foo, bar and donkey

Me, Myself and My Phone

2009-02-17T04:16:00Z

I apologize for being so inactive on my blog for the past few months. I switched to the Mobile Services division in June to work on a V1 consumer mobile service - My Phone. Microsoft My Phone has had so much buzz even before it was released. However, I could not blog about it until the formal announcement today at the Mobile World Congress today. But now the cat is officially out of the bag.

It has been an awesome learning experience working on V1 mobile service targeted for consumers and I hope that it is received well. The team has worked really hard to make this release possible in a very short span of time. Kudos! I hope some of them go out for a beer tonight and take a day off or something.

So what is My Phone?

Microsoft My Phone synchronizes data on your phone, specifically Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Pictures, Videos, Music, Documents, SMS (WOW!) and even stuff on your Storage Card, to the cloud.

You can get the latest My Phone news from the My Phone blog.

How do I get set up with My Phone?

If you have a Windows Mobile 6.0 or 6.1 Phone you can try out Microsoft My Phone today with a promotional code. Currently it is an invite-only beta. Please sign up and add yourself to the wait list. You will need a Windows Live ID (formerly Passport) to sign into the service.

What does My Phone do for me?

Keeps your data safe

If you ever lose your phone or decide you want a new one, My Phone will save you a lot of time by keeping the data intact and allowing you to easily migrate it to a new device.

Do more with your data online

You can also manage the data from the My Phone website - add new contacts, download pictures and videos you took using your phone to your home PC, push your favorite picture to your phone so that you have it with you on the go, and lots more.

How can I share my My Phone experience?

If you have tried it out and have bugs to report or any new ideas around improving our service you can do so on our My Phone forum.

See you there!

Using UpdatePanels with ModalPopups

2008-07-31T20:19:05Z

Moving an old post over from my old Technet blog to this MSDN blog.

One of the most frequently asked questions on the Toolkit forums and at MIX after Shawn's demo was how to get UpdatePanels to work right with ModalPopups. The trick is to understand that the ModalPopup extender attaches itself to more than just the TargetControl and PopupControl. If you include the OK and Cancel buttons inside the ModalPopup Panel in an UpdatePanel, make sure you include the extender declaration in it as well. If you do not, once a postback occurs the extender will not reinitialize the handlers and you will get null references. Also, if buttons inside the ModalPopup Panel are set to be OK and Cancel buttons on the ModalPopup Extender, then their sole purpose is to close the Popup Panel and run their respective scripts if any have been set. They will not perform postbacks or execute any other client side handlers since the ModalPopup prevents the event from propagating up.

I have attached a sample page that demonstrates three simple scenarios with ModalPopups and UpdatePanels.

ModalPopup with an UpdatePanel inside its Popup Panel: Make sure that the OK and Cancel buttons are not inside the UpdatePanel otherwise the handlers will be rendered useless on postback.
UpdatePanel that contains a ModalPopup Extender and its Popup Panel: Clicking OK or Cancel still does not cause the postback since those buttons are tied to client side handlers. Clicking on any other control will cause the server side handlers to kick in. Since the extender declaration is inside the UpdatePanel, the asynchronous postback causes the ModalPopupBehavior to be reinitialized correctly and any client side handlers are setup again when the request is completed. So if you would like to postback every time the user clicks OK or Cancel, just don't set those properties on the extender. The Modal Popup Panel closes on postback as desired since the entire popup is inside an UpdatePanel.
What if that Popup Panel in # (2) contains an UpdatePanel: Specify the triggers that will cause the outer panel to update and allow the UpdatePanel inside the ModalPopup to operate on its own terms. This time the ModalPopup Panel does not close on postback triggered from within it because the trigger for the outer panel is specifically set to be a separate button.

It is a good idea to design the page without UpdatePanels in mind. When writing the page place UpdatePanels when the rest is done. Once you have the page setup, determine locations in your page that need to be asynchronously updated and the controls that should act as triggers to perform that operation and then appropriately place UpdatePanels with the correct triggers and UpdateMode property set. With extenders it is important that you take into consideration not just the controls targetted by the extender but any others which it hooks into to provide additional functionality.

This post should evolve as I get more feedback and I will update the sample accordingly as well. I hope this helps.

Spinning-in-Control

2008-05-28T05:54:00Z

In my previous blog post I talked about how easily you could achieve a spinning/rotator functionality in Silverlight with existing controls. I promised that I would come back with a more reusable solution, so here it goes. A more organized attempt at spinning... One of the biggest issues I ran into, as with designing any generic control, was trying to keep the API simple while adding both basic Numeric Up Down functionality and ability to navigate through custom items. To workaround that in a clean...(read more)

Spinning out of control!

2008-05-14T02:42:00Z

What's going on? Well...I was wondering what control to explore this week. Currently I have my Sherlock hat on and trying to filter down the list of necessary controls using the Silverlight framework to meet the most common Rich Internet Application requirements. We have not received too many requests for Spinner/NumericUpDown but I thought I would try out how hard it is to come up with something using existing functionality in Silverlight. So here are some observations/findings. Overview A spinner...(read more)

Community in Control!

2008-04-22T09:50:27Z

Lately my Toolkit tasks involve working with passionate members who are making it a great, self-sustaining community project. How is that? They are contributing in the following two ways: Patches : Patches are mostly for small bug fixes or feature additions which allow the member to invest limited time and still add value to the Toolkit by solving very targeted problems reported by users. We have been checking in a lot of patches on behalf of our users and the trend keeps going up. We hope to see...(read more)

Why don't you Slide-r?

2008-03-08T12:30:00Z

In this post, I hope to give an introduction to the Silverlight Slider that is part of the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 SDK and share with you some interesting usage scenarios that demonstrate how to use the Slider API's and change its default look and feel. Anatomy of the Slider The Silverlight Slider owes most of its design to the WPF Slider and we have tried to ensure that it is a subset of the WPF Slider both in terms of the API's and behavior. It consumes/builds on top of the following classes, all...(read more)

Struck by Silver-lightening!

2008-03-06T01:28:43Z

The cat is out of the bag, yes, Silverlight 2 Beta 1 is now available for everybody to download and use. My past few months have been spent learning Silverlight 2 and building Silverlight 2 controls. Controls I worked on: I was on the team responsible for the following controls which made their way into the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 SDK: ContentControl and ContentPresenter The Button family which includes Button , HyperlinkButton , RepeatButton The ToggleButton family which includes ToggleButton , CheckBox...(read more)

Feb 29th Toolkit Release!

2008-03-01T02:00:52Z

You can experience the new Toolkit here . As has been the case with the last couple of releases, it includes binaries and source for both .NET Framework 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.5. Please post any issues you run into on our forums . Mucho thanks to our patch contributors who made this a very successful release! We would love to include your fixes in the next Toolkit release. All you need to do is to find a bug and start patching ....(read more)

Toolkit for .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008

2007-11-20T05:12:00Z

We have created a new Toolkit release 11119 that goes hand in hand with the official release from the Developer Division in Microsoft of the product code-named "Orcas" that packages a new version of Visual Studio and a new .NET Framework . We have introduced some version name changes in the Toolkit that reflect which ASP.NET AJAX version it builds on top of. .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 (includes ASP.NET AJAX): Toolkit version 3.5.11119.0 .NET Framework 2.0, Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET...(read more)

Rich Text Editor is here

2007-11-11T01:23:41Z

I am super excited to announce that Kannan Sundararajan , my colleague at Microsoft, has written a Rich Text Editor control using ASP.NET and JavaScript and shared it under the MS-PL license on CodePlex. It has a very rich feature set and Kannan hopes to enhance it further in the future. Since it is a CodePlex project you can report issues and make feature requests. Here are the highlights: Live demo: If you would like to see the control in action, then check out this live demo that Kannan has put...(read more)

Custom Tabs

2007-11-02T09:50:00Z

Shawn , the grand Toolkit poobah and my manager, forwarded me a great post by Andrew Cushen that talks about some of the quirks that one runs into when styling Tabs in the Ajax Control Toolkit. We will look into the issue that requires the workarounds in step 8 of the "How to style the AJAX Tab Control" section. I have attached a Custom Tabs website project that I created following Andrew's steps. It worked like a charm! Do you have interesting Toolkit stories to share? Send me a link to...(read more)

How do I contribute to the Toolkit?

2007-10-16T02:42:26Z

We have been brainstorming ideas to get community contributions in the Toolkit for almost a year now. After long deliberation we now have a plan and would like to try it out. If these are some questions on your mind? How do I fix a bug in the Toolkit? How do I add a new feature to a Toolkit control? How do I get my control to be included in the Toolkit? Then this document should answer them. The Patch Utility has been very effective in getting small fixes and feature requests be included in the Toolkit...(read more)

Blog anachronisms

2007-10-10T03:41:54Z

I have been moving some of my Technet blog posts over to this blog that I think are still relevant, although, adding them now has resulted in a chronological disarray that may make my blog seem a little confusing. I hope that it should not be the case in the future since I don't plan to move anymore anytime soon. If there are any that you would like me to move across I will do so only if they do not feel too out of order. There has been one guardian angel through all this chaos and that is Windows...(read more)

How to make localization in the Toolkit work for you?

2007-10-10T02:44:30Z

FAQ # ...: Why does the Toolkit add resources binaries to a website's bin directory? 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...(read more)

Cascading AutoComplete

2007-10-10T02:31:00Z

We have received a lot of feedback from users about not being able to pass additional information to the AutoComplete webservice which limits their usage of the extender. We decided to absorb that input and add support to all extenders that issue XmlHttpRequests the option of passing in data above and beyond what is allowed by the standard webservice parameters, something that closely resembles the DynamicPopulate style support, to provide to flexible context. With this support in , you will be able...(read more)