Ext.NET Ajax Requests: MVC, Web API or ASHX?

When I wrote the book on Ext.NET 2, I often described using ASHX or MVC Controllers (amongst other techniques) for getting data from Ext.NET Stores via AJAX Proxies.

Recently, I’ve received a few questions — and wondered myself — whether to use Web API instead. It has a cleaner method signature, and is intended for this kind of scenario where you want to return data rather than HTML.

I finally got a moment to compare all three (for my scenario). Continue reading

Ext JS TabPanel plugin for draggable tabs

Ext JS 4 comes with a plugin for TabPanels to allow reordering tabs using drag and drop. There isn’t an equivalent for Ext JS 3, however.

I came across a useful extension of the Ext JS 3.x TabPanel to re-order tabs via drag and drop. It is implemented as a subclass of Ext.TabPanel, as Ext.ux.panel.DDTabPanel and a version of it includes a useful reorder event that is fired once a tab is dragged to a new position in the TabPanel.

I refactored it from a subclass of Ext.TabPanel to a plugin so the original functionality is unchanged. See a demo and get the code. Continue reading