ASP.NET user name availability check using WCSF Validation Bundle

An average web site offering membership and protected content for its members requires users to sign up by visiting a sign-up or register page that allows a user to enter some information and create an account. A couple of pieces if information that users are commonly asked to enter are a User name or Login name and user's email. One potential problem with such user input is checking that entered login name and/or email address are available for registration and haven't been used by other users. When it's the case multiple attempts of entering available values can be very annoying and frustrating for users even making them to refuse registration on a web site. So improving user experience when validating login name and email is quite an important task.

How to set programmatically a value of a watermarked TextBox via JavaScript

There is an updated version of the article for the latest Ajax Control Toolkit release: http://blog.turlov.com/2010/05/how-to-set-programmatically-value-of.html

If you use ASP.NET AJAX and AJAX Control Toolkit you may find it useful to decorate some of your TextBox controls on a page with a TextBoxWatermark AJAX extender control from the AJAX Control Toolkit. It's fairly easy to use and a nice tool for improving both the page look and user experience. However if you need to set a value of a TextBox decorated with the TextBoxWatermark extender programmatically via JavaScript on the client-side you may notice that the behavior of the watermarked TextBox is different. If you use the regular way to set a value like this:

$get(textBoxId).value = someText;

then the value displayed in the TextBox on the page will change to the set value but the watermarked look will still be present and other AJAX Control Toolkit TextBox extenders (like a Calendar extender, for instance) will not recognize the new value. This happens because the TextBoxWatermark extender can not recognize and intercept your JavaScript operation since it's designed to serve user interactions. However there is a correct way of programmatic access to the TextBox's value. We modify the code above like that:

var textBox = $get(textBoxId);
if (textBox.AjaxControlToolkitTextBoxWrapper) {
    textBox.AjaxControlToolkitTextBoxWrapper.set_Value(someText);
}
else {
    textBox.value = someText;
}

The explanation is that most of the TextBox extenders from the AJAX Control Toolkit including a TextBoxWatermark extender use a special proxy class AjaxControlToolkitTextBoxWrapper to manipulate with the input elements. The proxy adds a special property AjaxControlToolkitTextBoxWrapper to the input element that contains a reference to itself allowing to access the value of the input element correctly. Similarly, if you need to get a value of a watermarked TextBox you do it like this:

var textBox = $get(textBoxId), text;
if (textBox.AjaxControlToolkitTextBoxWrapper) {
    text = textBox.AjaxControlToolkitTextBoxWrapper.get_Value();
}
else {
    text = textBox.value;
}

New version of ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit released

The new release of ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit is available for download. Bertrand Le Roy has written a very informative post about it.

What I particularly like in this new release is that the Color Picker extender is now included in the Ajax Control Toolkit. Hooray!

Along with the new Toolkit release there come a whole bunch of new tutorials and videos. Among them there are this particularly nice tutorial about the Color Picker extender and another excellent video tutorial by Joe Stagner. Thank you folks for such a great job!

What that means for the Color Picker Extender users is that they don't have to download it separately from Codeplex anymore because it is included in the Ajax Control Toolkit. For those who cannot yet switch to the new version of ACT the original Color Picker Extender control will continue to be available on Codeplex. During the next few days I will prepare and upload a new release synced up with the Ajax Control Toolkit.

It is very educating to read people's opinions about the new release of ACT in response to blog posts and on Codeplex. In general, the responses are positive, but occasionally there are some complaints, mostly about little things.

I would like to remind everybody that Ajax Control Toolkit is a completely community-based initiative (with, of course, the initial kick-off help from Microsoft) and people who work on it take time out of their personal calendars so let's be more tolerant and if you've come across something really bad please use the Issue Tracker.

As I mentioned before, I specifically was interested in reading responses about the ColorPicker.  Interestingly, all the complaints were about its look and feel, not about functionality. I admit that the UI it provides is rather simplistic but here is my question back: why don't you all take some time and come up with feedbacks and suggestions on what can be improved?

Since the ColorPicker was publicly available on CodePlex it's been downloaded more then 2000 times (and I don't count downloads of ACT source code) and only a few people suggested something about improving it. I take it as everybody has been satisfied.

Now that the CPE is a part of the ACT and has a bit more visibility I suggest that people who have suggestions or concerns please don't hesitate to speak up.