I’ve been playing with Telerik’s latest
product line after being given a copy of their products at the PDC (directly).
I must say they have an impressive line of up controls. I’ve learned to loath
web app development – though once upon a time I loved it. The development
platforms for web dev have progressed by leaps and bounds since .NET first hit
the streets, yet my interest in it has plummeted at the exact same rate. Though
the paradigm in general still makes my skin itch, these controls is making web
dev fun again.
When AJAX started getting hot, my skin really started to itch as thoughts of
AJAX development in 1999 came to mind (before they called it AJAX). I have
purposefully avoided AJAX thus far so I can’t speak to the technology and
tools/controls built upon it as a whole, but the Telerik Callback control
(read AJAX-control-suite) is flat out slick. It’s my new itchy skin ointment.
I must admit, when I first saw it, this went through my mind “Ok, cool, but
smells like a whole lot more trouble than its worth. There are surely firey
dragons down that corridor.”. I ran across a feature I needed to implement
today that if done with the standard postback way would have been ugly and tough
to code in a way I’d be proud of. So, I timeboxed myself to an hour and started
looking at this control.
Do yourself a favor and spend 30 minutes reading all of the help
documentation. Then sit back and enjoy the sweetness.
One tip… in ASP.NET 2.0, make sure you have EnableEventValidation turned
off. Throw this
<pages
enableEventValidation="false"></pages>
in your web.config – or better yet, be a good programmer and do it at the
page level. Not doing so will choke the Callback mechanism. I didn’t see this
mentioned in the documentation, but I didn’t look for it either.