated>
<Sequence>
<EnableAction Enabled=”true” />
<Color AnimationTarget=”UpdatePanel1″
Duration=”.5″
z-index=”5″
StartValue=”#FFCC99″
EndValue=”#FFFFFF”
Property=”style”
PropertyKey=”backgroundColor” />
</Sequence>
</OnUpdated>
</Animations>
</cc1:UpdatePanelAnimationExtender>
In addition to this I could have another animation to show while the target update panel is being updated with entry like
<OnUpdating>
</OnUpdating>
But I am not sure if this would inform the intended message to the end user! So I have decided to go in-between route. Show the “Progress Bar” while the update panel is being updated and show a simple color transition when the panel is being updated.
To outline the code is looks something like this
<asp:UpdatePanel id=”UpdatePanel1″>
<ContentTemplate>
<asp:UpdateProgress ID=”UpdateProgress1″ runat=”server”>
<ProgressTemplate>
<div class=”ProgressClass”>
Please Wait While the Page is Loading…
</div>
</ProgressTemplate>
</asp:UpdateProgress><asp:GridView>
</asp:GridView>
</ContentTemplate>
</asp:UpdatePanel>
<cc1:UpdatePanelAnimationExtender TargetControlID=”UpdatePanel1″>
</cc1:UpdatePanelAnimationExtender>
You could find more about these controls here
-Thanks,
Creating Temporary Projects in Visual Studio 2005
I read about creating temporary project in Visual Studio some time ago and kind of forgot about it. Few days ago, I needed to create a temp project for trying out something really quick.
There is a setting in Visual Studio that lets you create projects in temp directory and not save all the directory structure in to your main folder structure.
Follow these steps in Visual Studio 2005
Tools -> Options -> Projects and Solutions ->
and uncheck “save new projects when created” check box.
Good Luck…
Windows DreamScene for Vista
I have tried Windows DreamScene before but have not noticed the resources it is consuming. To day I was browsing around and landed on Microsoft Silverlight Wallpaper Section.
I went ahead and got the DreamScene from there and noticed that my computer usage has gone up about 15%. I quickly went back and changed my background to a static wallpaper image and saw the CPU usage going down.
Do I need a wallpaper, I know it moves, that consumes 15% of my Intel Core2 Duo processor, 2GB Ram laptop? I guess not!!!
Error: "Sys" is Undefined error
Please visit my new blog at budigelli.com and see the same Error: “Sys is Undefined error” post.
I was playing with AJAX enabled applications for some time but not really done any thing major yet. I was working on a small project that required me to add some AJAX functionality using simple updatepanels. I dropped the necessary controls like scriptmanager and updatepanel in to the page and added the references to System.Web.Extensions.
I ran the application and ran in the error message mentioned above.
Error: “Sys” is Undefined Error
I read some blogs and added another reference to “System.Web.Extensions.Design” and added some
<handler> tags to the web.config file.
Nothing seemed to work and I still had the issue.
I got smart at this time and created a new AJAX enabled web site in Visual Studio and copied the web.config file over to my existing application.
The error message is gone!!!
XmlDataSource databinding xML file to data-bound controls like DataView and DataList
I have pulled in few resources on couple of ways we could databind an XML file to a Data-Bound controls using XmlDataSource.
Basically the idea is to be able to bind an XML file, either a physical XML file or XML formatted String using XMLDataSource.
1) This article from MSDN talks about how to bind an external (physical) XML file to a TreeView Control. These Concepts are same for all the other data-boundable controls like DataView, DataList, etc
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/494y92bs(vs.90).aspx
You can see how you could simply bind the XML file, Transform it before binding, and using XPath to filter further.
One thing I think its missing is reading/binding values form an XML node attribute value.
Taking further the examples mentioned in the above article, assuming you have an XML attribute, “ID” for Person node, in the databinding columns you could read/bind it as
<asp:TreeNodeBinding DataMember=”Person” TextField=”ID” />
You are specifying the name of the attribute for “TextField” instead of the “#InnerText” that read the InnerText of the Node.
2) We could also bind an inline XML string using XmlDataSource as discussed in this article from another MSDN article
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228250(vs.80).aspx
-Hope it helps…
OneCare Firewall Problem-Solution!
Yesterday, I have installed Vista and my Internet stopped working. You could find that post here.
The problem is not with Vista but with the Security Software I am using, Live OneCare from MS.
Apparently there is a problem with OneCare firewall that prevents Internet connection
The solution I found out was
“The only solution I have found so far is to turn off the OneCare firewall (until they release a fix) and to turn on the regular Windows Firewall. It warns you against this and my OneCare is now red, but I can connect to the Internet through my wireless router.“
from a forum post.
-Cheers
ASP.NET, AJAX, Web Services, Vista, Visual Studio, and everything but personal! 