Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows...

Monday, April 23, 2007

AJAX History Management for dotNET

Most AJAX developers have at some point damned the lack of browser support for browser history and bookmarking. A large subset of these developers have eventually attempted to solve the problem by implementing support for browser support, needless to say: with varying degrees of success.

As some of the major cornerstones in this latest frontier on the RIA front it should be noted that Yahoo have shared their current project on the topic with its developer community (Browser History Manager: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/history/) based on the initial initiative by Brad Neuburg (Really Simple History: http://codinginparadise.org/projects/dhtml_history/).

However... browsing the RIA communities I found a general lack of seamless integration to the serverside written in dotNET when the state has to be restored, either from history navigation or bookmarking. I decided to do this based on the AJAX.NET framework (http://ajax.asp.net/) and to extend the functionality of the UpdatePanel to register and restore states.

I have it up and running now on and it works eminently for the IExplorer and Firefox people, sad I am using the IFrame approach I still need to provide the workaround for Safari so that it will be suitable to send into production systems.

When I have completed this task I will post the system here...

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