foo, bar and donkey

Me, Myself and My Phone

kirtid — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 04:16:00 GMT

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

kirtid — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:19:05 GMT

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

kirtid — Wed, 28 May 2008 05:54:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Spinning out of control!

kirtid — Wed, 14 May 2008 02:42:00 GMT

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....(read more)

Community in Control!

kirtid — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:50:27 GMT

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...(read more)

Why don't you Slide-r?

kirtid — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 12:30:00 GMT

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....(read more)

Struck by Silver-lightening!

kirtid — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 01:28:43 GMT

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...(read more)

Feb 29th Toolkit Release!

kirtid — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 02:00:52 GMT

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...(read more)

Toolkit for .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008

kirtid — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 05:12:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Rich Text Editor is here

kirtid — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 01:23:41 GMT

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...(read more)

Custom Tabs

kirtid — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 09:50:00 GMT

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...(read more)

How do I contribute to the Toolkit?

kirtid — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 02:42:26 GMT

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?...(read more)

Blog anachronisms

kirtid — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 03:41:54 GMT

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...(read more)

How to make localization in the Toolkit work for you?

kirtid — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 02:44:30 GMT

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...(read more)

Cascading AutoComplete

kirtid — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 02:31:00 GMT

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...(read more)