Taz Abdeali

ASP.NET Product Changes

[Infragistics] Murtaza Abdeali — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:37:00 GMT

Hi everyone, I want to bring you up to date on some important changes coming in the ASP.NET toolset for the 2010.1 release and beyond. But before I do that, I want to thank all of you for making the Aikido conversion a huge success for our ASP.NET product line. This major undertaking, which started in 2007 with the re-design and re-writing of all of our controls to support the modern capabilities in ASP.NET Ajax framework would not have been such a market leading success without the continued support from you. Thank you for keeping us on the right track and for continued feedback which is making the new Aikido controls the best performing Ajax controls on the market. Since the Aikido controls have matured, we have reached the threshold which allows us to take the next step. I am both happy and sad to announce that starting with the next release, 2010.1, we will no longer include any of our ‘classic’ controls in the toolbox.

This is the first step in the process of retiring the classic controls from the product, which allows us to go full swing with exclusive development on the Aikido based ASP.NET product line so we can continue to take the product innovation to the next level. Starting with the 2011.1 release (approximately a year from now) we will remove the classic controls from the product completely. However, you probably have multiple applications that you are still supporting, so the classic controls will still be available to you as a separate download package. Let’s take a look at what we have moving forward, and what is going to eventually be retired.

The following list of controls that are going to be part of the NetAdvantage ASP.NET toolset moving forward:

WebDataGrid
WebHierarchicalDataGrid
WebDatePicker
WebMonthCalendar
WebTab
WebExplorerBar
WebEditors
- WebTextEditor
- WebMaskEditor
- WebNumericEditor
- WebDateTimeEditor
- WebPercentEditor
- WebCurrencyEditor
WebDataMenu
WebDataTree
WebProgressBar
WebDropDown
WebDialogWindow
WebSplitter
WebImageViewer
WebSlider
WebHierarchicalDataSource
WebGauge
WebChart
WebSchedule
- WebDayView
- WebMonthView
- WebCalendarView
WebImageButton
WebCalcManager
WebSpellChecker
WebHTMLEditor
WebResizingExtender
(And any new controls we add to the product)

What controls are going to retire?
All the controls that we’ve re-written using the Aikido framework and some of which there are alternative for will be retired from the ASP.NET product. These include the following controls:

WebGrid
WebCombo
WebDateChooser
WebListBar
WebCalendar
WebToolbar
UltraWebTab
WebDataInput
- WebTextEdit
- WebMaskEdit
- WebNumericEdit
- WebDateTimeEdit
- WebPercentEdit
- WebCurrencyEdit
WebMenu
WebTree
WARP Panel
WebPanel
WebNavBar
WebWeekView
WebGridExcelExporter
WebGridDocumentExporter

What if I want to get to the classic controls?
All the controls will still ship as part of the product, you just won’t see them in the toolbox starting with the 2010.1 release. There will be help documentation that will give complete information on how to find those controls and use them if you need to. I will update this blog with more information on how to get to that help topic.

What if I find a bug in the classic control set?
We will be maintaining the classic control as part of our product line with regular service releases up to the normal expiration of the 2011.1 maintenance period, which is roughly 1 year after 2011.1 releases. After this service release, which falls sometime in early 2012, we will no longer fix bugs or including fixes as part of the normal service release schedule. To review our complete product lifecycle support policy, check this link:

http://www.infragistics.com/support/product-lifecycle.aspx#ProductLifecycle

In addition to this support lifecycle for the classic controls, we will not be adding support for new browsers or operating systems for the classic ASP.NET controls after the 2010.1 release. This does not affect the extensive OS and browser testing and support we have for the Aikido controls, so rest assured you will still see our controls work as expected in modern browsers like Internet Explorer, Fire Fox, Chrome and Safari.

When will you retire these classic controls?
Starting with the 2011.1 release, we will not be shipping any of the classic controls as part of the ASP.NET product. Our plan is to provide a stand-alone install for the Classic controls. We will maintain these controls like the rest of the product and will retire these controls completely when the maintenance period for 2011.1 ends, which as I mentioned earlier, ends up being early 2012. To review our complete product lifecycle support policy, check this link:

http://www.infragistics.com/support/product-lifecycle.aspx#ProductLifecycle

Where is the ASP.NET toolset going?
We are committed to our ASP.NET product, and we are committed to helping you be even more successful using the Infragistics ASP.NET tools. This change allows us to focus exclusively on the new, modern Aikdio based toolset, where we will continue to innovate - as well as maintaining our market leading data grid rendering performance. As we build out new controls which target modern, RIA scenarios, we will also continue to build more of the rich, high performing line of business controls which target modern browsers and enterprise applications. As usual, If you are looking for a feature that you don’t see in the product, make sure to let me know at murtazaa@infragistics.com.

Are you going to retire more controls in the future?
No, this is only a one time product change, and we are not planning on retiring any more controls from the product in future. At Infragistics, we take product changes like this very serious, and we understand the possible disruption it can have. We are doing this change with the utmost understanding that it could create some challenges for you. Please do not hesistate to let us know if you need help with anything, our team here will be happy to assist you.

If you have any questions on any of the above, please feel free to reach out to me at murtazaa@infragistics.com

Regards,

Taz.

AJAX Compression in 2010.1

[Infragistics] Murtaza Abdeali — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:45:00 GMT

Last week, Jason Beres put up an extensive road map of all the Products Infragistics will be shipping in the next couple of months. As you can see, these releases are going to be packed with all sorts of goodies. One of them is the new AJAX Compression module in ASP.NET’s 10.1 release. This new feature will compress Ajax responses generated by the server when using any of our Aikido-based controls. The browser will then de-compress the response on the client and process it further. When you turn on this feature, you immediately get the following benefits.

Bandwidth Savings: When a response is GZIPed, the bandwidth used by the Ajax response will decrease automatically. Your bandwidth capacity will improve and you will be able to serve more users at any given time, without clogging the network. If you are using a hosting provider that charges based on the amount of data transfer, you will now have less usage on the bandwidth, hence saving you money.
Time Savings: When the response size goes down, the round trip of an Ajax request from the server goes down with it. Based on how far the server is from the client machine on the network, the Ajax response time to the client will decrease by that much because the response is compressed and is faster to reach its destination. This will make your end-users a bit happier and productive :).

To get a better understanding of this feature, let’s take a look at a very simple example. I have a WebDataGrid bound to the Invoices view(26 Columns X 2155 Rows) in NorthWind using SQLDataSource that has paging enabled. I am going to set up different page sizes in the WebDataGrid to monitor the round trip times as well the response sizes with and without Ajax compression. I am using FireFox 3.6 and FireBug to monitor the results. Also, my server is the same machine as the client.

Without Compression
WebDataGrid Page Size	Response Size (KB)	Round Trip Time (Secs)
20	50.6	1.18
50	81.1	1.14
100	140.9	1.23
200	261.8	1.4
500	627.7	2.13
1000	1228.8	4.32

With Compression
WebDataGrid Page Size	Response Size (KB)	Round Trip Time (Secs)
20	7.4	1.19
50	10.2	1.19
100	15.8	1.19
200	27.4	1.29
500	62.5	1.51
1000	121	2.12

If you chart the data above in a line chart showing the two different data series, you can clearly see the benefits you get when using the Ajax compression feature.

Ok, so now it is time to answer the million dollar question. What do I need to do to get all these performance gains? It is very simple, all you have to do is add the following HTTP module under your web.config section and now all the Ajax responses of the Aikido-based controls on your site will be compressed and you will get the benefits mentioned above.

...

</httpModules>

Just make sure your assembly version matches with the install version & build.

NetAdvantage for Web Client : ASP.NET 2009.2 Just Released!

[Infragistics] Murtaza Abdeali — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:27:00 GMT

The moment we all been waiting for has finally arrived. Gort has hatched, and his secret ingredients to build killer ASP.NET applications is used in all the new NetAdvantage for WebClient: ASP.NET 2009 Volume 2 controls shipped today. You can read about all the exciting new features in the toolset here. To check out the controls in action, visit the online samples browser and click on ASP.NET.

Here are some snaps from the samples browser that highlight some of the features of this release:

WebHierarcahicalDataGrid: Multi-Child Bands Display

WebSchedule: Multiple Resources View

WebSchedule: Multi-Day Event Banner

WebDataGrid: Column Fixing

WebHierarchicalDataGrid: Child Band Paging

WebDatePicker : Displaying Drop Down Calendar

WebMonthCalendar : With Localization Support

WebEditors : 6 type of editors controls with unique features

Shared AJAX Indicator

You can grab the latest bits from the download page. As always, please keep your feature requests and feedback flowing through productmanager@infragistics.com. To check out the videos on what’s new in this release, check out the media on the community site. To get help on any of our products, click here.

Rev up your servers, ASP.NET 2009.2 is coming next week

[Infragistics] Murtaza Abdeali — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:13:00 GMT

In just a week, Infragistics will be shipping the next volume of ASP.NET controls packed with a lot of new controls & features. If you have been following my blog posts, you might have idea of what will be included in the next version. If you need a re-cap, here are the links to previous posts announcing new controls we’ve been working on for this release.

WebHierarchicalDataGrid Features
Controls shipped in August CTP
Controls shipped in April CTP

As with every release, we pay close attention to the performance in the controls and dedicate substantial amount of time, research and development to make sure the controls provide optimal performance within ASP.NET applications. Here are some of the high level performance improvements that you will get in 2009.2.

WebDataGrid - Virtual Scrolling a Paged Grid

Paging and Virtual Scrolling are not something new to the web. Web Applications today use these patterns in different ways. Paging data lets you as a developer cut down the overall data size into multiple pages which helps with the initial page load time and still gives the end user access to all the data by navigating to different pages. On the other hand, Virtual Scrolling does similar things by not loading all the data at once within the UI and lazy load data on demand when the user performs a scrolling operation. In most of the grids out there in the market these features are supported in one fashion or the other and are isolated from one another, meaning you can either use a paged grid or a virtual scroll grid. In some of the grid implementations the scrollbar is merely another way of paging the grid.

Using the WebDataGrid in the next version, you can now enable both the features in the grid at the same time. So you can set pagination in the grid as you’d normally do using the paging behavior and now with virtual scrolling you can enable virtual scrolling on different pages in the grid. In other words, you can apply load on demand to your overall data source by paging and enable virtual scrolling on top of that. Let me use an example to compare what are the overall gains in terms of page performance and application usability when these two features are used together.

For the results below I have used “Orders” table from Northwind that contains 830 rows and 14 columns. I used page size of 200 records/page & virtual scrolling factor of 3, which means there will be 3 times the display amount of rows cached on the client for smooth scrolling experience.

Initial Page Size (Bytes)	Paging Response Size (Bytes)	Virtual Scrolling Response Size (Bytes)	Paging Enabled	Virtual Scrolling Enabled
677,639	-	-
253,859	353,142	-
65,003	-	20,273
65,748	35,277	19,588

Please note: If you are using a DataSource control that supports Paging like LinqDataSource or ObjectDataSource then it also means that the queries made to your back end source is also optimized to what is requested by the client, further improving your overall page life cycle & AJAX requests. There is also improvement in client rendering times as well as with any AJAX transaction made by the grid when using these two behaviors together. Based on your data you can tweak the behavior settings to maximize performance on your application pages.

JavaScript files further Minified and Compressed

This release we also focused on getting the JS files sizes smaller as much as possible for all the ASP.NET AJAX controls. We were using JSOB in the past as a tool to minify JS and this release we switched over to YUI. Using YUI over JSOB, the new JavaScript files are less in size over their release sizes in the past which will result in faster page load times. Just last week Microsoft also announced its own JavaScript Minification tool which we are researching at the moment.

To give you an idea of the minified sizes of JavaScript files in 9.2, check out this table:

Scripts FileName	Uncompressed (KB)	Jasob (KB)	YUI (KB)	Improvement

Framework Scripts
igCore.js	187	91	78	14.29%
igAnimation.js	18	10	9.1	9.00%
igDragDrop.js	53	24	21	12.50%
igDropDown.js	61	24	22	8.33%
igLayoutPane.js	4.6	2.6	2.3	11.54%
igResizeBehavior.js	19	11	10	9.09%

*WebDataGrid*
igWebDataGrid.js	91	59	51	13.56%
igWebDataGridActivation.js	21	15	12	20.00%
igWebDataGridBase.js	52	31	25	19.35%
igWebDataGridCellEditing.js	1.3	0.9	0.7	22.22%
igWebDataGridColumnFixing.js	74	50	41	18.00%
igWebDataGridColumnMoving.js	40	29	25	13.79%
igWebDataGridColumnResizing.js	34	26	21	19.23%
igWebDataGridDeleting.js	4.1	2.4	2.1	12.50%
igWebDataGridEditBase.js	28	19	17	10.53%
igWebDataGridEditing.js	18	11	9.9	10.00%
igWebDataGridEditorProviders.js	24	16	13	18.75%
igWebDataGridFiltering.js	69	45	40	11.11%
igWebDataGridPaging.js	4.9	2.9	2.5	13.79%
igWebDataGridRowAdding.js	8.1	5.1	4.5	11.76%
igWebDataGridRowEditingTemplate.js	22	14	13	7.14%
igWebDataGridRowSelectors.js	13	7.2	6.2	13.89%
igWebDataGridSelection.js	63	44	37	15.91%
igWebDataGridSorting.js	13	8	6.5	18.75%
igWebDataGridVirtualScrolling.js	20	14	12	14.29%

*WebHierarchicalDataGrid*
igWebHierarchicalDataGrid.js	42	29	25	13.79%

*WebMonthCalendar*
igCalendar.js	72	41	36	12.20%

*WebDataMenu*
igDataMenuItem.js	13	7.6	6.7	11.84%
igWebDataMenu.js	66	38	34	10.53%

*WebDialogWindow*
igDialogWindow.js	54	35	32	8.57%

*WebDropDown*
igDropDown.js	200	92	82	10.87%

*WebImageViewer*
igImageViewer.js	104	70	63	10.00%

*WebSlider*
igSlider.js	47	27	24	11.11%

*WebSplitter*
igSplitter.js	46	28	24	14.29%

*Editor Controls*
igTextEditor.js	100	58	55	5.17%

*WebDataTree*
igWebDataTree.js	94	50	44	12.00%
igWebDataTreeNode.js	23	12	10	16.67%

Total	1804	1049.7	917.5	12.59%

WebHierarchicalDataGrid uses Pay to Play too!

Introduced with WebDataGrid in 2008 Volume 3, the patent pending architecture of the Pay to Play model in the ASP.NET AJAX WebDataGrid is now being used with WebHierarchicalDataGrid as well. What does that mean? You can enable the features that you want the WebHierarchicalDataGrid to support and it will generate its markup, client state and objects based on it. So, you don’t get unnecessary JavaScript code and bloated pages if you are not using a feature of the WebHierarchicalDataGrid that you don't want. Check out this video to learn more about it.

Stay tuned for the announcement on the website for our 2009 Volume 2 release of NetAdvantage for Web Client.

Using Pseudo-Classes to set Hover style on the WebDataGrid

[Infragistics] Murtaza Abdeali — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:42:00 GMT

Using Pseudo-Classes in CSS you can easily set hover appearance on any html element. Just specify the “<element>:hover” class to any element and you get a nice hover style attached to that element on the page. Since, all of the Infragistics controls use CSS styles for their look & feel; it is very easy to use pseudo-classes to target any of the control elements. CSS standard for “:hover” has improved over time to support all DOM elements, and today it is supported in all the modern browsers. However, it is not fully supported in older browsers, and by that I specifically mean IE6. IE6 supports “:hover” only for anchor tags. So, if you are using IE 6 and want to set hover appearance for element other than "<a>" then you have to use the old-fashion way of handling mouse event, and swaping element styles.

So, if your users have moved away from IE 6 and onto the newer browsers (lucky you!) and you want to use pseudo-class to set a hover style on the WebDataGrid row, you can place the following style in the grid’s style sheet or add it on the page.

tbody.igg_Item>tr:hover>td
{
background-color:Gray;
color: White;
}

Similarly, if you want to set a hover style on a cell you can use the style that will target a TD inside of a grid. Now, when you hover over cells, you get the style applied accordingly.

tbody.igg_Item>tr>td:hover
{
background-color:Gray;
color: White;
}

You can read more on the pseudo classes in CSS and its support for different browsers here. Pseudo classes are really powerful feature and help build stylable application with ease, which was really problematic in the old days of having to use JavaScript to capture mouse over and out events and apply/switch styles accordingly.

Enjoy!

Hierarchical Grid in 9.2... What’s the big Deal?

[Infragistics] Murtaza Abdeali — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 20:26:00 GMT

2009 volume 2 is going to be a huge release for ASP.NET. Infragistics’ promise to deliver the next generation of ASP.NET controls has been a great success so far. The benefits that the Aikido framework brings to the new ASP.NET AJAX controls are far beyond counting control features. Ability to reuse code across different controls, not only helps us deliver controls faster than ever before, but also makes the core well tested and brings consistency & functionality across the control suite. I will talk more about the ASP.NET 9.2 feature items in another blog, but in this post I want to talk about the biggest item of 9.2 which is of course, the new hierarchical grid control called WebHierarchicalDataGrid. As you can see we are introducing a new control instead of adding this functionality onto the WebDataGrid just because we want to make sure that your pages are kept simple, small and to the best performance possible. WebDataGrid is targeted towards displaying data from a flat structure and it does it well, adding the hierarchical rendering to it meant more “if” & “for loops” in the grid’s core, which in-turn would have added complexity to the grid controls inside and out. As a web page developer you know your data well and the control that would suit best for your data display needs, so we figured its best that you decide the grid you want to use on your pages.

This is the first release of the grid, and our engineering team has been heads down for the past 6 months and working hard to make sure we release the WebHierarchicalDataGrid with great features. As with any software project, time and resources are scarce and not only do we have to implement features, but also make sure they are quality assured. So, the grid will be packed with the following features when Web Client 2009 Volume 2 is released end of October:

• Multiple children bands display
• Self-Referencing data display
• Uses Pay to Play model - learn more
• Sorting
• Paging
• Rows Adding, Updating & Deleting
• Keyboard navigation
• Rows, Cells, Columns selection
• Load on Demand
• Expand/Collapse animations support
• Templated columns
• Hidden Columns
• Auto CRUD
• Auto-Detect column editors for in-cell editing

The list above may look similar to you, since the WebHierarchicalDataGrid inherits most of its features from the WebDataGrid. All the behaviors are supported on all of the grid levels, including paging. So, now you can have a grid that pages’ on root level as well as on the child levels. Stay tuned for more! In the upcoming weeks, I will be blogging more about the performance gains that you’ll get with the WebHierarchicalDataGrid, and talk more about why is it such a big deal for us and could be for your applications as well.

In the upcoming releases, we will be adding more features to the hierarchical grid, so please keep sharing your feedback. As always, you can email us at productmanager@infragistics.com or reach me directly murtazaa@infragistics.com

How can we make ASP.NET AJAX (Aikido) controls even better?

[Infragistics] Murtaza Abdeali — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:15:00 GMT

Those of you, who’ve been using our ASP.NET controls for over a year, may already be familiar with the Aikido framework. If not, you can check out the Aikido page to learn about the framework and the ASP.NET AJAX controls based on it. In this post I would like to open up to gather your feedback on thoughts about the design of these controls and what we could do more in the upcoming releases to make them even better.

We have been working on this framework for over two years. WebSplitter control, released in 2008 Volume 1 was the first Aikido control and since then all the controls we’ve shipped were based on this framework. Since 2008 Volume 3, we started targeting some major pain points from customers on controls that we’ve released in the past. For example, controls emitting html that is not completely XHTML complaint, relying heavily on ViewState, or having a steep learning curve. Remember that those controls are serving the ASP.NET market since ASP.NET 1.0, so they followed the best approach available at that time. As ASP.NET itself is going through its fourth major release and have matured a lot since then and with new standards and added support for UI controls, instead of re-engineering the old object model to address those pain points, we decided to take advantage of the ASP.NET AJAX stack that our Aikido framework uses and re-designed some of the controls from ground up to be able to use the latest and greatest technologies, be standard compliance and address those pain points.

In the upcoming release, 2009 Volume 2 of Web Client, the following is the list of controls you will see in the ASP.NET toolset that are based on the Aikido framework:

WebHierarchicalDataGrid
WebDataGrid
WebDataTree
WebDataMenu
WebDropDown
WebEditors
- WebTextEditor
- WebNumericEditor
- WebMaskEditor
- WebDateTimeEditor
- WebPercentEditor
- WebCurrencyEditor
- WebDatePicker
WebDatePicker
WebMonthCalendar
WebDialogWindow
WebImageViewer
WebProgressBar
WebSlider
WebSplitter
WebHierarchicalDataSource

We also release these controls as CTP before they make into the final product and it is great to hear feedback from you. If you want to be participate in providing feedback and help tailor the final product, please send me an email. I will let you know whenever we ship the latest bits. Also, let me know what you'd like to see in the upcoming releases of the product as well.

Please send your feedback at: murtazaa@infragistics.com

Thanks!

ASP.NET August 2009 CTP is Here!

[Infragistics] Murtaza Abdeali — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:50:00 GMT

I am excited to announce the August 2009 ASP.NET CTP. This release includes a new hierarchical data grid control and new features to the existing controls in the toolset, in addition to added funtionality to the controls we shipped in the last CTP. The new controls & features for this CTP are:

WebHiearchicalDataGrid: A fresh Hierarchical Data Grid control based our Aikido framework. You can display multiple child bands, configure child rows indentation, customize child grid headers and expansion buttons.

WebDataGrid (Auto-Detect Editors): No need to hook special editors anymore in the grid. Enable cell editing and the grid will read the datasource to use the best editor fit for the columns, based on their datatypes.

WebDataGrid (Column Hiding): You asked for it and now you got it! You can hide/show columns on client and server via a hidden property setting of a column object.

WebSchedule (Multi-Day Event Banner): When WebSchedule views display an all-day event that spans over multiple days, you can enable multi-day event banner to show a single banner in the day view (with multiple visible days) and/or month view. Now the users will see a single banner for their multi-day activities.

WebSchedule (Multiple Resources): Give you users more power by enabling multiple resources in any of the WebSchedule views. Now your users are not restricted to see a single resource’s activity, but you can specify the visible resources, and the WebSchedule will display all the activities that belong to those resources.

WebSchedule(Generic DataProvider): Do you have your own database setup or application layer that you want to use to serve to the WebSchedule views? Wait no more! The generic data provider is meant just for that. Use any database structure or custom collection, connect to the Generic Data Provider, specify your databindings, and the rest is all taken care by WebSchedule.

WebDataTree (Disable Auto-Checking): If you want to be in control when the users check or un-checks a tree node. You can now disable auto-checking and handle events for custom application scenarios.

Click here to get more information on this CTP & download. To check out these features in action, click here to view the samples browser. Since these controls are in CTP, you can get help via forums & to get started check out this video. To read more on controls from previous CTP, click here.

Try out the CTP today and if you have any feedback, please feel free to send it to me: murtazaa@infragistics.com

Enjoy!

Exporting in SharePoint using Excel or Document APIs

[Infragistics] Murtaza Abdeali — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:52:00 GMT

Recently a customer reported an issue with exporting the WebGrid in one of their SharePoint WebParts to Excel. As soon as the user exported WebGrid's data, the entire SharePoint page became unresponsive. All buttons and checkbox controls that were on the page didn’t respond when the user clicked on them once an export operation had happened on the page. As SharePoint developers know this well, debugging server-side code is not an easy task, and this issue seemed to be a client issue so it became extremely difficult to track down. The customer had reported this initially through our support and it has been looked into by development, but due to its nature we were not able to get to the bottom of it. Basically, we were reaching a point to make a final call on this as we couldn’t figure out if it was an issue on our part or had someting to do with SharePoint.

As a last resort, I wanted to see if anyone else ran into this issue, so I pinged my best friend, Google. It took me a while initially to explain it exactly what I was really looking for, but going back and forth a couple of times it came back with a search result that explained everything.

http://msmvps.com/blogs/laflour/archive/2008/06/06/page-events-stop-working-after-using-output-stream-for-binary-download.aspx

So, the issue happens anytime you do a binary write on a page that downloads a document on the client. Since there is no full page postback, the SharePoint page unregisters all the default html control events, but never hooks them back and the page is dead. Using the solution provided in the post, we were able to work around the problem for the customer.

Thanks to Michael Nemtsev for posting the solution, and to Google for making it easier to find :).

IE 8 Compatibility with NetAdvantage ASP.NET Controls

[Infragistics] Murtaza Abdeali — Wed, 27 May 2009 19:03:00 GMT

Update (06/26/2009): We have completed our testing with all of our ASP.NET controls against IE 8 and have fixed any issues we were able to find in the latest service release (build 2055) that shipped yesterday. Click here to download the service release.

So IE8 has been out for a couple of months now and it appears that some of you have already started testing your sites with IE 8, others may have even started supporting it, in this post I will talk about what we are doing to make sure all the NetAdvantage ASP.NET controls are ready for IE 8 as well.

Before I get into detail, I just want to give a little bit of background as to what our plans were for IE8. Last year, when we were planning for 2009 Volume 1 release (planned to ship first week of April), IE8 was still in beta. Expecting that it is going to release end of 2008 possibly early 2009 (giving us enough time to test) we had initially planned on testing and supporting IE 8 with our 2009 volume 1 release. As we all know by now that IE 8 didn’t release until MIX (Mid March) and while our product was already developed and was going into testing, IE 8 still stood in an RC state, not knowing when it will be released we had to make a last minute decision to pull IE 8 out from our testing to make sure we can run our regression tests against released set of browsers that most of the world was using at that moment. Right towards the end of our testing cycle, IE 8 RTMs and despite of our change of plans, we were able to do some level of testing against IE8 and fix any issues we were able to find in the time we had before the release.

Since our next release is scheduled for October 2009 and we normally introduce new browser support only during a release test cycle, this time around we didn’t want you to wait for it. So, right after the release, we started regression testing our 2009 Volume 1 ASP.NET controls. With the Service Release (formerly known as hotfixes) build 2040 that shipped today, we have completed our entire regression tests on all of the following controls in addition to any bugs that you have reported to us, so thanks for that. Click here to download the latest Service Release.

UltraWebGrid
UltraWebTab
WebCombo
UltraWebTree
UltraWebMenu
WebToolbar
WebHtmlEditor
WebListbar
WebDataTree
WebDataMenu
WebDialogWindow
WARP Panel
WebPanel
WebGroupBox

We are continuing to test remaining controls, but we strongly encourage you to report us any issues you find in IE8 so that we can make sure we include them when we release our next Service Release scheduled for next month. If you have any feedback on IE8 support or any other questions/suggestions in general regarding the product, please feel free to send it to me: murtazaa@infragistics.com

-Taz

ASP.NET April 2009 CTP Released

[Infragistics] Murtaza Abdeali — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:57:00 GMT

Seems like it was just yesterday we shipped 2009 Volume 1 of ASP.NET controls. As promised, today we released the next ASP.NET CTP. This CTP includes a set of new ASP.NET AJAX editors (6 of them), WebDatePicker, WebMonthCalendar and column fixing behavior in the WebDataGrid. To see the controls in action, check out the samples browser. Some highlights of this release are:

- WebDataGrid (Column Fixing) – The new Column Fixing behavior in the WebDataGrid supports both fixing to the left & right, with styling, button alignment & a styleable separator between the fix & unfix regions.

- WebEditors – Includes all the basic editors that you need for any type of data entry scenarios. They all come with spin buttons, null text, edit/focus style . The WebTextEditor also support multi-line text editing as well. They all support the usage of ASP.NET validators to validate user inputs. Mask editors and numeric editors also include locale support and input masks.

- WebDatePicker – Allows you to have a drop down month calendar control from which a user can pick a date. Comes with full vista-style keyboard navigation support with month/year selection.

- WebMonthCalendar – Full calendar display support with selection, weekdays, culture and ability to set custom styles for individual days.

To read more on what’s included in the CTP & download the bits click here. Please use forums for any support or feedback on these controls. To get started, check out this video.

Enjoy!

AppSettings for ASP.NET Controls

[Infragistics] Murtaza Abdeali — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:31:00 GMT

While you are still exploring the contents of 2009 Volume 1 release, in this post I will be talking about a couple of items that you might find useful. In this release, we’ve exposed an appsettings object that can help you in your day to day development and make some of the page level or application level tasks easier. This appsettings object contains a flag IsAjaxPostBack, this flag is set to true whenever an ajax call is being made by any of our ASP.NET AJAX control. This way you have one flag that you can check to filter out the code you do not want to run if a call is being made internally by a control.

It also contains an object for the AppStylingManager which holds all the settings and configuration for application styling. If you are using application styling, this object lets you enable/disable styling for your entire application using the EnableAppStying flag, or set the StyleSetPath and/or StyleSetName to change the look and feel. You can also use the Web.Config to set it as in the past.

It also has a CSSRegistry object which allows you to register your own CSS class in code and render it within your page. This helps when you don’t know if you will need a certain CSS class on the page, or want to convert an inline style to CSS. Let’s take a look at an example on how you can use the object to convert a WebControls.Style object to a CSS class on the page.

And when you run the page, you see the following CSS automatically added to your page. You can then apply this CSS style to any control or html element via a CSS property or a "class" attribute. The element or control will pick its appearance based on the CSS class you registered on your page.

We will be enhancing this object further and include more configuration settings that you can set on a application or page level. If you use a control level setting frequently that you wish was a one-time setting for your application or a page, or have any other suggestions, please feel free to send it to me at: murtazaa@infragistics.com

Happy Coding!

NetAdvantage for Web Client 2009.1 – What’s coming in ASP.NET?

[Infragistics] Murtaza Abdeali — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:24:00 GMT

We are about 2 weeks away from the RTM of NetAdvantage for Web Client 2009.1, so I wanted to give you all an update on what to expect when we ship!

We are shipping 4 newly designed controls, a JavaScript framework, performance enhancements & WebDataGrid column moving behavior.

No… I am not talking about our 2009 road map … this is all in the April 6th release of Web Client. If you think that sounds exciting, it’s just the beginning … continue reading …

This is our biggest ASP.NET release ever, our Aikido framework based on ASP.NET AJAX extensions has matured and we are proud to have numerous controls shipping in the next release based on our framework. All of the controls come with CSS based styling support, animations and cross browser support, including Google Chrome! Just because we like the extensions so much, we are going to refer these controls as ASP.NET AJAX controls. So, be sure to look for the lightest and the fastest when you download our next version of ASP.NET toolset. With so much to talk about I am not even sure where to start, so here is the list in no particular order:

WebDataTree: Add this light-weight ajax enabled Tree control on your page for navigation, or to make use of any of the complex features that this tree can support. A part from hierarchical view, you now have node selections, images, keyboard navigation, templating, checkboxes and load on demand capabilities.

WebDataMenu: Having a menu in a site is an essential control that most sites use today, allowing their users to navigate within the website. This WebDataMenu lets you take your end-user navigation experience a bit further. Use items as is for hyperlinks around your site, or use items as templates and you can pretty much put any content in there, allowing you to create a richer experience for your application users. It also comes with other menu items like separators, images, orientation settings, keyboard navigation and it can even be turned into a custom context menu.

WebDropDown: Just put about anything in the drop down area, this drop down controls knows no limits! WebDropDown control has a templateable drop down area, you can use it to show a simple list of items for your users to choose from like a drop down list, or fill it with complex control(s). When used as a drop down editor, it can give you the feature that the end-users today have come to expect, filtering, auto-suggestions, auto-completion, keyboard navigation, single and multiple selections... and so on.

WebProgressBar: A well-designed new control that can add more user friendliness to your web applications. Use the control to notify users of any process that you are running behind the scenes. Some of its features include animation support, tooltips & label highlighting.

WebDataGrid - Column Moving: This feature speaks for itself. We’ve added a new WebDataGrid behavior to allow re-ordering columns to enable your application users to customize how they view their data. They can simply grab a column header and place it in a different column order, its that simple.

Drag & Drop Framework: If you’ve used any of our ASP.NET AJAX controls that support feature which involves mouse dragging, well guess what, you’ve already have had a glimpse of the framework. We have added a lot more features to the framework and are releasing it as a stand- alone library so that you can use it for any drag and drop operations you want to implement within your browser to build richer applications. You can customize mouse cursors, drag elements, and it can work with any HTML DOM element, not just a Infragistics control! And remember, this is cross-browser supported as well.

So what’s next… keep an eye on our website and be sure to download and try out the 2009 volume 1 when it comes out, there is a lot more features included in each of these controls. Also, thanks for all the great feedback we’ve gotten from you all and please keep your suggestions coming.

Wait! We are not done yet. Right after the release, keep ASP.NET CTP page on your watch list, as you will be seeing our next CTP in just about weeks following the release with more exciting stuff. And of course, I can’t neglect Silverlight … which is part of your Web Client subscription. We just released a brand new March CTP based on Silverlight 3 with tons of updated features and new controls as announced on Devin's Blog. For more information and to download click here!

WebDataGrid - How to Import data from Excel & Export to Excel, PDF or XPS

[Infragistics] Murtaza Abdeali — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 22:32:00 GMT

If you’ve used our Excel or Document APIs, then you may already know where is post is headed. There have been numerous posts on how our Excel and Document APIs can be used to import and export data when working with our controls. In this post, we will focus on the newly released WebDataGrid control. Currently, it doesn’t have built-in support for exporting contents to Excel, PDF or XPS, ofcourse something that will be included in future. Here you can learn how to use the Excel API's load method to grab data from an excel sheet and display it within the WebDataGrid. Once the data is connected to the grid, you can then let the user do any grid operations like filter, sort, edit..etc. Once the user decides to export the displaying data, you can use the same API Engines to export the modified data and view back to Excel, PDF or XPS formats.

If you are only interested in learning how to export your data, you can skip the first section below.

Importing Data

Let’s start off by assigning some local variables that are going to help us accomplish the task.

//Create the temporary table to store data

DataTable myDataTable = new DataTable();

DataColumn myDataColumn;

DataRow myDataRow;

//MIN/MAX Values used to frame the working size of the Excel data to be imported.

int minCellRow = Int32.MaxValue;

int maxCellRow = Int32.MinValue;

int minCellColumn = Int32.MaxValue;

int maxCellColumn = Int32.MinValue;

Now, using an Excel sheet that has the NorthWind customer data, call the load method off of the Excel API to read the data and then construct a dataset.

Workbook internalWorkBook = Workbook.Load(Request.PhysicalApplicationPath + "Northwind.xls");

The load method will read the excel contents and return us an Excel workbook object. Once we have the workbook, we can search for the work sheet that contains the data and start constructing our data object that we will later bind to our WebDataGrid. In this example we are using a DataTable.

First, need to determine the bounds of our data, the column structure so that we can create the skeleton our data object accordingly. Using the workbook object, we can iterate through the rows and cells to determine the max and min of cells and rows that are contained within our worksheet that we want to load in our WebDataGrid.

foreach (Infragistics.Excel.WorksheetRow row in internalWorkBook.Worksheets["Customers"].Rows)

{

    foreach (Infragistics.Excel.WorksheetCell cell in row.Cells)

    {

         if (cell.Value != null)

         {

              //Logic For Determining the Range of Rows/Columns in the Excel File.

              minCellRow = Math.Min(minCellRow, cell.RowIndex);

              maxCellRow = Math.Max(maxCellRow, cell.RowIndex);

              minCellColumn = Math.Min(minCellColumn, cell.ColumnIndex);

              maxCellColumn = Math.Max(maxCellColumn, cell.ColumnIndex);

          }

     }

}

After we’ve collected the structural infromation of our worksheet, we can create columns for our datatable, and at the same time construct the columns of our WebDataGrid too. Here is where you can modify or remove colunms that you don’t want to import or setup properties on the WebDataGrid columns that you are creating.

for (int i = minCellColumn; i <= maxCellColumn; i++)

{

    //Get the column name

    string columnName =

            internalWorkBook.Worksheets["Customers"].Rows[minCellRow].Cells[ i].Value.ToString();

    //The export that was demonstrated earlier utilizes the first row

    //for the column header. We can now use that to give column names.

    myDataColumn = new DataColumn(columnName);

    //Add the columns to the datatable.

    myDataTable.Columns.Add(myDataColumn);

    //Create WebDataGrid Columns and enable settings

    BoundDataField bdf = new BoundDataField(true);

    bdf.DataFieldName = columnName;

    bdf.Key = columnName;

    bdf.Header.Text = columnName;

    bdf.Width = Unit.Pixel(100);

    importGrid.Columns.Add(bdf);

}

Finally, now it’s time to push the data from our worksheet into our DataTable.

for (int rowIndex = minCellRow + 1; rowIndex <= maxCellRow; rowIndex++)

{

       //Create a new DataRow

       myDataRow = myDataTable.NewRow();

       //Loop through the columns and associate the value to each cell

       for (int columnIndex = minCellColumn; columnIndex <= maxCellColumn; columnIndex++)

       {

            myDataRow[columnIndex] =

internalWorkBook.Worksheets["Customers"].Rows[rowIndex].Cells[columnIndex].Value;

       }

       //Add The Row to a DataTable

       myDataTable.Rows.Add(myDataRow);

}

Ok, so now we have all we need in our DataTable, our WebDataGrid columns are setup as we want, let's go ahead and databind our WebDataGrid.

//Set the primary key so that the WebDataGrid can perform Auto Crud

myDataTable.PrimaryKey = new DataColumn[] { myDataTable.Columns["CustomerID"] };

//ImportGrid below is the grid that we have on our page

importGrid.DataSource = myDataTable;

importGrid.DataBind();

To download the sample that includes the source code, use the link at the end of this post.

Note: The code assumes that you have the XLS file on the server, so that you can feed it in the Excel engine and can import data within the WebDataGrid. If you want to extend the behavior such that the client should be able to import an Excel file from his/her machine, then you will have to add the ability for the client to be able to upload that file onto the server first. Once, it is on the server, you can then simply use the import method to extract data from it.

Exporting Data

The idea behind exporting data to any of the formats using the APIs is the same. Basically, you iterate through the WebDataGrid columns first to create the column structure of the exported document and then iterate through the rows of the WebDataGrid to create rows for the data you want to export. Since the code is mostly the same when exporting to any of the formats, we will only going to run through exporting to excel in the post, you can download the sample from link below to get code for all formats.

First we need to create the workbook and worksheet object of excel that we are going to export our data into and some helper variables that will help us accomplish the task.

//Create workbook and worksheet object for Excel

Workbook theWorkbook = new Workbook();

Worksheet theWorkSheet = theWorkbook.Worksheets.Add("WorkSheet1");

int iRow = 1;

int iCell = 1;

Now, iterate through the WebDataGrid columns to create the excel sheet columns and go through your rows to fill up the cells in those columns.

//Iterate through the columns of the WebDataGrid and create

// columns within the worksheet that will be exported.

foreach(GridField gridField in this.WebDataGrid1.Columns)

{

    iRow = 1;



     theWorkSheet.Rows[iRow].Cells[iCell].Value = gridField.Header.Text;

     theWorkSheet.Columns[iCell].Width = 5000;

     iRow += 1;

     //Now iterate through the grid rows to add rows to the worksheet

     foreach(GridRecord gridRecord in this.WebDataGrid1.Rows)

     {

          theWorkSheet.Rows[iRow].Cells[iCell].Value = gridRecord.Items[iCell-1].Text;



iRow += 1;

     }

      iCell += 1;

}

In the sample attached you will find some extra code for formatting your cells while they are being exported. Once you’ve create your worksheet and exported the data, you can now go ahead and write the excel sheet to your stream, so that the client can view it.

//Create the Stream class

System.IO.MemoryStream theStream = new System.IO.MemoryStream();

//Write the in memory Workbook object to the Stream

theWorkbook.Save(theStream);

//Create a Byte Array to contain the stream and send the exported sheet to the client

byte[] byteArr = (byte[])Array.CreateInstance(typeof(byte), theStream.Length);

theStream.Position = 0;

theStream.Read(byteArr, 0, (int)theStream.Length);

theStream.Close();

Response.Clear();

Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment; filename=ExportedTo.xls");

Response.BinaryWrite(byteArr);

Response.End();

That’s it! Using the code samples above you should be able to import your data from Excel and export it to Excel, PDF or XPS using the APIs that we ship along with our product. Download the source code of this tutorial from the link below.

Download Source Code: ExportWebDataGridContents.zip

Note: Sample is using 2008 Volume 3 of our control set and uses C#.

These APIs demonstrated here are not directly connected to any control or component, so you can use it for any custom exporting requirement that you may have. To view more examples on the usage of the API, please check out the following resource.

Manually Create Excel Files

Excel I/0

Coloring Keywords in your Excel Worksheet

Export WPF XamDataGrid to Excel

Export WinChart to Excel

Export WinTree to Excel

Happy Coding !

Aikido November 2008 CTP Released

[Infragistics] Murtaza Abdeali — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:39:00 GMT

I am pleased to announce the release of our ASP.NET Aikido November CTP. It includes a set of new ASP.NET Web 2.0 controls built on top of our Aikido framework. To check them out in action, visit our online samples. In this CTP, we have introduced five new controls, and a WebDataGrid behavior listed below.

· WebDataMenu

· WebDropDown

· WebLanunchBar

· WebPanel

· WebProgressBar

· WebDataGrid (Virtual Scrolling)

To download the CTP, read more on our Aikido framework, or to get more details on the controls please goto our Aikido CTP page. If you have any questions on any of the CTP controls, please use our Aikido forums to post your queries and one of us will get back to you.

As always, if you want to provide any feedback, or would like to make a suggestion, please feel free to contact me: murtazaa@infragistics.com

Happy Coding!