Hands On ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit I hope everyone had a good holiday, I apologize for not posting anything new in the past couple of months. Things have been very busy with everything going on lately. I happy to say that I can check one thing off the to-do list! For those of you that may not know, Wrox has created a new development to help programmers get up to speed quickly on new topics called a Wrox Blox. A Wrox Blox is a shortened down “Programmer to Programmer” eBook that focuses on specific tasks. For example, instead of finding the time to work through a 300 or so page book on a topic, the Wrox Blox talks specifically about a focused point. It also contains complete source code of the examples just like the “Programmer to Programmer” series.

In my case, I have written a Wrox Blox that focuses on the AJAX Control Toolkit titled “Hands-on ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit”. The book focuses on the controls: CollapsiblePanel, Accordion, Tabs, ModalPopup, TextboxWatermark, AutoComplete, and CascadingDropDown. Many of the topics and examples come from common questions that I have encountered on the ASP.NET forums. While the book focuses on specific controls, I feel it does a good job of discussing various topics related to all the controls, such as dynamic creation, digging into the source, understanding how controls are rendered, and theming to name a few. One specific topic found in the book that I’m sure most of you will be interested in is a much more in-depth look at theming the Tab Control. Creating themes for the Tab Control is one of the most popular posts on this blog and is frequently asked about in the ASP.NET forums.

The direct link to the book is: http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/productCd-0470286644.html. I’d like to thank Jim Minatel at Wrox for getting me involved in the project and all of the wonderful editors at Wrox for polishing up my rambling thoughts.