It’s always cool to see how the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX work together. Today I saw a question from a customer asking if the RadRotator can be used to create a menu similar to that on the Experts Exchange web site. If you’re unfamiliar with their menu, it’s got a lot of options in it. Because there are so many menu choices they decided to make the menu interactive, adding a button to the right-hand side of the menu which, when clicked, replaces the existing menu options with another set.

Using this approach means you no longer have to be concerned about having...

The RadRotator is a control that is easily overlooked in the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX suite. It is not one of the more compelling controls like the RadGrid or the RadEditor, but it certainly provides a key set of functionality that is important in order for Telerik to claim that our suite is the most complete ASP.NET AJAX suite on the market. I’d like to take some time to show you what we have done to make the RadRotator a control that makes it easy for you, dear developer, to add rich functionality to your web applications.

Overview

The RadRotator for ASP.NET AJAX is...

Last week we got an interesting request from a customer of ours – he wanted to add several RadCharts in the RadRotator control and to implement custom slideshow. The idea was so appealing that I decided to shoot a quick blog about it. We already have similar image slideshows and I must say it is a pretty cool way to give your WinForms app a modern style and appeal:
http://www.telerik.com/community/code-library/submission/b311D-bdhadm.aspx

Even though it is very easy to add RadChart directly to the rotator (by using RadHostItem), RadRotator performs much better with images and/or other windowless RadItems. This is why...

My colleague Todd Anglin has already written a post about how to create a rotator control dynamically - you can read it here - How to Create RadRotator Programmatically. Unfortunately, this code in that post is for the old RadRotator control and if you try to use it in the new ASP.NET AJAX version, you will notice that it will not compile. Fortunately, you can quickly fix that. Here is what you need to change:

FrameTemplate - this property has been replaced with ItemTemplate

RadRotatorFrame - this object has been replaced with RadRotatorItem

After you update the above names, you should be able...

As you already know, the upcoming RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX Q2 2008 release will add a new control to the suite - the RadRotator. If you are familiar with the RadRotator control from the classic ASP.NET controls suite, you will be glad to know that it is now included in the new Ajax suite as well.

 

One important change I would like to talk about is how the new rotator works with XML data. The classic rotator control had a property called ContentFile, which allowed the developer to specify a XML file to use as a datasource for the rotator frames....