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With jQuery plugins being the new hotness, it seems the gold ol’ AJAX Control Toolkit isn’t getting much respect these days. But Bertrand LeRoy and the dedicated ToolKit gang keep plugging along, and have come up with three great new controls – HTMLEditor, ComboBox, and ColorPicker – as well as a slew of bug fixes, new samples, tutorials and videos too.

The AJAX Control Toolkit is a joint project between the OSS community and Microsoft. Built upon the ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX framework, the Toolkit now contains 38 highly functional components that let you easily include a lot of nice client-side interactivity to an ASP.NET website.

The newest version, just released today, contains three great-looking new controls. As always, the team has included some excellent documentation, including step-by-step tutorials, videos, and live online samples of the controls in action, as well as a downloadable sample site and every juicy byte of the source code, all of it free for the taking.

• HTMLEditor – Lets your users easily create and edit HTML content. There are buttons in the lower toolbar that let users switch between Design (WYSIWYG) mode, HTML Source mode, and Preview mode. Toolbar properties are fully configurable of course, and the UI is easily customized via CSS.
  • See a live online sample
  • Follow the tutorial
  • Watch Video 1 – Video 2 
     
• ComboBox – A DropDownList that can be typed directly into like a TextBox. In many ways closely resembles and behaves like the familiar Windows Forms ComboxBox control. It supports first-letter auto-completion, case sensitivity, and insertion of new items typed into the list. Unlike the AutoCompleteExtender, it doesn’t require a web service to obtain data, but is easily bindable to a data source control or an in-memory collection.
  • See a live online sample
  • Follow the tutorial
  • Watch the video 
     
• ColorPicker – Extends any TextBox control to display a palette of pickable colors. It can optionally display an interactive swatch that shows the picked color, or any custom RGB value you type in.
  • See a live online sample
  • Follow the tutorial
  • Watch the video

Many of the existing controls have also been updated, and more than 20 bug fixes have been implemented.

You can download the new 30512 build of the AJAX Control Toolkit here. You can grab just the compiled assembly, just the client-side files (JavaScript, CSS and Images), or the full source code along with a complete sample site. Remember that this version of the Toolkit requires ASP.NET 3.5 Service Pack 1.

In case the AJAX Control Toolkit is completely new to you, you can learn how to download, install, and get started with it here.

Have fun!

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