How to make a Gmail-like loading indicator with ASP.NET Ajax

The application uses a few ASP.NET Ajax controls so I was pretty surprised when the customer sent me an email saying that he liked all the dynamic loading and the fact that he could reorder "things" using drag&drop and saving them without waiting the page to reload, but it took him a while to understand was going on. The first time he clicked the button, and since nothing happened, he thought that something was going wrong, so he kept clicking on the button, an yet nothing happening.

The problem was that since all the Ajax interactions happen behind the scenes asynchronously, the user doesn't understand what's going on: sometimes the user doesn't need to know what's going on (like when you are just reloading some data), but when he presses a button he needs to know that he did the right thing and that something is happening. With the "old style" ASP.NET a postback would have been initiated, so it was obvious that something was happening, but how to do it using Ajax?

That is pretty easy to accomplish with ASP.NET: just drop in an UpdateProgress control and it will be displayed when an Ajax postback happens.

But, as default behavior, the UpdateProgress is displayed in the position where it is added to the page, so, if your page is longer than a scroll page, the indicator could not be visible: it has to be positioned relative to the browser window and not relative the html document.

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How to build an advanced ASP.NET AJAX Photo Slideshow featuring imaging effects and watermarks with ImageDraw for ASP.NET

Technologies used
- Neodynamic ImageDraw (3.0 or later) for ASP.NET
- Microsoft .NET Framework (2.0 or later)
- Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Framework (1.0 or later)
- Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit
- Microsoft Visual Studio .NET (2005 or later - Visual Web Developer Express Edition)

This ImageDraw demo - which source code files can be found at the end of this page available for downloading - demonstrates how easily you can use ImageDraw object model and ASP.NET AJAX Framework to design an advanced AJAX-based Photo Slideshow. This demo is based on the Slideshow (SlideShowExtender) sample of AJAX Control Toolkit (http://www.asp.net/AJAX/AjaxControlToolkit/Samples/SlideShow/SlideShow.aspx)

The following figure is a screenshot of the ASP.NET AJAX Photo Slideshow application that leverages ASP.NET AJAX Framework, ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit and ImageDraw. Each photo slide is dynamically created by ImageDraw objects adding built-in Rounded Rectangle Shapes for photo metadata; applying the desired imaging effect on the original photo and stamping the ImageDraw logo for watermarking.

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What is the ASP.NET Ajax Framework? What versions have been released so far?

ASP.NET AJAX is a free framework to implement Ajax in asp.net web applications, for quickly creating efficient and interactive Web applications that work across all popular browsers.

The Ajax Framework is powered with
1 - Reusable Ajax Controls
2 - Support for all modern browsers
3 - Access remote services and data from the browser without tons of complicated

script. Versions of Ajax release
1 - ASP.NET Ajax Framework 1.0 (earlier release to this was called the Atlas)
2 - ASP.NET Ajax Framework 1.0 was available as a separate download for ASP.NET 2.0

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