I’m excited to announce the June 2012 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit. You can download the new release by visiting http://AjaxControlToolkit.CodePlex.com or (better) download the new release with NuGet:

Install-Package AjaxControlToolkit

The Ajax Control Toolkit continues to be super popular. The previous release (May 2012) had over 87,000 downloads from CodePlex.com and over 16,000 downloads from NuGet. That’s over 100,000 downloads in less than 2 months.

Security Improvements for the HtmlEditorExtender

Unfortunately, in the previous release, we made the HtmlEditorExtender too secure! We upgraded the version of the Microsoft Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library included in the Ajax Control Toolkit to the latest version (version 4.2.1) and the latest version turned out to be way too aggressive about stripping HTML. It not only strips dangerous tags such as <script> tags, it also strips innocent tags such as <b> tags.

When the latest version of the Microsoft Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library is used with the HtmlEditorExtender, the library strips all rich content from the HtmlEditorExtender control which defeats the purpose of using the control.

Therefore, we had to find a replacement for the Microsoft Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library. In this release, we’ve created a new HTML sanitizer built on the HTML Agility Pack. If you were using the AntiXssSanitizerProvider then you will need to substitute the HtmlAgilityPackSanitizerProvider. In particular, you need to modify the sanitizer sections in your Web.config file like this:

<configuration>
    <configSections>
        <sectionGroup name="system.web">
            <section name="sanitizer" requirePermission="false"
                     type="AjaxControlToolkit.Sanitizer.ProviderSanitizerSection, AjaxControlToolkit" />
        </sectionGroup>
    </configSections>

    <system.web>
        <sanitizer defaultProvider="HtmlAgilityPackSanitizerProvider">
            <providers>
                <add name="HtmlAgilityPackSanitizerProvider" type="AjaxControlToolkit.Sanitizer.HtmlAgilityPackSanitizerProvider"></add>
            </providers>
        </sanitizer>
      </system.web>
</configuration>

We made one other backwards-breaking change to improve the security of the HtmlEditorExtender. We want to make sure that users don’t accidently use the HtmlEditorExtender without an HTML sanitizer by accident. Therefore, if you don’t configure a HTML sanitizer provider in the web.config file then you’ll get the following error:

If you really want to use the HtmlEditorExtender without using an HTML sanitizer – for example, you are using the HtmlEditorExtender for an Intranet application and you trust all of your fellow employees – then you can explicitly indicate that you don’t want to enable HTML sanitization by setting the EnableSanitization property to false like this:

<ajaxToolkit:HtmlEditorExtender 

    TargetControlID="txtComments" 

    EnableSanitization="false" 

    runat="server" />

Please don’t ever set the EnableSanitization property to false for a public website. If you disable HTML sanitization then you are making your website an easy target for Cross-Site Scripting attacks.

Lots of Fixes for the ComboBox Control

In the latest release, we also made several important bug fixes and feature enhancements to the ComboBox control. Here’s the list of issues that we fixed:

• 22930 — ComboBox doesn’t close its drop down list when losing input focus to another ComboBox control
• 23140 — ComboBox Issues – Delete, Backspace, Period
• 23142 — ComboxBox SelectedIndex = -1 does not clear text
• 24440 — ComboBox postback on enter
• 25295 — ComboBox problems when container is hidden at page load
• 25469 — ComboBox – MaxLength ignored
• 26686 — Backspace and Delete exception when optionList is null
• 27148 — Combobox breaks if ClientIDMode is static

Fixes to Other Controls

In this release, we also made bug fixes and enhancements to the UpdatePanelAnimation, Tabs, and Seadragon controls:

• 21310 — OnUpdated animation starts before OnUpdating has finished
• 26690 — Seadragon Control’s openTileSource() method doesn’t work (with fix) Title is required

We also fixed an issue with the Tabs control which would result in an InvalidOperation exception.

Summary

I want to thank the Superexpert team for the hard work that they put into this release. In particular, I want to thank them for their effort in researching, building, and writing unit tests for the HtmlAgilityPack HTML sanitizer.