Scott Guthrie
posted a note on his blog
here
about the new cross browser support for ASP.NET validators in the upcoming ASP.NET v2.0 (Whidbey) Beta 2. Scott also mentions that this functionality will be retro fitted back into ASP.NET v1.0 and v1.1. Does this mean that maybe another service pack is in the pipeline for 1.1?
While this move is to be welcomed, I would like to see Microsoft state their overall position with regard to cross browser support. There are a lot of new "gadgets" in the new ASP.NET v2.0, but unless you are working on projects for Intranet deployment, we can't be sure that any of them will be of any real use.
One of the most understated new features of this next release is Client Callbacks with some info
here
,
here
and
here
. Asynchronous callbacks from within a web page is certainly not new, but this little control is going to take all the hastle out of the difficult plumbing. The only problem is that currently this feature is IE specific (XmlHTTP is a dependency) which is my view severely limits its usefulness.
Fredrik Normén
points out a new property added to the HttpBrowserCapabilities class that could be used to check if the browser support Client Callbacks "SupportsCallBack"... but this doesn't make it any more useful for real world web based applications. Back in June I posted a comment on
Minh T. Nguyen
blog pointing out that Mozilla had support for XmlHTTP but unfortunately the Javascript injected by ASP.NET is IE specific! I ask him this question directly and you can read his response
here
. We can only wait and see if the IE Specific Javascript issues has been fixed in Beta2 for the final release...
How many other controls fall foul of this same problem?