This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Marcus Mac Innes. Original Post: ASP.NET 2.0 and Cross Browser Support Feed Title: Marcus Mac Innes' Blog Feed URL: http://www.styledesign.biz/weblogs/macinnesm/Rss.aspx Feed Description: Issues relating to .NET, Service Oriented Architecture, SQL Server and other technologies. Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Marcus Mac Innes Latest Posts From Marcus Mac Innes' Blog

Scott Guthrie posted a note on his blog here about the new cross browser support for ASP.NET validators in the upcoming ASP.NET v2.0 (Whidbey) Beta 2. Scott also mentions that this functionality will be retro fitted back into ASP.NET v1.0 and v1.1. Does this mean that maybe another service pack is in the pipeline for 1.1?

While this move is to be welcomed, I would like to see Microsoft state their overall position with regard to cross browser support. There are a lot of new "gadgets" in the new ASP.NET v2.0, but unless you are working on projects for Intranet deployment, we can't be sure that any of them will be of any real use.

One of the most understated new features of this next release is Client Callbacks with some info here, here and here. Asynchronous callbacks from within a web page is certainly not new, but this little control is going to take all the hastle out of the difficult plumbing. The only problem is that currently this feature is IE specific (XmlHTTP is a dependency) which is my view severely limits its usefulness. Fredrik Normén points out a new property added to the HttpBrowserCapabilities class that could be used to check if the browser support Client Callbacks "SupportsCallBack"... but this doesn't make it any more useful for real world web based applications. Back in June I posted a comment on Minh T. Nguyen blog pointing out that Mozilla had support for XmlHTTP but unfortunately the Javascript injected by ASP.NET is IE specific! I ask him this question directly and you can read his response here. We can only wait and see if the IE Specific Javascript issues has been fixed in Beta2 for the final release...

How many other controls fall foul of this same problem?