Ext.Net

It feels good to be blogging again after a gap, the last couple of months or so have been way too hectic. Although I expect the schedule to remain clogged up for some more time, I will try to squeeze in some blog posts over the next couple of days. So, lets now come to the topic of this blog post, Ext.clone in ExtJs/Touch resulting in stack overflows while trying to clone an object containing circular references.

I yesterday did a very interesting thing, integrating ExtJs with the excellent iScroll 4 script from Matteo Spinelli that would make my ExtJs containers intuitively scrollable on Touch devices (especially iPad) giving them a more native scrolling feel.

Our designer had created a comprehensive custom theme for ExtJs, and we wanted to use it in our ASP.NET app that leverages Ext.Net and ExtJs extensively.

If you have used Ext.Net, you would know that all ExtJs resources are embedded in Ext.Net.dll assembly that are automatically put on the page whenever you add an <ext:ResourceManager /> to the page. This includes the core ExtJs css and javascript resources (including current ExtJs theme's resources), plus Ext.Net's own resources (providing extensions/enhancements to Ext classes).

I think all of us would agree that Ext.Net provides too good (and a bit complex) ExtJs and ASP.NET integration. It exposes almost all ExtJs toolkit classes server-side in ASP.NET and many of the popular extensions too. In addition, it provides own custom components that are useful (e.g. MultiCombo, Linkbutton etc).

Tickers used to be an essential part of any website during the earlier days of web, but are no longer considered that much useful today, right? Well I atleast thought so until a few days back, when I received a feature request for a scrolling ticker in a corporate intranet app (which uses ExtJs heavily, in fact with a completely ExtJs based UI). And on some inspection, the request seemed to be reasonable.

In this blog post, I present a complete framework for automatic localization in ASP.NET, ability to customize what is produced by this framework and a completely functional ASP.NET app demonstrating the features and process.

Yesterday night, I had a very interesting scenario. One of our apps has a normal ASP.NET page that is used exclusively for rendering Crystal Reports to the browser. The page provides a comprehensive Ajax framework for rendering Crystal Reports and we normally host that page in an <iframe> as part of the app.

I had earlier blogged about various aspects related to Brian Moeskau's CalendarPanel component for ExtJs 3.x here, here and here.

Well, you know the good old <input type="file" /> widget in html, the one used for selecting files to be uploaded on a web page, right.

The problem with this widget is its limited support for styling and scripting compared to other html tags (probably due to security concerns). You cannot style or specify text for the "Browse" button for this widget, for example.

Second consecutive blog post relating to adding something dynamically to an already rendered Html component, while the previous one was for adding buttons dynamically to jQuery UI dialogs here, this one is for adding tools dynamically to ExtJs Panels.