WCSF Guidance Bundles Presentation in Sarasota
by David Hayden, Sarasota .NET Developer
I gave a presentation last night to the Sarasota .NET Developer Group on 3 of the new guidance bundles in the Web Client Software Factory ( WCSF ) v2.0:
I have all 3 of these controls successfully running in production applications and am quite happy with the experience they bring to the applications - especially the ServerSideValidationExtender which is invaluable with the PropertyProxyValidator Control in the Validation Application Block.
I did the presentation using Visual Studio 2008, .NET 3.5, and using AJAX Control Toolkit v 3.0.11119.0. There has not been an official release of these bundles for use with the above configiuration, but everything went off without a hitch. I also showed off the ASP.NET 3.5 ListView, DataPager and LINQ To DataSets during the presentation.
The design surface was as follows. The ServerSideValidationExtender does not show up in the image because it is located within the ASP.NET 3.5 ListView's InsertItemTemplate:
Although hard to detect from an image, the RealTimeSearchMonitor Control monitors both the Contact and Country TextBoxes for changes, which kicks off an Asynchronous PostBack on the UpdatePanel to get new data based on the text entered into the textboxes. This provides live filtering ASP.NET AJAX style:
When entering text into the Country TextBox, the ContextSensitiveAutoCompleteExtender sends both the data entered into the Country AND Contact TextBoxes to provide logical country choices to the user to help narrow the real-time search functionality. A CountryLookupService Web Service gets the information and returns valid country choices.
When selecting Insert Mode, the ServerSideValidationExtender offers responsive server-side validation in the background for the PropertProxyValidator and CustomValidator Controls without a traditional postback to provide real-time validation of user input:
It is hard to beat such a rich user experience using ASP.NET AJAX without any javascript code being written by me in the page! Visual Studio 2008 provides Javascript Debugging, but do we really want to use it :)
I'll be talking about this and other bundles at the Day of Patterns & Practices in Tampa, Florida on Thursday, January 31, 2008.
Check out my screencasts for additional information.
Thanks for attending last night and have a great weekend!