More new "Prometheus" controls: RadScriptManager and RadStyleSheetManager

The Q3 news just keeps coming today, hot on the heels of the official Q3 2007 release. This time I want to bring your attention to two new controls in the Q3 2007 "Prometheus" release: RadScriptManager and RadStyleSheetManager. Some eagle-eyed developers may have spotted pre-release versions of these controls in our Futures releases, but the Q3 release marks their official readiness for production applications. These "manager controls" provide some very neat functionality for "Prometheus"-based applications and deliver some features that aren't possible with the old ASP.NET 2.0 control architecture. Let's take a closer look.

RadScriptManager
This control, as the name indicates, is similar the ScriptManager control that ships with ASP.NET AJAX. In fact, if you use the RadScriptManger, you should remove the "plain" ScriptManager from your application. Aside from delivering all of the "normal" functionality the original ScriptManager provides, the RadScriptManager is also capable of combining all "Prometheus" JavaScript resources in to a single web resource request!

The effect is controlled at the control level via a new "EnableScriptCombine" property and it does require that you register a new HttpHandler in your web.config. Once it's enabled, though, you can significantly reduce the HTML output to your page and reduce the number of requests that your page needs to make during load to initialize "Prometheus" controls.

RadStyleSheetManager
Like the RadScriptManager, the RadStyleSheetManager enable you to combine all of the CSS output for "Prometheus" controls in to a single stylesheet web resource request. If you have many "Prometheus" controls on your page, this can dramatically reduce the number of stylesheet links your page must request and load. The one caveat, though, is that this feature only supports embedded resource files. That means this feature only helps if you're using a control's default skin. If you're using custom skins, you'll have to do manual stylesheet combining to achieve the same effect.

The RadStyleSheetManager is also controlled at the control level via the "EnableStyleSheetCombine" property and it also requires a new HttpHandler in your web.config.

These tools should help anyone trying to maximize the performance of "Prometheus" controls, especially those who currently spend time manually combining the control JavaScript resources. Look for the tools in the latest "Prometheus" build and have fun building even better applications with Telerik's controls.