A while back, I've posted about the problem with Visual Studio 2005 complaining about the site being configured for use with ASP.NET 1.1. I've lived with this problem since then, but today I had enough...

Here is the solution that works for me:

1. Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager
2. Select the root node
3. Open Handler Mappings
4. Remove each entry that points to ASP.NET 1.1

The entries from poing 4. are the handlers for files such as .aspx, .asmx and so on. Notice that there exist an entry for each of those files that maps to ASP.NET 2.0.

I'm not an IIS expert so I don't know if those deleted entries were necessary, but I haven't noticed any negative impact of not having them.

Before doing any changes to IIS I would suggest making a backup of all its configuration files, unless you are not afraid - like me (hence no screen shots and no concrete names for entries to delete ).

Add to del.icio.us

OnClientClick is a useful property introduced in ASP.NET 2.0 that allows us to add some client-side behavior to button control. Using is as simple as providing the script to be called when a button is clicked by a user:

<asp:Button runat="server" ID="Save" 
    OnClientClick="return confirm('Are you sure?');" />

The problem is that if you use it like that, client-side validation won't fire. Looking at the rendered HTML quickly explains the situation:

onclick="return confirm('Are you sure?');WebForm_DoPostBackWithOptions(...)"

As you can see, the validation doesn't even have a chance to fire (which happens when WebForm_DoPostBackWithOptions is called).

Solving the issue is simple (or not). All that has to be done is a little change in our OnClientClick script (a piece of code found somewhere on the Internet):

<asp:Button runat="server" ID="Save" 
    OnClientClick="if (!confirm('Are you sure?')) return false;" />

Now we only return false (preventing the submit) in case a user didn't confirm the action, otherwise, the rest of the script will be called thus firing validation.

The reason I said that it may not be a simple issue is the fact, that the validation happens AFTER the confirmation, which is not the best thing in my opinion. Why ask the user about saving his data if there are still errors on the form, of which we will inform him after he confirms that he wants to save it?

After analyzing a bit, the code responsible for dealing with OnClientScript, I have come to a conclusion, that solving this problem is not an easy task. It would require some dirty hacks on the server side to make it pretty or calling validation routines on the client, before displaying the confirmation dialog (keeping in mind that checking if there are validation routines present at all is necessary in this case).

I've just left it as it is. After all it's only a minor inconvenience - at least in my case.

Add to del.icio.us

ASP.NET Ajax comes with a nice way to attach to a load event of a page. To do it just call Sys.Application.add_load and pass it a function as an argument. Done. Everything works as expected... WRONG!

It comes out that add_load fires on each callback and not only when the page loads for the first time. That is of course a problem if you want something to happen on page load only.

From what I've been able to learn, this behavior is by design. Although it is never mentioned in a strigh forward way in a description:

"Raised after all scripts have been loaded and after the objects in the application have been created and initialized."

There are some places in the documentation, that suggests that this is a way it was intended to be. First of all, ASP.NET Ajax tries to mimic that ASP.NET Page life cycle and as such, fires the load event every time there is a callback. The other thing that makes me believe, that load's behavior is there by design is this:

"You can use the event arguments to determine whether the page is being refreshed as a result of a partial-page update and what components were created since the previous load event was raised."

So now I know, but I still cannot accept the naming convention. Sys.Application plainly suggests, it's a kind of singleton, and not a per load thingy.

Add to del.icio.us