Disabling UpdatePanels when an asynchronous postback in progress

If you’ve ever worked with relatively large UpdatePanels maybe you’ll have had a problem: blocking the user some elements while the asynchronous postback is running. When working with local or LAN environments, the async responses might be fast, but over the internet, or on large calculations the async postback may take a while. During this period, you may want to block the UpdatePanel controls so the user can’t trigger another postback or do any other operations on that UpdatePanel. I’ll show you an easy way to do so by using the AJAX framework for .NET and jQuery and one of its plugins: blockUI.

For those who don’t know jQuery, it’s an opensource Javascript framework that is going to be embedded on future versions of Visual Studio. It’s a very good framework because of its simplicity and its extensibility, having lots of plugins. One of those plugins is the blockUI plugin, which allows you to block and unlock any part of the DOM at will.

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Developing Javascript involved web applications with Firebug

If you’ve been assigned to a new web application project lately, you’ll probably have had to deal with this [not] new AJAX technology. To be honest, AJAX is good, and websites like Google Mail and Flickr are good examples of that. But remember something: it’s always bad to abuse of something. It’s always bad to abuse AJAX. Don’t use it if it doesn’t really make sense to do it, and if your boss insists on it, ask him if he would use truck wheels on his BMW.

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