Log in to like this post! How can we make ASP.NET AJAX (Aikido) controls even better? [Infragistics] Murtaza Abdeali / Wednesday, August 26, 2009 Those of you, who’ve been using our ASP.NET controls for over a year, may already be familiar with the Aikido framework. If not, you can check out the Aikido page to learn about the framework and the ASP.NET AJAX controls based on it. In this post I would like to open up to gather your feedback on thoughts about the design of these controls and what we could do more in the upcoming releases to make them even better. We have been working on this framework for over two years. WebSplitter control, released in 2008 Volume 1 was the first Aikido control and since then all the controls we’ve shipped were based on this framework. Since 2008 Volume 3, we started targeting some major pain points from customers on controls that we’ve released in the past. For example, controls emitting html that is not completely XHTML complaint, relying heavily on ViewState, or having a steep learning curve. Remember that those controls are serving the ASP.NET market since ASP.NET 1.0, so they followed the best approach available at that time. As ASP.NET itself is going through its fourth major release and have matured a lot since then and with new standards and added support for UI controls, instead of re-engineering the old object model to address those pain points, we decided to take advantage of the ASP.NET AJAX stack that our Aikido framework uses and re-designed some of the controls from ground up to be able to use the latest and greatest technologies, be standard compliance and address those pain points. In the upcoming release, 2009 Volume 2 of Web Client, the following is the list of controls you will see in the ASP.NET toolset that are based on the Aikido framework: WebHierarchicalDataGrid WebDataGrid WebDataTree WebDataMenu WebDropDown WebEditors WebTextEditor WebNumericEditor WebMaskEditor WebDateTimeEditor WebPercentEditor WebCurrencyEditor WebDatePicker WebDatePicker WebMonthCalendar WebDialogWindow WebImageViewer WebProgressBar WebSlider WebSplitter WebHierarchicalDataSource We also release these controls as CTP before they make into the final product and it is great to hear feedback from you. If you want to be participate in providing feedback and help tailor the final product, please send me an email. I will let you know whenever we ship the latest bits. Also, let me know what you'd like to see in the upcoming releases of the product as well. Please send your feedback at: murtazaa@infragistics.com Thanks!