As readers of the site know, I like to monkey around from time to time with various UI frameworks. Last month I ran a 3 part series on the YUI that was really well received (thanks!), and continues to be some of the most visited articles on the site (I even have a postback from Yahoo!…kinda cool).

To continue with that success, I bring you a series on ASP.NET AJAX. In the next few articles I will be breaking down the framework and provide some examples of how I used it while building a site for a client. Keep in mind, that this series won’t be able to cover everything, but it will give enough detail so you will know how to tackle something that isn’t directly covered here.

So lets get started shall we?

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Over the past few days I have been going over the Yahoo! User Interface or YUI for short. Up to this point I have discussed the Tab View and the Connection Manager.

For my last trick I am going to dive into the Dialog control. The dialog is really sweet because you can get a “popup” that looks and behaves like it would on the desktop. Now I will tell you upfront that I normally shy away from popups because they interrupt the flow of the app (don’t get me started on popups on top of popups…*shudder*).

However, for the real estate site the dialog provided a nice way of logging into the site, as well as a data collection form. For this article, I will focus on the login form.

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So yesterday I began a short series on the Yahoo! User Interface or YUI for short.

I began with the tab view, and today I am going to talk about the connection manager.

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So over the last several weeks I have been building a site for a client (it is an internally used app, otherwise I would give you a link). It is a relatively straight forward app for a real estate company so they can track their leads and contacts.

I could have done it the standard way, but I like to try out new stuff as much as I can. In this case I wanted to implement a little Ajax. I find this is a good way to get paid to experiment. It is a win/win for both me and the client. I get to learn a new technology and the client gets a much “fancier” site without having to pay for it (I never charge for the learning curve when I am the one who wants to try out something new).

The site was just a good old fashioned “data collection” site. Easy enough, so to make things interesting, I decided to use the Yahoo! User Interface or YUI. What is that? Well, it is basically Yahoo!’s way of doing the whole Ajax thing. But it is also really cool because they have some nice CSS templates that are built in and ready to use.

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