Kiva.org is a charity website that allows individuals to provide the capital for micro loans to the working poor.

The Kiva Available Loans widget is a control designed to be used with the BlogEngine.Net blog platform. This control lists, via the Kiva API, a number of the latest loan requests that have not yet been fulfilled.

The available loans can display a developer specified number of thumbnail images. When selected, each image displays a pop up box containing details of the entrepreneur and a link to the loan details page.

Kiva Available Loans control with a basic Kiva styling.

Kiva Available Loans control with the loan description pop up displayed. The contol has a basic Kiva styling.

The Kiva Available Loans widget is released under version 2.1 of the GNU Lesser General Public License.

The latest version of the control can be downloaded here.

Converting HTML & JavaScript to an ASP.Net control

In the last post we created a image gallery control using HTML and JavaScript using the jQuery library. In this post we are going to take this control and turn it into an ASP.Net control that can be used in an ASP.Net website or web application.

There are number of steps we are going to have to go through to wrap the HTML / JavaScript construct we created in the last post and render it out from an ASP.Net control.

The control needs to allow the web site designer to be able to modify various settings, such as the period between image changes and the fade out time. It needs to allow definition of the different images within the array and, lastly, render the modified the HTML and JavaScript.

Why start using jQuery with ASP.Net?

I have been working with internet technologies now for over ten years and for most of those I have worked with Microsoft technologies, such as ASP or ASP.Net.

For most of this time there has always seamed to be a massive disconnect between the backend ASP or ASP.Net code and the front end HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I have often found that when people build sites using technologies like ASP.Net they ignore the power of JavaScript especially, instead either doing things through backend code or using another technology, such as Flash.

This is, I think, because:

• As most screen readers do not support JavaScript, any critical functionality that is implemented in JavaScript needs to also be implemented in backend code. This increases the development time.
• Documentation on how to access the HTML rendered by ASP.Net controls via front end JavaScript is very limited.
• Most people find JavaScript development tools limited in their functionality and therefore development is more difficult than backend development using tools like Visual Studio.
• Various browser implementations of JavaScript are massively different, this causes many compatibility headaches.

This is why I was very interested in the announcement announcement that Microsoft where going to start shipping jQuery, the JavaScript library, with Visual Studio. This should be a real boast to JavaScript integration with ASP.Net and means ASP.Net developers have no excuse now not to learn JavaScript.