AJAX Control Toolkit experiences

In the project I'm currently in, we are using ASP.NET AJAX Extensions. We use certain controls, like a Calendar, Tabs... So we tried Ajax Control Toolkit. At first sight, it looks really nice. It has an awesome calendar. However, when we (Pedroafa and me) tried to use it, we found a curious bug.

When you insert the calendar (we found the same behaviour with the Tabs) in an empty page, it works, it's nice. However, when you insert it into a FormView (say, in the EditItem template), it loses all the style. Hmmmmm. After searching the internet for someone with a problem like that one, we found it here. Or something like it, anyway.

It looks like the CalendarExtender loads its CSS when you receive a page that contains one directly from the server, but not when it's created in an AJAXlike way.

They say a workaround is to have another TextBox outside the Formview and another CalendarExtender bound to it, and make them invisible. They're invisible, but they load the CSS, so when you create the one in the FormView, it's correctly formatted.

After seeing that kind of bug, we decided we were not using the Control Toolkit until it was more stable.

However it was about time they created a Tab control. Hope we can use it soon.

Technorati tags: AJAX