Microsoft has released developer previews for Visual Studio 2011 and .Net framework 4.5. There are lots of new features available in
the developer preview. One of
the most interested things for web developers is
the support introduced for new HTML 5 form
controls.
The following are
the list of new
controls available in HTML 5 email url number range Date pickers (date, month, week, time, datetime, datetime-local) search color Describing
the functionality for these
controls is not in
the scope of this article. If you want to know about these
controls, refer
the below URLs http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh547102.aspx http://www.w3schools.com/html5/html5_form_input_types.asp ASP.Net 4.5 introduced more possible values to
the Text Mode attribute to cater
the above requirements. Let us evaluate these. I have created a project in Visual Studio 2011 developer preview, and created a page named “controls.aspx”. In
the page I placed on Text box control from
the toolbox Now select
the control and go to
the properties pane, look at
the TextMode attribute. Now you can see more options are added here than prior versions of ASP.Net. I just selected Email as TextMode. I added one button to submit my page.
The screen shot of
the page in Visual Studio 2011 designer is as follows See
the corresponding markup <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> Enter your email: <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server" TextMode="Email"></asp:TextBox </div> <asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" Text="Submit" /> </form> Now let me run this page, IE 9 do not have
the support for new form fields. I browsed
the page using Firefox and
the page appears as below. From
the source of
the rendered page, I saw
the below markup for my email textbox <input name="TextBox1" type="email" id="TextBox1" /> Try to enter an invalid email and you will see
the browser will ask you to enter a valid one by default. When rendered in non-supported browsers, these fields are behaving just as normal text boxes. So make sure you are using validation
controls with these fields. See
the browser support compatability matrix with these
controls with various browser vendors. ASP.Net 4.5 introduced
the support for these new form
controls. You can build interactive forms using
the newly added
controls, keeping in mind that you need to validate
the data for non-supported browsers.
