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Home > Archive > SSW Standards > Developer General > The Best Tools for Web Forms Development (ASP.NET Controls)
Multi-mode operation, support for AJAX callbacks, and client side template feature provide the richest, highest-performing user experience delivered to date by an ASP.NET Grid control.
Figure: ComponentArt DataGrid Screenshot ComponentArt DataGrid Overview
Suggestion to other vendors.
You should all make similar grid examples so others can compare.
I really like this grid example http://www.componentart.com/demos/grid/features/ajax_grid/WebForm1.aspx And this one http://samples.infragistics.com/2006.2/WebTabs/CustomerViewer/WebForm1.aspx
Telerik only have this http://www.telerik.com/demos/aspnet/controls/examples/integration/ajax/grid/defaultcs.aspx
ComponentArt's award-winning Menu has been written from the ground up for ASP.NET, combining the best practices from our original ASP.NET Menu with our advanced new rendering technology.
Figure: ComponentArt Menu Screenshot ComponentArt Menu Overview
Enhanced performance and added features are now available! Lightweight and lightning-fast, TreeView is rich on both the client and server side, easily data-bound and ready for ASP.NET 2.0.
Figure: ComponentArt TreeView Screenshot ComponentArt TreeView Overview
Use this classic component to add tree structure menus to your asp applications. With eight tree styles the functionality in this component gives you all the power you need, to create an impressive looking tree to suit your web site. The TreeView Component includes examples for database, xml and client side event handling, plus many others.
Figure: VisualASP™ TreeView Component Screenshot Visual ASP Web Site
This rich text box from r.a.d is great.
Unfortunately it is poorly named (they will rename it to RichTextBox) and does not come up on the first few pages of google ! http://www.google.com.au/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLJ,GGLJ:2006-17,GGLJ:en&q=rich+text+box+asp%2enet
Why do I say the RichTextBox from Telerik is the best one - because when you paste from Word it cleans up the god awful HTML
See http://www.telerik.com/r.a.d.controls/Editor/Examples/Default/DefaultCS.aspx
Figure: r.a.d.editor Screenshot Telerik Web Site
There is certainly a place for small bits of code like FreeTextBox, but I don't think free, unsupported code is suitable for most corporate applications. And anyway, for a high quality web app, $150-250 isn't a large investment by any means. Certainly when compared to the effort required to build one of these editors, it's insignificant.
Adam Cogan
Now this is a great control and comes with even better support. RichTextBox is a server control that you add to an ASP.NET page. You can set a few properties if you like and there is nothing more to it - it works like any other control. Under the covers, when the page is requested by the browser, it generates several hundred lines of HTML and JavaScript in a configuration that depends on and properties you set for the control. To provide the editing functionality it relies on editable IFRAME functionality in Internet Explorer and provides a large amount of code to support that, and it does a great job in bringing such richness to the browser.
Figure: RichTextBox Screenshots RichTextBox.Com
FCKeditor is a powerful tool providing a text editor for web pages. The interface is similar to the ones we know from Microsoft products and has an easily customizable toolbar. The text editor provides all the formatting possibilities which are possible in HTML through an online interface. As FCKeditor is an OpenSource project, it is absolutely free.
One disadvantage is that FCK has problems over a SSL connection.
Figure: FCKeditor Screenshot www.fredck.com/FCKeditor
A free ASP.NET control written in C# implementing MSHTML in Internet Explorer. It can be validated using standard ASP.NET validators and has many options for customization..
FreeTextBox has a 'free' version and a paid version which offers things like XHTML compliance. Also DNN uses FreeTextBox as their default editor.
If you have multiple rich text editors on one page then IE uses a large amount of memory - this causes problems on older machines with 256mb of memory and integrated video cards.
Figure: FreeTextBox Screenshot Real demo in SSW Web Site - Contact Me freetextbox.com
The collapsable panel control from EWorldUI ( www.eworldui.net ) is a great, lightweight, free to use ASP.NET server control that enables you to expand and collapse blocks of content client side. You get control over the numerous sections of the title row as well as the javascript source file - embedded or linked.
Figure: The content panel collapses to only show the title row which is clickable.
Figure: Once clicked, the panel expands to show the content without a postback.
ASP.NET comes with a built in Calendar Control that you can put on your web pages. I don't like the Calendar Control from a usability perspective - I think it is better to be able to type in the date in a text box. For the users that want a GUI calendar, they can click a button next to the date field. eg. www.qantas.com Love to know if you Agree/Disagree?
So in my search for a good calendar that can be used as a popup, I found these ones...
In my opinion this is the coolest cross-browser compatible DHTML date picker. It is setup in minutes, with all the features you may require in 90% of your projects. Try dragging it around the page...
Figure: Dynarch Popup Calendar
Dynarch Calendar Overview What is it?
ComponentArt Calendar supports a variety of date and date-range selection types - without requiring postbacks for month paging or date selections.
Figure: ComponentArt Popup Calendar ComponentArt Calendar Demo
The DateTextBox Control is a complete solution to date entry in a web form. It is a greatly extended TextBox which assists the user in entering the day, month, and year of a date. It always follows the international short date pattern that you supply. Users can popup a calendar to select a date from that interface or use an assortment of commands available as single keystroke, from a context menu, or from a Help button. Two can be connected together for smart date range entry.
Figure: Peter Blum's DateTextbox with popup calendar Peter Blum's DateTextbox Demo
The RJS popup calendar is free ASP.NET popup calendar baseed on the Fuushikaden JavaScript calendar. It can be fully customizable with CSS, has full globalization and cross-browser support and is very easy to implement. It is available on GotDotNet and is regularly updated by the developer Ricaute Jimenez Sanchez. Documentation is available in English and Spanish.
Figure: RJS Popup Calendar
Real demo:
DbCombo is an ASP.NET server component for picking from long lists of data. It uses client scripting to 'auto-complete' a text box while you type - just like a combo box. On lower browsers, it gracefully degrades to use HTML 3.2 for optimum compatibility. Functionality is not lost as this happens though, DbCombo uses the postback architecture to achieve the same result.
Figure: DB Combo Cambro DB Combo
Second best is Teleriks combo box
http://www.telerik.com/r.a.d.controls/Combobox/Examples/Functionality/WhatsNew/DefaultCS.aspx
Richer Components is the 3rd best - functional, but a little ugly
http://www.richercomponents.com/asp-net-components/rich-live-combo/Demos/Dictionary.html
As you type a word in the textbox, a JavaScript event fires an HTTP GET request to the ASPX page. The response from the ASPX page is simply displayed in a div tag under the textbox. The page is not refreshed/reloaded for every keystroke as everything is done by the JavaScript in the page. The main JavaScript object that allows us to do this is XMLHttpRequest. You could read about it from Apple's developer site here. This is supported by IE 5.0 +, Mozilla 1.0 + and Apple's own Safari 1.2 +.. It uses the XMLHttpRequest object to make requests and get back data.
Figure: objectgraph dictionary textbox
Real Demo - Search Suburb:
It is quite common to write HTML code that will create a combo box on your web page. Users can then make a selection from multiple items within the combo. However, you may want to produce a combo that also allows the user to enter in custom text, as an alternative.
Although this functionality is normally implemented in Windows by default, you will need additional code to make it work on a web page.A good explanation of how to do this can be found at the URL below:
Solutions .NET: True Combo Behaviour
The accepted way to debug complex table-based HTML pages is to add a border="1" attribute to the <TABLE> element. Toggle Borders is a utility which automates this and more. It is accessed from the context menu in Internet Explorer and will colour-code tables, span tags and div tags for you to see how your website, or a third party website has been laid out. Select Toggle Borders again and the colour-coding is removed.
More information is available on the official website:
ThunderMain
Polling is one of the most common ways to get the user to interact with your site. Often sites will offer polling simply to have something to draw users back to the site. A Poll is a fairly complex combination of HTML and server side code. It has two entirely different looks: its entry view and results view. It uses a database which demands web forms to allow the user to edit the polling data and extract data collected from the users. This Polling package includes all of the pieces.
I use peterblum.com for this.
Figure: Telerik has a good spell checker for ASP.NET
Figure: Infragistic has a spell checker for ASP.NET - but it is not so good
Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
It is easy to retrieve the html source, CSS and script for anywhere you want:
Figure: When you hover over the red box, it indicates where it is in the browser (see green box).
For lovers of Firebugs there is a Microsoft Internet Explorer Equivalent. The Internet Explorer Developers toolbar has a neat DOM explorer which is nearly as good as Firebug. (I'm sure some of you are aware of this product but I thought I would put up a tip anyway as I wsan't using this until today.)
Latest version can be downloaded from MSIE Dev toolbar
Javascript has always been a nightmare to work with but JQuery makes working with javascript really easy.
JQuery has these features:
Demo:
var mylink = document.getElementById("mylink"); function myfunction(){ alert('clicked me!'); }; mylink.onclick = myfunction;
On the surface, it seems that your Javascript works fine - what one naively fails to realize is that you've killed all other Javascript hooks on that object - they are no longer run.
function myfunction(){ alert('clicked me!'); }; $('#mylink').click(myfunction);
