Ajax Toolkit

Along with the release of AJAX 1.0 from Microsoft is the ASP.Net AJAX Control Toolkit which I have recently realised contains some very cool controls that are not all related to AJAX development.

There are of course controls that seamlessly communicate with the server to retrieve data without a postback as you would expect but in addition there are a number of visual controls such as:

- rounded corners on a panel control by simply associating a RoundedCorners control with the Panel control ID
- Dropshadow on a panel control using the same method
- Ability to Drag a panel around the screen by the title (like you would any window)
- Ability to Fix a panel control in a location so when you scroll the page it stays in that position
- Acordian control that shows/hides tabs like the navigation in outlook
- Modal popup which greys out all other text on the page
- Password Strength indicator
- Slider controls for values between ranges
- plus many more

There are examples of all of these, some obviously require server side web services code to operate but many are client side only.

The collapsablePanel control is one of the controls whose example does not do justice to. It can also autogrow and autoshrink when the mouse is moved over it so you get the effect similar to the 'quick links' on the top right of the sub-pages of Microsoft.com

I have gone through these examples in Firefox too and they work a treat. This is the sort of control library that you would normally pay a fortune for in licensing costs but Free with ASP.Net AJAX