I like to get inspiration from using web applications that make good use of new technologies. This time I would like to check out ASP.NET based web applications that make heavy use of Ajax & Ajax Toolkit for line of business apps (data bound controls like grids). I checked out some apps at CodePlex but didn't see anything cool enough.
Any recommendations? Preferably an app with source.
I don't think your going to find what your looking for easily. The AJAX toolkit lacks the slickness of the plugins of jQuery and other popular frameworks. If you are looking to be impressed, you may want to look elsewhere than the toolkit.
I'm not sure what framework it's build on, but I have been very impressed by the UI of MailChimp lately. They nailed it, so easy to use and elegant.
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I know that the main draw to ASP.NET AJAX is the fact that you can build it nicely inside of Visual Studio and it is nice and easy. I am finding ASP.NET AJAX limiting, but I really like .NET and figure that a separate javascript library is probably the way to go for responsive apps that are easy to maintain.
I know that within the group (Dojo, ExtJS, MooTools...) there will be differences of opinion, but I am really curious to hear the results of effort and maintainability from people who have gone to or from the .NET component route. Thank you.
Edit:
This largely about ComponentOne's AJAX suite. I am new to ComponentOne, but have an opportunity to either embrace their library or push for something more appropriate. Our needs are customer facing and must be highly configurable. Many of our applications are reports while some are themselves application configuration tools.
Clay, if reporting is your focus then I would definitely go with ComponentOne. C1 has really powerful reporting tools in .NET and a pretty sweet report viewer in ASP.NET. C1's reporting tools can also use existing Crystal, SQL Server, and Access reports.
However, ComponentOne has been asking themselves the same question about server controls and JS libraries. So they built a completely stand-alone library called Wijmo. Wijmo is built on jQuery/jQuery UI and has over 30 widgets included in the kit. Wijmo even has rich data controls like grids and SVG charts that would would normally see in ASP.NET. It was originally built to be used in ASP.NET MVC as the UI layer. Here is a video on how to use Wijmo in MVC.
This same technology is being extended into the ComponentOne ASP.NET controls. So with choosing ComponentOne you will have both options based on the same client-side framework.Note that the Wijmo ASP.NET controls are still in the works and should be out in the summer of 2011.
My experience is that using ASP.NET AJAX controls, such as ComponentArt for example, tend to be limiting and force your design decisions. I have had much better success using pure JavaScript libraries for the UI Layer like jQuery/jQuery UI and ExtJS. Having the serverside render your JavaScript in the ASP.NET way gets complex when dealing with an advanced UI.
I am working towards porting a windows application to web. The windows application is quite rich w.r.t. the form controls, complex validations and user interactivity.
Basic web forms are inadequate to meet these complexities. So I would like to know the best way to still have the richness on the web pages. I have some ideas and would like comments.
Use DHTML & Java Script to mimic complex controls. There are some macro controls available as part of jQueryUI that can be used and some other third party Java Script controls. I'd like suggestions if there is a recommended control library.
Use RIA (preferably Silverlight) wherever rich controls are needed. I'd like to keep this as a last option because it mandates the Silverlight plug-in.
What are other popular / preferred strategies?
If you don't mind a departure from .NET "controls", I'd try Ext JS. It is dual licensed GPL/Commercial so you'll likely have to pay for it, but the components are more robust than Telerik or the other .NET versions.
I would suggest that you also check out the tools from DevExpress (http://www.devexpress.com). I've used both Telerik and DevExpress and ended up going with just the DevExpress tools. Both companies, however, are top-notch and both have tools that can really enhance your UI.
With that being said, I would strongly suggest that you avoid the temptation to just port your fat client UI to the Web. That is, if you are just looking for web controls to take the place of your current Windows controls but otherwise leave the UI intact, you are likely to be disappointed. The web is a different kind of animal and people expect to use it differently. With Ajax, JQuery and the various specialty tools from a company like DevExpress or Telerik you can do amazing things on the web that are the equal of anything you may have done in your current fat client interface but they will be done differently.
Reasons for this advice? First, in my experience Windows UIs migrated to the web feel clumsy and inappropriate. The controls aren't the only thing that changes - the entire windowing and content flow models are different.
Second, if you are deploying to organizations outside of your own, you are likely to find that there is significant resistance to using any kind of plug-in - including Silverlight. We win business all the time because we've stayed pure web.
Third, to the extent that you try to build web apps while not really learning web development ethics and methods, you'll just slow down your eventual evolution to true web development experts.
Anyway - that's my $0.02.
We have had a lot of success with the Telerik controls for ASP.NET.
http://www.telerik.com/products/aspnet-ajax.aspx
They also have a suite of Silverlight controls.
http://www.telerik.com/products/silverlight.aspx
And for ASP.NET MVC.
http://www.telerik.com/products/aspnet-mvc.aspx
They are very easy to use and richly featured. The demos on their site should give you a good feel for the capabilities.
There was an article on Codeproject which covered converting Winforms to ASP.NET
Hope this helps.
I'm looking for a good asp.net webforms reference application.
We have some developers with VB6 experience, but no web application experience. I'd like to provide them with a couple of example apps that make use of a few simple forms, some user controls, db access, etc. An application that made use of a separate project for classes would be a nice bonus.
There seem to be a lot of very simple examples/tutorials for given features, but I can't find a good reference app that covers all of the above-mentioned topics.
Any suggestions?
I would recommend the ASP.NET starter kits here on the asp.net site. They are pretty diverse. My suggestion would be to actually try the hosted versions until you find one that suits the features you're trying to demonstrate. BeerHouse is a great start.
This one looks pretty interesting. It's a shameless plug for the Infragistics controls, but it looks like they're doing some non-trivial things:
The reference application shows the
use of web services, client side java
scripting, XML data binding and other
real world code samples.
http://devcenter.infragistics.com/RefApps/Expense/Expense.aspx
http://www.asp.net/community/projects/
Starter kits are a good place to look...
I'm planning a ASP.NET project for which I'm going to use AJAX. I'm researching all the available technologies for doing so in the .NET world.
I need a solution that is well documented and stable.
The current solutions I've found are:
1. ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel
2. ASP.NET AJAX with Web Services + JQuery
3. JQuery + Http Handlers
In the second and third solutions the backend would only send JSON or XML messages to the client.
In my experience the best way to go is JQuery with WCF with JSON webservices.
The reason is:
ASP.NET ajax is gives you alot for free in terms of coding but is bloated from the start and needs to be stipted and slimed. On the other hand you have JQuery that you needs more development but is light weight. JQuery has a great plugin library as well.
XML is to slow, JSON is fast.
Thats how I would do it today.
All will work but I've had most performance and stability with using JQuery and a script service.
An update panel will work but as its designed to work in the general case it can be a little bloated if you aren't careful. One reason being is that it posts the viewstate back with each update.
I recommend you check out the site: encosia.com as it has a number of posts on how to use script services and page methods. Then you can make a more informed decision. I would say that I've not used page methods and probably won't but that's entirely for personal reasons.
One other thing to consider will be any mvc you may end up doing. The general consensus is that it's a whole lot easier with JQuery. Added to that Microsoft have officially adopted it and also provide intellisense in VS2008.
All compelling reasons to include at least some of it in your project. In mine I only use the built in ScriptManager when I absolutely have to.
HTH!
S
I've built web sites using classic ASP, ASP.NET web forms and lately ASP.NET with ExtJS. However, I've always felt that I've had to do a lot of the heavy lifting and that there was no real RAD until the application was fairly mature.
I've only briefly looked at RoR and Django, but they look like a step in the right direction. Does anyone feel they have the equivalent mix of .net technologies for creating web sites quickly?
EDIT: I wanted to stay with mainstream tools (esp. open source or 'low cost') that work with ASP.NET. Also interested in fast framework configuration/setup, as my current project took lots of initial code (my)generation template work to get it to a RAD state.
You can try JQuery + ASP.NET MVC + Linq2SQL.
Is a good combination for a RAD. Or you can change linq2SQL by Subsonic
Well, asp.net is a lot more RAD than having to program the socket interface and handle the web requests yourself. I guess it's a matter of perspective. I'm still waiting for the device that I can plug directly into my brain and out pops whatever software I can think of. THAT would be RAD. :-)
I'm not sure exactly what you are looking for but going by what others are posting, this is a more mature product:
http://www.ironspeed.com
I use asp.net with Telerik Rad controls with jQuery and telerik's client-side api
It works well for me but its open to discussion of course