By default, Visual Studio 2008 does not display ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 controls in the toolbox when you are targeting .NET Framework 2.0 (this is because AJAX 1.0 is a separate download from VS 2008, and the AJAX 1.0 installer only adds templates/controls to VS 2005). In order to make the AJAX 1.0 controls available in VS 2008, you need to populate the toolbox manually using these steps:
1. Open a Web Form (.aspx page) in your project
2. Right-click the Toolbox and choose “Add Tab”
3. Give the new tab a name, such as “AJAX Extensions 1.0”
4. Right click underneath the new tab and select “Choose Items…” (note that it can take awhile to bring up the this dialog for the first time)
5. In the Choose Toolbox Items dialog, click the Browse… button
6. Browse to \Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions\v1.0.61025, select System.Web.Extensions.dll, and click the “Open” button.
7. You should see the toolkit controls selected in the Choose Toolbox Items dialog. Click OK to add these controls to the toolbox.
After confirming this dialog, the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 controls will appear in your toolbox. You can verify that these are the 1.0 controls by hovering over a control in the Toolbox and looking for the tooltip containing version number 1.0.61025.0.
Important Note: These controls will continue to be displayed in applications that target .NET Framework 3.5, so be careful not to accidently add them to pages in those applications (you should use the AJAX Extensions controls included in .NET Framework 3.5 instead).
Step Three (Optional): Download and Install the ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit Controls to the VS 2008 Toolbox
If your application uses the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, you will need to follow these similar instructions to populate the toolbox in VS 2008 with the ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit controls. If you already have downloaded the Toolkit to your machine, you may skip steps 1-3.
1. Click here to go to the ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit Release page
2. Download the latest version of the toolkit for .NET Framework version 2.0 (choose one):
a. AjaxControlToolkit-NoSource.zip
b. AjaxControlToolkit.zip (includes source code)
3. In Windows Explorer, right-click the zip file and choose “Extract All…” to extract the contents to an “AjaxControlToolkit” folder in the same directory
4. In Visual Studio 2008, Open a Web Form (.aspx page) in your project
5. Right-click the Toolbox and choose “Add Tab”
6. Give the new tab a name, such as “AJAX Toolkit 1.0”
7. Right click underneath the new tab and select “Choose Items…” (note that it can take awhile to bring up the this dialog for the first time)
8. In the Choose Toolbox Items dialog, click the Browse… button
9. Browse to \AjaxControlToolkit\SampleWebSite\Bin, select AjaxControlToolkit.dll, and click the “Open” button.
10. You should see the toolkit controls selected in the Choose Toolbox Items dialog. Click OK to add these controls to the toolbox.
Important Note: These controls will continue to be displayed in applications that target .NET Framework 3.5, so be careful not to accidently add them to pages in those applications (you should use the AJAX Control Toolkit released for .NET Framework 3.5 instead).
Conclusion
You can now continue building and maintaining your .NET Framework 2.0 + AJAX 1.0 Web application in Visual Studio 2008. When you close and re-open your project in Visual Studio, you will not be prompted to upgrade it again, although you can upgrade to .NET Framework 3.5 at any time by following these steps. Additionally, there are many great new features of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 that you can use to develop your AJAX 1.0 application (see the links at the top of this post), although there are few caveats about developing AJAX 1.0 applications in Visual Studio 2008 that are worth calling out:
· The AJAX item templates such as “AJAX Web Form” and “AJAX Master Page” not available in the Add New Item dialog of a .NET Framework 2.0 application. You can instead add a regular Web Form or Master Page template, and add the <asp:ScriptManager> control from the toolbox.
· JScript Intellisense always displays members from the AJAX 3.5 scripts. Although these scripts are backward-compatible with AJAX 1.0, Jscript Intellisense may display members that are unavailable in AJAX 1.0. To get AJAX 1.0-based Intellisense, you can copy the entire System.Web.Extensions folder from the AJAX 1.0 installation directory (typically under \Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions\v1.0.61025\MicrosoftAjaxLibrary) and then add an explicit script reference to the 1.0 MicrosoftAjax.js script on the <asp:ScriptManager/> in your page:
<asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server">
<Scripts>
<asp:ScriptReference Name="MicrosoftAjax.js"
Path="~/System.Web.Extensions/1.0.61025.0/MicrosoftAjax.js" />
</Scripts>
</asp:ScriptManager>
· Jscript Intellisense against Web Services (registered in ScriptManager) or the ProfileService (enabled in Web.config) is unavailable in an AJAX 1.0 application.
· Extender controls from the AJAX 1.0 Control Toolkit or other AJAX 1.0-based 3rd-party control libraries will not get the VS 2008 Extender design-time enhancements (i.e. the “Choose Extender…” smart task in Design View).
· You will not get intellisense for references to scripts inside third-party assemblies.
