Wishtlist? Yahoo UI Ext like Toolkits

Hey all,

I'm just saying.. and it's my personal opinion. In most cases, I don't find most of the Ajax control toolkit useful in my every day apps. The only ones I see that are really useful to me are ModalPopup, Accordion, mabye Calednar, but other than that, it doesn't contribute much to the end user experiences. I feel like it's a bunch of random old javascript library got wrapped in .net controls. (No pun intended) What we have is cool, just not so useful (again just my perosnal feeling)

I wish Ajax Control Tool Kit could actually serve some real stuff, real GUI componets like Grids, Dialogs boxes, Tabs, u know, the stuff you see in windows. Take a look at the Yahoo GUI Ext Grid (resize, drag/drop column, edit in place)
http://www.yui-ext.com/deploy/ext-1.0-alpha3/examples/grid/edit-grid.html

Tabs
http://www.yui-ext.com/deploy/ext-1.0-alpha3/examples/tabs/tabs-adv.html

Menu
http://www.yui-ext.com/deploy/ext-1.0-alpha3/examples/menu/menus.html ( okay, we can wrap out menu control inside the updatepanel, this just serves as an example)

Even a FeedViewer using a composite of others

http://www.yui-ext.com/deploy/yui-ext/examples/layout/feed-viewer.html

These are the Gui componets that actually helps our user experiences and are commonly used. I guess I'm just trying to say if we can focus a bit more on the real stuff, it will be SO MUCH more useful to the MS Ajax suite. I hate the fact others are beating us to it and I have to use MS ajax on the backend while using others on the front end.

Hmmm...interesting post!

I don't totally agree with what you are saying as I think a lot of the stuff in the toolkit at the moment provides a good foundation of AJAX controls (although admittedly there are some that I will never use). However, it would be nice to see some richer controls like the Feed Viewer example that you provided which really give the toolkit the wow factor..."the wow is now" or something like that ;-)

The toolkit already has Tabs and you can do Menus as you say. A rich AJAX grid control should be right up there though I reckon. There is acontrol wishlist that shows what is on the radar at the moment for the dev team and you can always make suggestions in CodePlex and drum up some votes to get priority.

I think it is a case of playing catch-up with the other AJAX stuff out there but the advantage of the MS toolkit is that it is so nicely integrated with the ASP.NET framework and with great serverside support for the controls too. I'm really encouraged by this project but it maybe just needs a bit more resourcing to shift it up a gear??

Thanks for your feedback Liming.

If you take a look at the latest version of the toolkit we have added a newTabs control. Thedropdown extender may serve your menu requirement. We have anajax grid item very highly demanded on our issue tracker. The feedviewer is a great idea. We just discussed this today with one of our contributors, Jim Zimmerman, who is here for the MVP summit. You can alwayscreate a new work item for it and we will let the community decide.

Please let us know if you have more detailed comments and we can discuss possible solutions to help make the toolkit more useful for you.

Kirti

Hey guys,

Thanks for your reply. I was just trying to compare the toolkit with others, and it was the "wow is now" moment. Didn't know there was this wiki of feature requests before, lots of good stuff there and it made me feel really comfortable to know what might be coming back :)

Thanks again.