I've just uploaded a new version of the wwHoverPanel control. wwHoverPanel is a small AJAX library that provides some useful and common functionality in an easy to use and lightweight package. The library consists of a couple of controls that provide quick client side window popups from server content and a very easy and light weight mechanism to make AJAX callbacks into ASP.NET code to send and retrieve JSON data with the server. The callback mechanism can be utilized easily in ASP.NET pages, handlers or even in your own user or custom controls making it super easy to have your client code call back into any of these ASP.NET code components.

This is primarily a maintenance release that fixes a few bugs and adds a few lower level enhancements. All of the enhancements are framework level so there are no changes to the library or the controls themselves so this is a painless update.

There are a number of things that have been tweaked and fixed over the last few months as I've used the library in my own work and also from feedback that some of you have provided. As always I appreciate any reports good and bad <s>...

So what's been addressed? A number off minor issues related to Drag behaviors have been fixed. Specifically issues with not being able to drop in some situations are fixed as well as a number of visual artifacts related to dragging windows around when a shadow is attached to it. Note that drag behaviors apply to all windows now - wwHoverWindow and wwModalDialog both inherit from wwDragPanel so all of these controls are optionally draggable and closable. There are also the beginnings of an easy to use drag and drop interface in the client library, but it's not been made official yet. You can play around with a simple demo of this in the DragDrop.aspx page.

Myself I've been using the heck out of the JSON callback functionality which has become my primary use of AJAX these days writing client heavy code and using ASP.NET primarily as a data service only. This has worked out well and has given me the opportunity to really push this stuff a bit. Over time there have been  been a few tweaks and optimizations to make the JsonSerializer (or more specifically the de-serializer) work better. Specifically previous versions didn't do very well with nested arrays and lists which has now been addressed and you should be able to get any single dimensional and single typed arrays as well as most IList based collections to deserialize.

Finally a few of the functions now also check for the existence of other libraries like Prototype or jQuery etc. You can now use these libs in combination without name conflicts as long as they are loaded before the wwScriptLibrary.js file is loaded (ie. before the <form> tag in the page).

The control is free to use and re-use and use in your own code in parts or as a whole. There's a bunch of useful and self-contained stuff in there including the JsonSerializer, the ScriptCompression module, and the ClientScriptProxy that makes it easy to make controls MS AJAX aware (and no wwHoverPanel DOES NOT rely on MS Ajax, but we want to work well in combination with it at least <s>). You can find documentation and all that's new on the wwHoverPanel page.