Introducing the RadInputManager control for ASP.NET AJAX

Last week the ASP.NET team released a Beta of Q3 2008 for RadControls ASP.NET AJAX.  You can download it from http://www.telerik.com/community/forums/thread/b311D-bgmcha.aspx  , and run examples built with it on the online samples page here http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax-beta/Controls/Examples/Default/DefaultCS.aspx.  The Q3 2008 will be shipped with a new server control - RadInputManager. The RadInputManager offers an easy and intuitive way to extend a standard ASP.NET TextBox.

Sometimes web apps will contain, for whatever reason, a large number of Input controls that can significantly impact the page performance. A great solution in these cases is to use RadInputManager. The big benefit with this control is that it can significantly reduce the overall download size of the HTML.  This can provide some really nice performance and load-time wins on pages.

The RadInputManager contains four types of settings which could be added:

• telerik:TextBoxSetting - the targeted textbox will exhibit behavior like a normal RadTextBox
• telerik:NumericTextBoxSetting - the targeted textbox will be accepting numeric input
• telerik:DateInputSetting - the targeted textbox will be accepting input in a date format
• telerik:RegExpTextBoxSetting - the targeted textbox will be accepting characters corresponding to a specified regular expression

I compared 300 NumericTextBox(RadInputManager) to another leading Numeric Input controls  to check how their performance compared:

Page Load-Time (300 Input controls)

Maximum Input Controls on the page

You can learn more about RadInputManager form the following help articles:

• Introduction to RadInputManager
• Using RadInputManager
• Design-Time Support
• Getting and Setting Values

So check out the Beta of Q3 2008 for RadControls ASP.NET AJAX and let me know whether you plan to use the RadInputManager control in your project.