AJAX Series Part 1: Building a Web Applications with Third-party Controls in Real Time

First of all, I want to thank everyone that joined us for the first part of this ASP.NET AJAX Webinar Series! There was a great turnout, and from the look of the comments you guys enjoyed the material as well! Keep in mind that next Tuesday, August 23rd, the second part of the series takes place at 11 AM EST (-5 UCT) so set up your reminders now :)

As mentioned during the webinar I wanted to follow up with a blog post containing the answers to all of the questions that popped up during the presentation. If your exact question isn’t included here it is most likely due to another question asking something very similar (or the same thing), but all of the questions have been answered below:

• Would you be talking about how to “ajaxify” some of the RadControls in the upcoming webinars?
  This is planned to be included in the performance section of the third webinar.

• Will the project and source files for this project be available to download after the last webinar so we can tweak and explore it?
  Yes, the full source code for the project will be provided after the third webinar is over.

• What defines the link between where the "ItemTemplate" is inserted into the “LayoutTemplate" (RadListView)?
  In the particular example for the webinar I am defining the LayoutTemplate to contain the start and end tags of an unordered list (<ul>). Now within this tag I am defining a placeholder (just a <div> in this case) and each ItemTemplate then contains a list item (<li>) element with my desired item setup. So, the LayoutTemplate allows me to define an overall layout which will contain all of my child elements (my items) while my ItemTemplate allows me to specify what each item will look like.

• Please point out any VS add-ins you might be using, I am always on the lookout for helpful tools while developing.
  Although not a question what was noted here and there during the webinar was the usage of Telerik JustCode, a code analysis and refactoring tool. Aside from that the Visual Studio Extensions for the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX were also used when setting up the initial project.

• Will this webinar be posted on Telerik TV?
  This video will indeed be posted on Telerik TV. You can find the video right here.

• Will you be looking to integrate your product offering's through NuGet once NuGet for Commercial libraries is created?
  We are looking into the opportunity to see what we can do with NuGet and our controls.

• I heard you mention skinning your controls earlier, now that .Net 4 is out with nicer IDs and rendering of controls, what advantages do I have if I use Telerik controls for skinning?
  There are a couple of advantages that I can think of off the top of my head. One thing is that if you’re like me, not-so talented at designing, we already have quite a lot of pre-made skins that Telerik has created to make your application look fantastic. We also have the RadFormDecorator which allows you to skin several non-Telerik controls with our skins pretty easily. Now if you’re a bit more adventurous we have the Visual Style Builder which allows you to modify and tweak any of our existing skins, all in the same online application, to make it fit your overall design. It’s a pretty powerful tool and you can quickly get skins integrated this way. Finally, we always strive to keep the rendered HTML of our controls as minimalistic as possible and this simplifies skinning quite a bit.

• I noticed that when you were creating new methods, when typing the { } you would see dotted lines showing which bracket went with which. Is that part of JustCode?
  This is indeed part of JustCode! As I mentioned in the webinar it helps out tremendously when working with nested brackets!

• Will this SQL database be also in the download?
  Since the database was so simple (three unrelated tables) and the idea is to have this hooked into an OData feed I’m currently not planning on providing this SQL database. The second webinar will make it obsolete!

• Why aren't you use a UserControls for the footer?
  I might’ve just brushed past this way too quickly, but in my MasterPage I actually just have a simple <div> to handle my footer since it’s fairly static and I don’t necessarily need to take use of a UserControl.

• How did you get the magnifying glass on the SearchButton?
  As I mentioned this is all a part of the custom CSS that I have for the application. If I were to go into more detail regarding the overall CSS that would be a webinar all by itself. In this case I have a simple skin to modify the button to look like a magnifying glass. These files will also be included in the final version of the application that will be ready for download after the webinar series has concluded.

• Can you include RadStyleSheetManager and RadScriptManager and RadWindowManager in this or any of the next webinars?
  The RadScriptManager was already in use in this webinar, and currently the RadStyleSheetManager is not going to make an appearance in future webinars. The RadWindowManager might be able to get featured though.

• For the RadListView, Can I define templates dynamically?
  Yes this is possible. You have to inherit from the ITemplate interface, but as long as you do that you should be fine. We have a demo which you can find right here, which goes over this exact functionality.

• Are you going to create administration pages that control this store?
  This particular feature will not make it into the application unfortunately. The main focus of the next couple of webinars will be to go outside of the basics and add more functionality to the pages already included, as well as go more into overall performance tweaking and styling.

• The AutoPostBack on the RadButton has left me a bit curious, since I'm not used to see that attribute on button like controls.
  The AutoPostBack property is by default set to true and just means that the RadButton will automatically postback on a click. When this property is false the RadButton will not cause a postback and could be useful when you want to deal with the click on the client-side without a follow-up postback. I specifically set this so a change could be easily seen in later webinars.

I also wanted to mention that after a couple of snafus with the encoding of the webinar recording it is finally up for viewing on Telerik TV! Follow this link to see what we went through in the first webinar! Keep in mind that this presentation mainly went over the groundwork of creating the overall layout of the application as well as the basic flow between pages.

Missed the first webinar? Didn’t even know about this webinar series? Watch the video I mentioned above and sign up for the second and third webinars in this series to see how we can take use of OData, jQuery, HTML5/CSS3, and even how to deploy all of this to the cloud!

Just in case you missed any of the links above, or just scrolled all the way to the bottom ;), here are the important links:

Telerik TV Link
Webinar Registration Link