Lately I decided to see how easy was to create AJAX custom controls specifically using the included javascript libraries. I thought it might be useful to try to use the included javascript libraries to enable client side access to the selected value from a custom control. The example I will use is a date time picker which uses the calendar extender from the ajax control toolkit for the date and a simple drop down for the time. Much like outlook, the date is pickable from a textbox and the time in a list of 15 minute intervals. The goal is to...

Microsoft have just announced Silverlight, the new branding for what was previously known as WPF/E. They've also provided a lot more details about the specifications and their future plans.  Silverlight is the new Adobe (Macromedia) Flash competitor from Microsoft, it is based on the new Windows Presentation Foundation graphics engine found in Vista. It turns out that it will be very tightly integrated with .Net even to the point of shipping with its own cut down runtime. The download should be around 2MB though initially it will not contain 3D capabilities. IE, Firefox and Safari will be supported at launch. Silverlight website: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

A colleague came across a problem recently where performance counters were showing a high exception to request ratio. In actual fact there were at 4 exceptions for every 1 request, that's 400% compared to the desired 5%. These seemed to be getting handled at some stage or another as there were no HttpUnhandledExceptions getting thrown at the UI. It turns out that Response.Redirect and Server.Transfer will throw a ThreadAbortException everytime the single parameter overload is called. i.e. Response.Redirect( string url ) The problem is that Response.Redirect will call a Response.End internally to stop code executing after the statement. This in turn throws our mystery...