Retraction…. of the AJAX kind

Ok, I have to get this out there….

A long time ago, I came up with a back alley when of dynamically adding tabs to a tab container. Well, it turns out I also found a way to actually add tabs WITHOUT actually knowing how many I needed. In short, I was building my entire page dynamically at Init based on some session variables that stored the number of tabs I needed. All in all it was pretty cool but it made me realize something that I think the world should know:

If possible avoid using the AJAX control toolkit, at ALL COSTS. Sure it’s cool and look all the pretty things I can do but it’s slow and very high traffic. If you want to do the cool things it does, I would use the AJAX Extensions class and write the rest myself. It’s sounds like a bad idea and a lot of work and it is. But TRUST ME, it’s well worth it.

I just try to find different ways to provide the same user experience in the end. The big downfall with dynamically generating all the controls at Init was after you added 3 tabs, the site really started to slow down and the user experience is just thrown out the window. I managed to achieve the exact same experience by replacing the tabs with entirely seperate pages and just managing a dynamially created menu control at the top of the page. So now, we have a much better performing site with code that’s WAY easier to manage!