Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Last week I released a new version of Dropthings, my open source AJAX portal, that shows many fancy Web 2.0 features and showcases extensive use of ASP.NET 3.5, Workflow Foundation, C# 3.0 new language features, custom ASP.NET AJAX extenders, many performance and scalability techniques. I have written a book on these topics as well.

The new version implements the following performance and scalability improvement techniques:

Here's how the new version looks:

Dropthings new version

Hope you like the new design and the performance and scalability techniques that can significantly boost your ASP.NET website's quality. I highly recommend these techniques for ASP.NET websites. These are easy to implement and makes a world of difference in speed and smoothness for ASP.NET websites.

I am thinking about making an ASP.NET MVC version of this portal using jQuery. Do you think it will be a hot area to explore?

 

Share this post :
kick it on DotNetKicks.com

Published Mon, Jul 14 2008 13:10 by omar
Filed under: ,

Comments

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Monday, July 14, 2008 1:43 PM by Mike Roosa

I'd love to see the MVC version.

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Monday, July 14, 2008 2:25 PM by miguelangel carballo@gmail.com

problems in opera....dont work..

sorry,im natural speaking spanish..

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 1:45 AM by Mehfuz Hossain

Please use some sort of filtering in your flickr widget(for ex, currenlty it shows most recent photos, you can it make most interesting).Any chance of improvement in terms of loading time? Overall, it looks nice !!

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 2:02 AM by omar

You can customize each widget by clicking on the "edit" link on the header.

Flickr widget allows you to switch to Most Interesting, Most Recent and any custom tag.

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 2:23 AM by Mehfuz Hossain

Cool, but going to edit-> Most interesting/ Most Recent does not change the photos. Also, the default photo list should do some sort of filtering :-). Please tell more about improving the loading time of dropthings. Currenlty, the wait state is long for each action plus initial loading.

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 2:37 AM by omar

Seems like your internet problem. Working pretty well from here. How much latency to you get?

tracert www.dropthings.com

From here on a 128kbps line:

Initial loading - 10s

Second visit - 3s

Clicking on Flickr Next photos - 1s

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 4:52 AM by hhrvoje

I would LOVE to see it with MVC and JQuery, or maybe some other JS framework like prototype+scripaculus, mootools, extjs...

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 5:01 AM by neo

I'd love to see the MVC version.

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 8:33 AM by Lee Timmins

I think it's too early to convert to mvc since microsoft haven't even released a beta yet.  Also there are planned improvements for asp.net ajax and it would probably be better to hold off from jquery until more information is released.  Since your project is a showcase of what asp.net offers i feel this would be best approach.

One other area i wanted to touch on was open social.  There is already libraries for other frameworks out there but .net is lacking behind.  I feel it would work well in your project to allow users to create their own widgets.

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 10:00 AM by Kazi Manzur Rashid

I am also finding it very slow. I already mentioned Omar few times Update Panel is not the proper candidate for Start Page when users are allowed to do multiple Ajax operation. When doing multiple operations it aborts the previous operation, unless you do some kind of queuing.

You can expect to win the Formula1 with double Decker bus!!!

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 10:12 AM by whitsonk

If you hover over a widget while the page is loading the drag and drop functionality stops working for that widget. I use IE 7.

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 11:43 AM by Morteza

This is slow omar!

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 12:35 PM by omar

I made a mistake in configuring the script batch mapping. The configuration was done for my PC. On production, the ScriptResource.axd and WebResource.axd urls are different. I have updated the mapping now.

Note: the mapping is different for IE and Firefox/Opera/Safari. The generated url for .axd differs on IE and non-IE browsers.

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 11:10 PM by mike kidder

my VOTE for MVC.

I would definately like to see your take on ASP.Net MVC.. preview 4 is about to be released.

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Friday, July 18, 2008 7:10 AM by tuan

That was the first thing when I found out about drop things, why not in MVC, you got my vote,

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Friday, July 18, 2008 7:41 AM by jonx

No mvc and no jquery. I prefer being able to use the stuff you build and also keep it focuses on the MS World and have no external dependencies.

For MVC, wait that it's released and for jquery, what is there you can't do with Web.Extension and toolkit ?

Overall, very good work...

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Sunday, July 20, 2008 10:13 PM by George

asp.net mvc and Jquery would be a wonderful area to explore. I am a big  fan of both technologies.

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Monday, July 21, 2008 9:58 AM by Christian

i'd love to see the mvc and jquery version!!

greets, chris

ps: i like your book :)

# Herr

Monday, July 21, 2008 11:34 AM by Michael P. Schulze

Thank you for your portal solution.

mvc +1

jquery +1

Greetings from Germany,

Michael

# DropThings: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Monday, July 21, 2008 11:45 AM by ASP.NET AJAX Team Blogs

Omar AL Zabir (author of Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 ) updated his very cool ASP.NET AJAX

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Monday, July 21, 2008 5:43 PM by Phil

I'd love to see an MVC/JQuery version. Great idea!

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Monday, July 21, 2008 8:42 PM by robert

Hi, the license on dropthings.com says it's your license.  On CodePlex, it's Microsoft Permissive License, which is non-restrictive other than reselling the existing codebase.  I'd like to use it on a commercial project portal. They should probably be synced, which is correct?

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Wednesday, July 23, 2008 10:12 PM by Bill Hennessy

Is your website down (dropthings.com), or is it me?  

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Friday, July 25, 2008 2:29 AM by Mladen Mihajlovic

I'd also love to see the MVC version.

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Monday, August 04, 2008 9:44 PM by Rainmaker

I Change RSS Widget url as

"www.zdnet.com.tw/.../ent_tech.htm", then the widget's content will display error encoding.

What's the different with "XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(response.GetResponseStream())" and "XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream(),  true ))" ?

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Tuesday, August 05, 2008 7:33 AM by rajasekhar

If i put absolute positioned element inside a widget and do a drag drop the element is disappearing after dragdrop. It especially happens in IE7. to reproduce just place

<div style="position:absolute;border:solid 1px black;">

Some text here

</div>

In anyone of the widget and do drag drop of that widget.

Do you know any reason why this happens?

Thanks

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Wednesday, August 06, 2008 9:04 PM by Rainmaker

Omar master, if 2 or more "Fast RSS" widget will cooupy connections, so others widget will wait for RSS widget. Do you have any suggestions for me? Thanks.

# WidgetContainer.ascx's onmouseover="this.className='widget widget_hover'" will cause widget do drag & drop not work!

Monday, August 11, 2008 12:57 AM by Rainmaker

Sir, When first load page, mouse in any widget, then the widget's drag & drop will not work. WidgetContainer.ascx's onmouseover="this.className='widget widget_hover'" will cause widget do drag & drop not work!

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Monday, August 11, 2008 2:38 PM by Skino

My vote for MVC + JQuery

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Thursday, August 14, 2008 3:17 PM by reind

My vote for MVC + JQuery

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Monday, August 18, 2008 4:54 AM by Peter Short

I too am working on taking the basic idea here and make it work with jquery (not implementing any optimizing tricks yet) but still working with the classic forms model. perhaps then i will create a way to use it with WCSF and have some load time mechanism to expose the available modules to the container for consumption by the application. In theory u should be able to develop a module outside of the main application environment then drop it into the main app and have it up and running after a restart

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Monday, August 25, 2008 2:52 AM by jalam

My vote for MVC + JQuery

# An interesting bug.

Friday, September 12, 2008 3:25 AM by Miraculeux at gmail.com

First of all, I'd like to say your portal is verycool. I used it in my project.Recentlly I found an interesting bug in it.

While widget elments are on loading, if my mouse pointer is just hovering on someplace an widet element will appear. This element will became an draggable.

I traced your code, and found the bug alaies in CustomDragDropBehavior.js, line 112.

if( child.className == this._DragItemClassValue && child != this._dropCue)

For at that time, the DIV's class changed to "widget widget_hover", the first equation test will return false.

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Friday, September 19, 2008 11:56 AM by aBDU

I would like to see an MVC version. I am not sure about JQuery. I hope I am not asking too much but if you have two forks, one with JQuery and one without, it will make almost everyone happy. Let us know your future plans.

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Thursday, October 02, 2008 11:42 PM by Rainmaker

Dear Omar:

I found a bug. First I delete the HTML Widget  and add HTML Widget again. Then HTML Widget can not become a drag & drop.

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Saturday, October 04, 2008 2:58 AM by ha thanh hung

i love the way you develop widgets. But how these widget connect together? Do you have any solutions  for this? I mean somethings like WebPart sharepoint

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Sunday, October 12, 2008 6:44 PM by Asheesh Soni

My vote for MVC + jQuery

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Sunday, November 09, 2008 2:00 AM by Abdulrahman Murad

Hi Omar,

Good job and I liked it.

how can I download it??

my Email is:

developer85@hotmail.com

Regards

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Thursday, November 13, 2008 10:57 PM by Chris

I would love to see an ExtJs portal with MVC. A one page model using border layouts. Now that would be something.

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Saturday, November 15, 2008 7:34 PM by Ihab

MVC beta is out now and Microsoft officially supports jquery , so i also vote to see dropthings.com in MVC

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Saturday, June 06, 2009 8:55 PM by tc11o8

My vote for MVC + JQuery

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Friday, August 07, 2009 5:15 PM by Venkata Uma Lakkakula

Folks, check out my open source Web 2.0 Portal http://www.linksgrid.com; developed using Asp.Net MVC 1.0, Microsoft Ajax Client Templates and jQuery with drag and drop widget personalization. Implementation details are in my blog: http://lakkakula.wordpress.com

Hope this helps for the folks looking for MVC version.

BTW, great job Omar.

# re: Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - new and improved

Tuesday, January 05, 2010 2:43 AM by Phil

Hi there, would love to see the MVC / Jquery version, is that going to be released soon?

Leave a Comment

(required) 
(required) 
(optional)
(required)