Kirti

Contributor	Toolkit Work Item #	Description of the fix
Phani Raj	9043	AutoComplete list items can now have additional data associated with them which allows them to behave like an ASP.NET ListItem with its Text and Value properties.
Koen Verheyen	9129	Calendar PopupPosition setting.
Ryan Heath	11874	CascadingDropDown PromptValue and EmptyValue added.
Jesse Mandel	8181	CascadingDropDown default PromptValue fix.
G Morgan	10902	MaskedEdit fix to make it work right in 24 hour and AMPM format.
Crymsan	12431	MaskedEdit fix to ensure that it respects the page culture.
Tomasz Jastrzebski	11578	IClientStateManager in UpdatePanel fix.
Tomasz Jastrzebski	10277	DropDown panel positioning fix.
Andrew Ventura	11513	ValidatorCallout performance improvement.

Thanks again! We hope to see more of these in the future. It is a clear sign that the community is taking charge of the Toolkit and shaping it the way they would like it to be. The Patch Utility has helped users provide us fixes for existing controls in the Toolkit but what about new controls? We should have a Toolkit control gallery coming up which will serve as a staging ground for new controls before they can be added to the Toolkit. I will provide more details in a following blog post very soon.

Please try it out and let us know if you run into any issues.

The sample...

• provides additional context to the user by showing the previous and next slides by hooking into the 'slideChanging' event that SlideShow exposes.
  
• and it uses the images as navigation buttons to avoid overwhelming the user with too many controls. This is possible since SlideShow targets any control of type Image. I used an ImageButton instead to make it clickable.

In the example, I attach a handler to the 'slideChanging' event in the pageLoad function. The handler updates the previous image using the SlideShowEventArgs parameter that is passed to it. SlideShowEventArgs exposes the previous and next slide objects out of which I use the previous slide to update the previous image. Check out the attached zip. It just a proof of concept, not super-refined and could do with a lot of help in the visual department.

Are there other simple customizations of Toolkit controls that you would like to see? Let us know.

SlideShow.zip

Here are our selection criteria. Note: These are just the minimum requirements and meeting them does not guarantee that the website will make it to the page. Subjective criteria like peculiarity of Toolkit usage, level of customization, degree of usage i.e. just one Toolkit control is used or more and many other qualifications may also come into play.

• The site uses at least one Toolkit control built on top of the Toolkit infrastructure.
• Usage of the Toolkit is blatant i.e. we should be able to spot the control easily. If it is very obscure then it does not really "showcase" the Toolkit per se.
• The website does not have "questionable" content.

If you would like to see your website in the showcase here is the information we need:

• Your name and email address
• Your site's name and URL
• Description of your site in less than 50 words.
• Description of the usage of Toolkit controls on your site in less than 200 words.

You can send this to me using my blog contact form or to the Toolkit team by email.

Thanks for using the Toolkit!

Our next release is scheduled to be around the 14th of September. What will it include? 

• New test framework and tests: It will include a new testing framework and wrappers for Toolkit components. The old tests have been migrated over as well. Some of the advantages of the new testing system would be:
• Test authoring made simple and fast by having it in managed code. This will enable us to have a exhaustive suite that validates more code paths. More checks to ensure the robustness and backward compatibility of Toolkit controls will allow us to introduce new features and fixes without worrying about regressions.
• An efficient release process achieved by eliminating some of the manual testing that needs to be performed every time we release. The new tests can be run in all browsers unlike the old harness which only worked in Firefox and IE 7.
• Bug fixes: We would like to target some of the top voted items and other minor issues that have been bothering our users. To see the complete list please visit the planned release page.

If there are other issues that you care about and would like to provide a quick fix for the same using the Toolkit Patching Utility, please do so and let us know if you think that those should be included in this release. We will review your changes and keep you in the loop if we need more information.

Check out our Patch Hall of Fame! Would you like to see your name there? Use the Patching Utility and be a Toolkit star!

To explain the motivation behind this I have put up a wiki on our CodePlex site that details how to make the most of the Localization features without getting overwhelmed by the language resource binaries. We believe that the defaults we have set work best for users who are interested in localizing their websites as well as users who do not need that feature at all. It is now very easy to develop, configure and deploy websites using the Toolkit that are globally aware. We wish to continue adding neat features to the Toolkit and we hope that this feature is serving you well.

Motivations behind this 10618 release:

• A Tabs naming container issue that prevented users from finding child controls successfully
• A design time binary dependency that was accidentally being required on the deployment server because of web configuration file reference issues
• FilteredTextBox control was misbehaving when using navigation and control keys and
• The ToolkitScriptManager feedback needed to be incorporated

If you are already a Toolkit user then upgrading to the latest version of the Toolkit is straightforward. Ping us if you run into any issues.

One of the core tenets of Agile development is customer satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software. We hope that we are living up to it!

Our goal? We would like to make sure that the Toolkit works right in the language of your choice. Here's how you can help.

• The Toolkit resources files reside in the AjaxControlToolkit project in the Toolkit solution under the ScriptResources folder. 
• The name of the resources file follows this pattern: "ScriptResources.%languagecode%.resx". You can find a list of language codes here.
• You can use the English resources (ScriptResources.resx) file to get a complete list of all strings that can be localized and that need to be translated to fully support all controls in a particular language.
• You will need to install the Patching Utility and submit a patch that contains the change to the resources file for the language you are adding support for and an update to the AjaxControlToolkit project file if that language is not yet supported by us, to include the new file.

It's that simple! If you have questions or concerns feel free to contact us.

Happy Translating!

Update: With the latest 10618 release of the Toolkit our language count is up to 17! New languages are Turkish, Czech and Dutch. Existing language resource files, for Traditional and Simplified Chinese, and Russian, have been updated to include translations for all strings in the Toolkit. Check out the Toolkit Patch Hall of Fame for a full list of our patch heroes.