Adding Google Chrome to ASP.NET AJAX

12/15/2008 – Two things to update:

First, sources at Microsoft confirmed this bug for me and said that a fix was already completed for v-next. I’m not sure when the next release will take place; if it will be with VS 2010 or sometime earlier, but they have it fixed.

Second, Jason Kealey has a fix that is less intrusive than the one I suggested here. You can find it here

Since the rest of the tech-world is talking about and trying Google Chrome, I thought that I’d give it a whirl and see how it interacted with ASP.NET AJAX. I’ve worked on a couple of ASP.NET AJAX applications for work (including a public website: http://showcase.costar.com) and have a bunch of small test application that I’ve written for other purposes and was curious to see how those held up when accessed with Chrome. For the most part, with the smaller applications the browser worked as expected. I had almost no layout issues (as we program for IE6, IE7, FF2, and FF3) and almost no JS problems. But, when I ran ShowCase, which uses UpdatePanels to load large swathes of a page and in doing so loads external scripts dynamically, the application broke when accessing the mapping portion of the application. Since I was responsible for this part of the application, I needed to investigate further.

.NET 3.5 SP1 Doesn’t Provide Composite Script Registration from an IScriptControl (out-of-the-box)

Note: Below the following little story, there’s a work around that I came up with so if you’re looking for help, jump down a bit.

The Story

A story of despair. Here’s how my evening went.

Act I Scene I: I just downloaded and installed the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 / 3.5 SP1 and I’m excited to take a look at how to use the Script Combining mechanism. I’ve been using the ToolScriptManager’s script combining ability for a while now, and while it is okay, it has its quirks and I was hoping the one in .NET 3.5 SP1 would be better.

Act I Scene II: I notice that the ScriptManager has a new templated section called CompositeScript. This is the spot I need to investigate closer.

Advanced ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls for .NET Framework 3.5 Released!

Phew … it’s out.

This past week, Adam’s and my book: Advanced ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls for .NET Framework 3.5 released to online retailers. It should be available in your brick & mortar stores either later this week or earlier next week. If anybody’s got any questions about it, pass them along!!

Advanced ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls

Update: Fixing Sys.Application.initialize

See this post for the latest solution. This one has a small problem with it.

Yesterday I posted an entry where I wrote about an initialization problem in the AJAX Library portion of ASP.NET AJAX. Today, having a few spare minutes and already having found a few entries on the setTimeout problem which I linked to yesterday, I decided to do a bit more research on the window.onload problem and see how other libraries had gotten around the issue. I started with JQuery because it’s next on my list of AJAX libraries to become familiar with. So I downloaded the library, opened Visual Studio, and took a look around (don’t you love the open source nature of JS?!).

When Sys.Application.initialize Causes Operation Aborted in IE

As you might already know, I’m a power user of ASP.NET AJAX. I’ve been using it in large commercial projects for over three years and I’ve come to love JavaScript and be somewhat of an ASP.NET AJAX expert. In fact, I even co-authored a book on ASP.NET AJAX Server Control development with my bud Adam Calderon if that helps lend me some credence.

Force Virtual Earth Road Style Maps to Shaded Style

With Virtual Earth 6.1 there’s a new map style called Shaded that places topographical information on the map in the road view. It’s sort of a combination of Aerial and Road styles and is set to replace the Road view. In fact, maps.live.com uses the new Shaded map style instead of the previous Road view so whenever you think you’re viewing the Road style you’re actually viewing the Shaded style.

ASP.NET AJAX Localization Slides and Code

A while back I promised a three-part series on ASP.NET AJAX Localization. I wrote Part 1, but wasn’t entirely happy with the way it turned out; primarily because I was still learning Localization. I’ve been chugging along with writing my ASP.NET AJAX Control Book since then with a couple of posts on a JavaScript Stack Trace and a JavaScript Error Publishing Control since that first post, and haven’t really gotten back to finish the promised Part 2 and Part 3.

Well, I’m not really sure when I’m going to get back to writing the full posts, but I recently put together a slide deck and some code examples on ASP.NET AJAX Localization for a presentation at work. I’m pretty happy with the way they turned out so I thought I’d post them and let anybody take a look at it.

• MSDN Code Site
• Slide Deck (Office 2007)
• Slide Deck (Office 2003)
• Source Code (VS 2008)