Today I was profiling the initialization time of RadTreeView for ASP.NET Ajax and found out that the biggest bottleneck was traversing the DOM tree. The code looks something like this:

I tested with 10000 elements and in IE7 I got about 25000ms whilst in FireFox the total time was around 33ms (Core 2 Duo @ 2.33GHz). Quite a difference if you ask me.

I thought that there may be some IE specific method/property which could perform better and I dug into MSDN. And ...

ASP.NET Dynamic Data has just gone official with the SP1 release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. We have just released updated version of our Dynamic Data bits which is tested against the official release and has few minor improvements (such as implementation of the DataControl property). Get it from here.

In my previous blog post I told you how the Web Service load on demand mode of RadTreeView delivers the best performance. A logical question arises - why we have the other load on demand modes (server side postback and callback) if they do not perform on par with the Web Service mode. The answer is not that obvious. The truth is every load on demand mode has its pros and cons. The following table describes visually the load on demand modes according to three criterions - performance, templates support, ease of implementation.

A common scenario for a treeview control is to populate it with lots of nodes. Adding a few thousand nodes initially is not a good idea though. Think of all the rendered HTML. Even rendering a few thousand strings (without any extra markup) will result in a few megabytes of HTML. That's where load on demand comes into play. RadTreeView supports three different types of load on demand: web service, server side callback and server side postback. From those the server-side postback mode is least efficient in terms of performance because it postbacks and updates the whole page. ...

We have just published a new update of our Dynamic Data bits. We fixed a bug which could cause possible duplication of items in RadComboBox (in the ForeignKey editor). The zip also includes the latest official release of RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax. You can download the bits from here.

Two days ago Bertrand Le Roy announced the first preview of ASP.NET Ajax 4.0. If you haven't read its roadmap you can check it out here. Lots of cool stuff is coming out - client-side templates, bindings, fluent client-side API (similar to jQuery) and more.

Things are a bit hectic here because of the Q2 2008 release. Nevertheless Vlad and I managed to prepare two demo pages demonstrating how to use the client-side templates introduced in the ASP.NET Ajax preview with RadGrid and RadTreeView (yes it was that easy). Both controls are bound to web services and the client-side ...

In this post I will show you how to troubleshoot Web Resource related problems and how to deal with them.

If you are using an ASP.NET server control with rich client-side behavior it is likely built to utilize web resources. Sometimes your page loads and that rich server side control does not work at all - the tree view does not expand, the grid cannot sort etc. Most of the times this is because the JavaScript files of those controls have failed to load. If your browser is configured to prompt on JavaScript errors you may see the following error ...

I this post I will try to explain the difference between those three commonly used properties. Each property is described in a separate section. Attached you can find a sample web site as well as two screenshots visually depicting the difference between the ID, ClientID and UniqueID properties.

 

ID

The ID property is used to assign an identifier to an ASP.NET server control which can be later used to access that control. You can use either the field generated in the codebehind or pass the value of the ID property to the FindControl method. There is a catch though ...

SharePoint

We recently pulled out a sample SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) site which shows RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax working in SharePoint environment. You can check it out by going to http://sharepoint.telerik.com. This site is a SharePoint Publishing portal. We have modified the master page and replaced the default navigation controls with RadTabStrip and RadPanelbar. The required steps are described in detail in our online documentation. The Corporate section of the SharePoint is utilizing a different master page which incorporates RadMenu and RadTreeView.

RadEditor for MOSS also got a major update - go check Stoyans’s blog post for more info.

Also we prepared three demo ...

We have been working for some time to integrate RadGrid in the ListDetails page template. I am pleased to announce that this is now a fact. You can use a modified version of ListDetails.aspx bundled with RadGrid. See for yourself:



You can download the bits from here. They are tested with the latest Dynamic Data bits which you can grab from here.

I would like to thank David Ebbo for his continuous support and help. Also a big thank you to my colleague Vlad (our local RadGrid expert) who provided invaluable assistance with the technical implementation.