I have received feedback from our customers mentioning that WebCallOut is merely a UI component without AJAX/server-side featuer in behind. By integrating WebCallOut and Intersoft’s FlyPostBack architecture, I’m glad to announce and prove that the newly-born WebCallOut is not as simple as it looks, but rather a pure, real and powerful similar to the other Intersoft’s components so far.

With this new enhancement added into WebCallOut, you can now assign WebCallOut’s Text or Title not only from client side, but also from server side via FlyPostBack. This new enhancement will certainly add flexibilities in using WebCallOut and therefore results in more advanced scenarios supported.

In order to perform FlyPostBack, simply add OnShow server side event in WebCallOut. In OnShow server side event, add the below code. 
protected void WebCallOut1_Show(object sender, ISNet.WebUI.WebDesktop.WebCallOutEventDataArgs e)
{
        e.Title = "New Title with FlyPostBack";
        e.Text = "New Text with FlyPostBack";
}


OnShow server side event will be triggered when just before WebCallOut is about to appear/show.

If you are using WebCallOut with ContentMode = “UseTemplate”, then you can change the control(s) in the template with this below approach.   �
protected void WebCallOut1_Show(object sender, WebCallOutEventDataArgs e)
{
        WebCallOut callout = sender as WebCallOut;
        Label label = callout.FindControl("Label1") as Label;
        label.ForeColor = System.Drawing.Color.Green;
        label.Text = "New Text with FlyPostBack";
}


For better understanding, I provide WebCallOut’s lifecycle illustration.

Standard lifecycle	FlyPostBack lifecycle

Hopefully this integration can help developers to gain better web experience. Quoting Intersoft’s motto, we are striving to deliver the best WebUI components that have “insights for a better web experience” for both developers and users.

Best Regards,
Budianto Muliawan.
Software Architect, Intersoft Solutions Corp.

All the best,
Jimmy.

In case you are not aware, Mozilla has recently released Firefox 3.0. While it promised some cool features, and nice enhancements in DOM and CSS area, it contains a dozens of breaking and regression. It’s not so surprising, as we have constantly experienced the breaking from one major version to another. For instance, the onblur event is no longer working properly. Another example, FireFox no longer recognizes <font face=”Webdings”>. It doesn’t even work if you put it in the style of DIV. So what does that mean? Say bye-bye to imageless solution that used Unicode font to display nice Web icons.

Despite of several breaking changes in FF3 that affect our products, we have tested that 95% of major functions are working as expected. You might, however, notice several minor layout issues such as shrinked column header in WebGrid and weird sorting indicator. But, nothing to worry – as we have planned the Firefox 3 support to be steadily availabe in this month’s hotfix (or possibly inclusion in Service Pack 2).

On the other hand, we have also aware on several new browsers release such as IE8, although still in beta. There is also Opera 9.5 – finally – after a long beta. Fortunately, unlike Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera are much better in maintaining compatibilities and less regression. I personally have tested our UIs on both IE8 and Opera 9.5 — both worked flawlessly.

WebUI Studio.NET 2008 in Internet Explorer 8 (note: Emulate IE7 is turned off).

WebUI Studio.NET 2008 in Opera 9.5.

Finally, just before landing to our next target for 2008 R2, we plan to release Service Pack 2 for WebUI Studio.NET 2008 R1 by sometime next week, which includes all latest hotfixes, several nice enhancements in WebAqua, WebScheduler and WebGrid, plus some cool samples.

Best Regards,
Jimmy.

[MissingFieldException]: Field not found:’ISNet.WebUI.ProductInfo.Is2008Product’.

To fix this issue, simply update the WebUI.NET Framework to the latest build (build 559 or higher), which can be obtained from Update Manager or My Components in TDN2. Don’t forget to copy the new assemblies to your project’s bin folder. And last but not least, clear the .NET Temporary Files cache to ensure you have used the latest build version.

Dicky-Support Engineer
Intersoft Solutions

• Create the custom editing form and set the EditingUrl property. The custom editing form used in this sample uses .NET standard control. Advanced client behavior can be implemented manually.
• Add the following code in OnEditingFormShow client side event. The code is needed to reload the editing form every time it’s opened.
  
  function WebScheduler1_OnEditingFormShow(controlId, action, eventView, eventType, newType) �
  {  �
       var WebScheduler1 = ISGetObject(controlId);   �
       var dlg = WebScheduler1.EditingDialogBox; �
       var path = “./EditingForm_Custom.aspx?action=” + action;  �
       if (action == “Edit”)      �
            path += “&eventID=” + eventView.GetOriginalObject().EventID;
       dlg.SetContentURL(path);  �
       return true; �
  }

You can manually implement the database updates in the custom editing form. After you save the changes to database, you need to refresh the scheduler so the changes can be displayed in the scheduler. In this sample, I use the following code to call the Refresh method after save action.

server side:
Page.ClientScript.RegisterStartupScript(typeof(Page), “OnLoad”, “Load();”, true);

client side:
function Load() �
{     �
     var wnd = window.parent;
     var scheduler = wnd.ISGetObject(‘WebScheduler1′);
     scheduler.EditingDialogBox.CloseDialog();
     scheduler.Refresh();
}

To close the dialog box, use the following code:

var wnd = window.parent;
var scheduler = wnd.ISGetObject(“WebScheduler1″);
scheduler.EditingDialogBox.CloseDialog();

Note that you are unable to add custom fields in the editing form, because WebScheduler architecture has not supported it yet. Don’t worry though, we will implement the extensibility feature in next version of WebScheduler, which would be available in WebUI Studio.NET 2008 R2.

For further information, please try this sample. Note that you need to use the latest WebScheduler.NET build 112, which can be retrieved from Update Manager. This build is newer than the one included in WebUI Studio.NET 2008 R1 SP1.

As usual, please send any feedback to feedback@intersoftpt.com

Two of the most noteworthy enhancements are:

1. Strong x64 bit support in all version of Windows (including XP, Vista and Server 2003/2008). All our assemblies are now fully compatible with native 64bit mode IIS Web application. So, if you’re deploying to Windows Server x64 edition, you should upgrade your Web application to 2008 R1 SP1.
   �
   Note that the x64 bit support doesn’t require separate assembly, so each single assembly can be used in both x32 and x64 environment.
    
2. New Charting runtime engine for Pivot Charting feature in WebGrid.NET Enterprise 6.0. If you’ve deployed applications using Pivot Charting feature, reading this Whitepaper is a must!
   �
   The new, built-in Charting runtime engine is a royalty free component that is OEM licensed, and redeveloped by our engineers to meet the full backward compatibility with previous runtime engine that we licensed from third party. In this new Service Pack, we no longer distribute the runtime engine from the previous third party Charting component.

There are also dozens of exciting enhancements, such as full RTL support in WebScheduler as mentioned in Erika’s post and significantly updated WebScheduler documentation. We also included the large data enhancement for WebGrid and ISDataSource in this Service Pack 1.

For full list of fixes, new features and enhancements, make sure the “Read release notes” checkbox is checked in the last screen of the installation. Get Service Pack 1 now!

All the best,
Jimmy.

WebScheduler now works fine in x32 and x64-bit machine.

When RTL mode is enabled, all elements in the page will be displayed right to left. WebScheduler.NET 1.0 SP1 now supports RTL mode. Note that all elements is displayed correctly, along with the more div elements, the drop shadow, and event’s callout.

SelectedDate and SelectedViewMode values are persisted during flypostback.

In Month view, user can navigate to other view by clicking either the day header or the week header. A new property, EnableNavigateToOtherView, is added to determine whether or not this behavior should be enabled. If disabled, no action will be performed when user clicks the headers.

Added some client side events related to editing form.

If you have other feedbacks regarding WebScheduler.NET, feel free to send them to feedback@intersoftpt.com.

#1 – Why not using homegrown table for best speed?

Unfortunately, there’s no remedy when it comes to binding large data table using basic technique. As I mentioned previously, a single .NET’s Fill method alone already takes 20 seconds to fill 350k data into the dataset. Not to mention the time to populate and dispatch each row into the UI, it will take at least 25 seconds until rendering.

If you have a large datatable, you can give it a spin using the following sample:

<asp:GridView ID=”GridView1″ runat=”server” AllowPaging=”True” AllowSorting=”True” AutoGenerateColumns=”False” DataKeyNames=”ID” DataSourceID=”SqlDataSource1″>
   <Columns>
        […Columns]
   </Columns>
</asp:GridView>

If the above sample can be bound to 350k data in less than 20 seconds, I’m interested to learn further.

#2 – I guess we can use SqlDataSource with DataReader mode and bind it to GridView.

Unfortunately, DataReader mode in SqlDataSource won’t work with Paging and the rest of databound features. So, SqlDataSource is totally unviable.

#3 – How about ObjectDataSource, or other built-in datasource controls that come with ASP.NET?

ObjectDataSource does support paging, but it falls into the same bottleneck as it used DataAdapter to fetch the results into a DataSet. The pagination is done at server-side control level and not at database level, and hence, it will result into the same 20 seconds performance hit.

So at this time, none of the built-in datasource controls (or the GridView) can bound to a large data table efficiently.

#4 – Isn’t it inefficient to bound to such a large table? I think in real world scenarios, you should have a predefined filter for data fetching.

Good shot. Although our Grid supports large table binding, we often recommend customers to load and retrieve data efficiently by either using predefined filter or asked user to enter some search criteria before requesting data. Best design & pattern in application architecture is always our first priority and suggestion.

However, the large table binding is unavoidable in several enterprise scenarios. For a quick real-world scenario, administrator often need to browse a table of their Sql database via Web in order to maintain the data records (or perhaps updating records). As business growth, the table might contain more records. In this situation, if the deployed data grid is not able to display the data in acceptable timing, the administrator will waste his entire day in waiting the Web page to response.

For us, it’s extremely important to support such enterprise scenarios (as we utilized it in our own internal application as well).

Conclusion

Performance is always a hot topic in software industry, especially in reusable component industry as it becomes foundation and backbone of many enterprises Web application. Some products are good in styles, but not performance. Some are good in performance, but not styles.

WebGrid.NET Enterprise is striving to deliver both the best user experience and styles, and performance.

In addition to the measurement factors that I used in my initial post, there are several more important points that worth mentioned.

• Database agnostics. Unlike competing products, WebGrid supports large data binding to any kind of database through ISDataSource control. You can bind to Sql Server, Access, Oracle and even your own custom object collection.
• Bare-metal architecture and elegant binding approach. Many developers end up with “tricky workaround” to achieve faster results. While this may work, it is not quite reusable in other pages, as many codes are involved in the page’s code behind. ISDataSource embraces an elegant and professional approach, which works consistently with the entire reusability concept that it introduced.�
  �
  Surprisingly, the sample that I mentioned in the previous post doesn’t contain any single line of codes related to the databinding or data retrieval in the page’s code behind. The Webform is completely declarative, while the actual codes are done in GetData method, which is defined at ISDataSource level (and works consistently with datasource control architecture that introduced in ASP.NET 2.0). This allows you to create as many pages as you like, and simply refer to the desired data object without the need for extra coding. It’s that simple.

Next, we will make available an in-depth knowledge base article that explains the technique we used in the sample. It’s unfortunate that we can’t ship the sample in our product installer due to the size of the large database sample (which is around 500MB in size).

I hope this post satisfies your hunger in knowing and learning more about some performance topics in our products. Enjoy, and have a nice day

Best Regards,
Jimmy.

What’s new in 2008 Support Center:

• Major revamp on user interface of the Support home page for more intuitive information browsing and easier navigation.
• Added new products materials, such as Online Documentation for WebAqua and WebScheduler.
• Added Featured Tutorials, Featured Whitepapers and Featured Resources.
• New “Change Group by Resource” feature. Instead of browsing per product, you can now browse per resource type. When you click on the “Change Group by Resource” link, the ribbon toolbar will automatically change to Resources type.
• You can now conveniently browse all articles, videos, white papers, and other resources regardless of the products. This enables you to quickly check newly added resources. To use this new function, simply click “See all featured videos”, or “See all whitepapers”, and other similar “See all” pattern.
• Added several new white papers, such as WebGrid 6.0 on SharePoint 2007, WebUI 2008, and many more.

What’s new in updated WebUI Studio.NET 2008 R1 Installer:

• Incorporated latest assemblies build per April 1st, 2008 hotfix, which fixes several regressions and support for ASP.NET AJAX 3.5
• More complete server-side and client-side reference (and included more how-to topics) for WebScheduler.
• VB.NET samples for WebScheduler is now included.

All the best,
Jimmy.

The 2008 R1 refresh contains the following fixes:

• Minor installer related issues, such as missing samples and images.
• Fixed several regressions on WebDesktopManager and WebTab.
• Enhanced WebFishEye to work better and more stable in Safari Mac, Firefox Mac and Firefox Windows.
• Enhanced WebScheduler to cover more advanced event scenarios rendering, which are unhandled in initial release. This new build of WebScheduler has been extensively tested against advanced scenarios such as converting a normal event to a switch-day event, better synchronization between each views, and fixed several issues in Agenda.
• Added more How-To topics and more complete server-side documentation for WebScheduler.

The live sample has also been updated with the latest builds.

You can download 2008 R1 Refresh from Product Trial or My Components. However, if you are not in hurry to get the fixes for the above issues, I recommend you to wait until the end of this month when the hotfixes become available for download.

Regards,
Jimmy.