AJAX is not for everything

 

I have over 1000 feeds now and I have been using RSS Bandit exclusively for reading my feeds. Since I have been away from my home computer for sometime now I decided to import my opml to google reader.

I have used their older version and found it to be completely useless. Eventhough I know that rss reading is different from emails, I needed the ability to mark items as read so that I can keep my rss reading list tidy. I guess this would be the most basic feature that was absent in the older google reader.

<rant>Since I saw the announcement for the new google reader I thought I’ll give it a second chance. The stupid reader crawls with my list. AJAX is more of an annoyance than a feature here. I wish there was a way to turn the AJAX off and give the plain simple HTML page. I can live with postbacks but crashing and unresponsive browsers is most annoying. People behind the AJAX bandwagon please realize that AJAX is not the panacea for poor interface. Just because its cool doesn’t mean it could work everywhere. I guess two sloppy applications from google are the spreadsheets (why use an online spreadsheet when U can attach an Excel file in a email?) and google reader. </rant>

Google maps are great, not the best in directions.. but the street level views is cool. 

I highly recommend bloglines. By far the fastest web based rss reader. Minor annoyances with the UI is something I can trade off with the speed at which it displays my rss items…no more chocking browsers.

 

btw.. the last two posts were published from Windows Live Writer which rocks! One of the sweetest applications I have used. Simple, Intuitive (I haven’t hit the F1 key) and fast. Great job on this MS!

ASP.NET Adding Dynamic Controls in EventHandlers

As most of you guys know, adding controls dynamically to aspx pages is a pain. There is always a tricky situation that messes up the eventhandling or viewstate or diffuculties in walking through the child controls through the container controls like placeholder. I faced one such with dynamic controls being added in a button.click handler. Just so that you or I can save some time here are some reads to look for before you use dynamic controls in your application:

Page Lifecycle

1. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178472 (read everything)
2. http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20051227.asp 

(Peter’s table is great in 2. Pay attention in particular to events LoadViewState, ProcessPostData1, ProcessPostData2 and their order in Page’s timeline. And then read about it from Dino’s excellent article abt ProcessPostData1 and ProcessPostData2 sweeps here. Then read everything Scott has to say:

Scott‘s Articles

1. Dynamic Controls in ASP.NET
2. Working With Dynamically Created Controls
3. Dynamic Web Controls, Postbacks, and View State
4. Control building and ViewState Redux
5. Tip: When Adding Dynamic Controls, Specify an ID

In short these are the general things that you would want to do to ensure all work smoothly.

1. Add new control to a placeholder’s control collection.

eg:

TextBox myTxtBox = new TextBox();
myPlaceHolder.Controls.Add(myTxtBox);

2. Only after step 1, set the attributes for the dynamically created control.

myTxtBox.ID ="myDyna"
myTxtBox.Text = "Hello! I am Dyna"

3. Ensure you specify the ID’s for the controls you add.

4. If controls are dynamically created in an EventHandler like Button.Click or DropDownList.SelectedIndexChanged then follow the pattern in Dino’s article. Which if I may summarize is to:

• Isolate Control Factory methods from EventHandlers
• Use ViewState or some other persistent flag (dropdownlist.SelectedIndex != -1, etc) to check if the controls have been added dynamically.
• If the flag is true then re-create them again in page load so that during ProcessPostData events the controls are found and viewstate restored for them from the temporary collection as described in Dino’s article.