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.

Working locally (both IE & FF), only working in FF on live server

I just got my personal website (link) updated with some Atlas enabled stuff, right there on the front page you can do "Show Different Image" in the top left or use the Calendar's left and right arrows to go through the months without postback.... but... as the subject says

Running on my laptop here: Atlas CTP installed, using studio's built in web server:
- All functions work in both browsers (IE 6, FF 1.5.0.4)

Up on my web server: Atlas CTP installed, IIS 6.0
- FF works 100%, but IE spews javascript errors on page load

And it's weird, one time i get one error (and this is the common one, btw that line # shown doesn't have anything!):

Other times, IE is totally confused! (i do not have that many lines in that page needless to say)

I've already tried seeing what's going on with Fiddler, not sure what i am exactly looking for, but all looks well in that tools... and just for good measure i uninstalled Atlas on my server and reinstalled it, that didn't help things either

Any ideas? (link again)

So i got by this problem by installing theMicrosoft Script Debugger and seeing what IE was whining about and it was the javascript for Google Analytics causing the above problems (although it makes *no* sense why it worked 100% in FF)

So now I have the "css refresh" problem where IE/Atlas is working, but the whole page's CSS refreshes, i swear i saw a blog post by someone at Microsoft to fix it... gotta track that down