Matt Berseth

A few weeks ago I wrote a post explaining how the AjaxControlToolkit's Slider control could be used as a data pager.  One of the teams I am currently working with has adopted this approach and is implementing it throughout their site.  While this technique seems to work well, one feature the team would like to add is a custom tooltip that not only displays the typical paging statistics (i.e. page X of Y), but also gives the user a hint as to what can be found on each page of data.  It's this last bit of information that increases the value of the tooltip.  Not only are we showing the user the typical paging statistics, but now they can get an idea of what data can be found on the page before actually navigating to it.  Below is a screen shot of how this looks.  Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and...

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As far as web development goes, I came a little late to the party.  I started life as a developer working on the absolute guts of a fairly complex object persistence engine.  At my next stop I hand-coded an obscene number of business objects that fed our presentation layer (which is pretty ironic considering I just worked on an ORM!).  Needless to say I didn't stay at that place too long.  From there I finally took a stab at user interface when I took a gig as a WinForms developer.  I did that for a little over a year and it was OK.  Finally I ended up where I am now, about 60% of my day to day activities includes web developer on Microsoft's ASP.NET 2.0 platform.  I did a little bit of web development with 1.1, but nothing substantial.  Hands down, I enjoy web development the best (I have never once been complimented on how nice...

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The web application I am currently developing has a fair number of popup windows.  Some are modal, some aren't.  All open new browser windows and this annoys more than a few of our users (I hate popup's too, so I guess it shouldn't be that surprising).  So as a team we are looking into replacing our popup windows with the ModalPopupExtender and PopupExtender AjaxControlToolkit controls.  This is just fine by me - I have worked with the toolkit's popup controls on other projects and they worked quite well (It also saves me the pain of writing custom JavaScript for communicating between browser windows).  Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF) | Download (Uses Toolkit Version 1.0.10920.0) So as an R&D task, I created a page that implements a simple 'Tip of the Day' popup control.  The functionality is basic - you click a button and the Tip of the Day panel is displayed.  Once displayed, you can click that 'Next Tip' button to fetch the...

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My current employer uses a web based tool for project management.  The tool is visually appealing and provides users with a great web experience.  It's an ASP.NET application that relies heavily on ASP.NET AJAX.  One of the AJAX features I like is the use of a popup control for status/type selection (i.e. what state is this bug {Open, Closed, Pending Acceptance, ...}).  Most existing web and windows applications usually present this as a drop down list.  Live Demo | Download Obviously, there is nothing wrong with the drop down approach, but I thought I would create an example showing an alternative technique using the PopupControlExtender found in the AjaxControlToolkit along with the regular ASP.NET RadioButtonList control.  The main advantage the PopupControl/RadioButtonList approach has over the standard ASP.NET DropDownList is that it provides the developer with a finer grained control over the presentation.  Here are a couple of screen shots that show this alternative technique.  Because the RadioButtonList control exposes attributes for controlling the layout, it is easy to configure exactly how...

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