For those of you interested in the new features available in Visual Studio 2008 and ASP.NET 3.5 you might find the latest article on Scott Guthrie’s blog useful. As ever it’s excellent quality and comes straight from the horse’s mouth.

The article concerns the new ASP.NET Control Extenders derived from the System.Web.UI.ExtenderControl base class. These extenders allow you to add additional functionality, most usually AJAX of JavaScript user interface enhancements, to existing controls that you’ve already declared on your ASP.NET page. They provide a very neat method of keeping your UI code separate from your business logic. Scott provides a fully worked example of just the right length to make excellent lunch-break reading.

There’s an updated version of the shared-source controls within the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit that’s just been released.

Those that know it will just want to go here. Those that don’t will want to read this (and look at the samples in the left-hand column), or perhaps be happy just to understand that the Control Toolkit is a collection of shared-source controls hosted on CodePlex and created by both Microsoft and non-Microsoft developers.

There’s an interesting account of a recent round-table discussion between representatives of the Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera browser-developement teams about the possible future introduction of a <video> HTML tag amongst other things. All under the moderation of Douglas Crockford from Yahoo!

Given the increasingly rich nature of the net it makes for interesting reading.

You’ll find details on Bertrand Le Roy’s ASP.NET AJAX/Atlas weblog here. It

Apropos of nothing, I discovered that the Wii uses Opera as its browser technology from this discussion. I’m not sure why this brightened my day, but it did.

Here’s a useful link for anyone getting to grips with ASP.NET AJAX. Microsoft Learning have produced a set of free resources that are available for online access here. The content is free for a year. All you need is a Windows Live ID.

The course provides you with three modules – an overview, evaluation and additional materials – that are presented in a JavaScript viewer needing the MSXML add-in (this caused some problems for innitially and IE7 doesn’t like the MSXML add-in!)

Once loaded the materials are quite interesting. If you’re looking for a rapid low-level introduction to ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 this could be just the thing to get you started.

(ASP.NET AJAX is being given greater design-time support in Visual Studio ‘Orcas’ later in the year, so check-back as these features aren’t currently mentioned).

I saw this on Scott Guthrie’s blog and – after a quick look – just had to pass it on. Joe Stagner has completed his update of all the ‘How Do I’ videos on the asp.net site to work with ASP.NET AJAX 1.0.

Continuing this week’s theme of catching up on posts I should have spotted during the last two weeks of December, here’s an interesting one from Somasegar:

It’s been a busy 24 hours!

The RC of ASP.NET AJAX shipped last night, and is now available to download from the Microsoft site.

Looking at the changelog whitepaper there have been a fair few bits and pieces moved about. The RC is being offered alongside a ‘Futures’ CTP. Together they comprise all of the functionality that was available in earlier CTP releases (the RTM release has a cut-down feature set; you’ll have to wait until ‘Orcas’ in 2007 to get the whole package).

A couple of quick gotchas:

• The ASP.NET AJAX namespace has been changed from Microsoft.Web.Extensions.dll to System.Web.Extensions.dll with the server functionality moving from Microsoft.Web to System.Web (this is to make upgrading to ASP.NET ‘Orcas’ easier, since the namespaces won’t need to change again – you’ll just select the preferred runtime in web.conf).


• There’s now a true ASP.NET AJAX template available from File | New Projects in VS 2005, so you can start building ASP.NET AJAX applications directly.


• Something’s changed within the globalisation support, but I’ve not worked that out yet; Scott Guthrie provides a pointer on his blog.

Linked to my previous post, the first “WPF/E” CTP has been released today, too. You can find details, including some very nice looking example code on Scott Guthrie’s blog.