I spent almost 3 hours today trying to figure out what is wrong with one of the WebControl I am writing. The component reads up a XML file and based on that allows for dynamically populating a Data Entry interface - absolutely no markup in the aspx and all the dynamically created controls can callback/raise events to the container page when some events occur. However i noticed in case of ModalPopupExtender i can not get back any events whatsoever and if i add a update panel it just recreates itself then and there and all the entered data is gone!!!

What was i doing wrong!

As one of my colleague pointed out i should have used INamingContainer on each of the dynamic controls that i was making because they in turn create some dynamic child controls. And as soon as i implement INamingContainer on the base control all worked just fine. Its weird but it works. I guess its time to dig deep in the INamingContainer!!!

public interface IInputControl : INamingContainer
{

........
}

Hope someone finds this tip useful.

Some time back when I wanted to use AjaxControlToolkit I found that there were two builds of AjaxControlToolkit and one worked with ASP .NET and other with MOSS.

But this month working on a project for Stockholm Stad we needed to add functionality similar to the ModalPopupExtender  wanted and to my surprise they actually have fixed it and I was able to deploy and use the .NET 3.5 version (AjaxControlToolkit-Framework3.5SP1-NoSource.zip) without any problems in a SharePoint solution.

Great work from the AjaxToolkit Team!!!