MSDN Magazine - August 2008 - (Page 35)

Give Me a Placeholder In ASP.NET, the simplest way to achieve this page architecture oriented toward plug-ins involves using the PlaceHolder control and ASCX user controls to define on-demand components. Here’s how you define an updateable area: The updateable content is bound to the MenuItemClick of the Menu. Through the UpdateMode property, the panel is also configured for control-specific updates. This means that the updateable area is refreshed only when the user clicks on a menu item. In most Web applications, you use a menu to point users to different functional areas of the site or the page. Having distinct ASPX pages to implement specific functionalities is helpful for a number of reasons. It keeps your code clean and easier to maintain and test. But more importantly, it allows you to assign the implementation of distinct functionalities to distinct developers on the team. Thus, you can improve the productivity by parallelizing some development tasks. The single-page interface is a typical AJAX pattern that suggests you have a main page in your application whose user interface is rearranged every time an event is fired. The single-page interface model is great at minimizing postbacks, but it requires some care when it comes to parallelizing development tasks on a team. You should consider it to be a page architecture based on the concept of plug-ins. In other words, the page defines placeholders with a contracted interface where dynamically loaded components could be plugged in quickly and easily. You associate each menu item with an ASCX user control and load it into the placeholder whenever the item is clicked. Figure 3 shows the source code of the aforementioned LoadContent function, which you invoke from the MenuItemClick event handler. The LoadControl method on the Page class takes the URL of an ASP.NET user control and loads it into memory as an instance of a class that derives from UserControl. If the control is loaded correctly, the method adds it to the Controls collection of the PlaceHolder. Note that the ASP.NET PlaceHolder control doesn’t output any markup, so don’t be afraid of cluttering your user interface markup if you use it. Using ASCX user controls in the context of an AJAX site with NCache TM Clustered Object Cache for .NET Boost your .NET application performance! If your .NET application runs in a server-farm and has large number of users, then use NCache to boost its performance and scalability. NCache is an extremely fast distributed object cache for .NET. Enterprise Distributed Object Cache Cache data, reduce database trips, and boost performance Scale up thru Replicated, Partitioned, and Client Cache topologies Distributed ASP.NET Session Cache Faster & more scalable session storage Integrate without any code change Distributed ASP.NET Output Cache Cache rendered pages and serve content without re-rendering Integrate without any code change msdnmagazine.com Ph: +1-925-236-3830 Download FREE Trial www.alachisoft.com August 2008 35 http://www.alachisoft.com http://www.alachisoft.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - August 2008

MSDN Magazine - August 2008 Toolbox CLR Inside Out Basic Instincts Cutting Edge Patterns in Practice Data 2.0 - Expose And Consume Data In A Web Services World Biztalk EDI - Build A Robust EDI Solution With BizTalk Server Silverlight - Create Animations With XAML And Expression Blend Write On! - Create Web Apps You Can Draw On With Silverlight 2 Wicked Code - Craft Custom Controls For Silverlight 2 Team System Foundations Windows With C++ Concurrent Affairs Going Places { End Bracket }

MSDN Magazine - August 2008

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