For a recent project I was working on I wanted to display some sports results on my local football club's website. The association publishes the results weekly on its website, we also wanted to post them on our website. It would be a waste of time to type them out each week so what can we do? First solution I thought of was HTML data scrapping the results and redisplaying them, better than using an iframe as the results were not in a format that would suit our site. It would be fairly straight forward using ASP.NET on the server but this website is a Blogger site with limited server side functionality.
It struck me the other day that it is so easy to use AJAX with ASP.NET it can make you lazy. I was working on a project where I had some radio boxes and based in the selection of the radio boxes another fields was displayed or hidden. I didn't want the page to post back so initially it though I'll just pop it in a AJAX UpdatePanel and write some code to show or hide the fields after the selection is made on the RadioButtonList.
SWFObject.NET 1.1 has been released. SWFObject.NET is a C# ASP.NET server control that wraps the functionality of the SWFObject 2.2 JavaScript library. SWFObject works great to avoid the ‘click to activate’ problems that affected IE6, IE7 and Opera 9+.
Implementing keyboard shortcuts can greatly improve the user interface of your web application. Interface navigation is a good place to start, for example if you are viewing a slide show of photos you may expect to be able to navigate through the photos using the left and right arrow keys on you keyboard. For an application that has a popup dialog very common functionality is the ablity to push the escape key to cancel the dialog and close it.
Sooner or later when you are developing a web based application you will want to enable tabs in textareas so you can format some HTML or CSS. My first thought is why is this not a function of the web browser it would make sense to have a property you could set to enable tabbing. But no you need to use JavaScript. You can find plenty of solutions searching on Google. Most solutions, like the first one I found , detect when you press the tab key cancel the event and insert a tab into the textarea instead. This method is simplistic and limited when you are used to a IDE and want to indent blocks of text.
In one of my projects I had a button to toggle a collection of check boxes output from a CheckBoxList control on the page. Initially I toggled these with a server postback.
I have recently started using the JQuery javascript library for a number a small projects. I have really enjoyed using jQuery, it makes javascript development really easy especially if you want to do some simple animations. There is a lot of good documentation that is easy to follow and a lot of plugins available, its worth a good look through before you make your own javascript application.
I got to thinking about Ajax and get data out off a ASP.NET WebService.