I’ve been trying off and on for 5 months to get the AJAX toolkit to run on my ASP.NET WebApp site. The web host only supports ASP.NET 2.0, so finding relevant information on an 8 year old technology is challenging.
I first tried adding a reference to the DLL in an aspx page:
<%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" %>
The page crashed on load with this Parser Error Message: “Could not load file or assembly ‘AjaxControlToolkit’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.”
I contacted the web host who stated “There is only ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions installed on the server. AJAX toolkit is not installed on the server.”
I had to ask if there was any possibility that the AJAX toolkit could be installed. The web host replied “There are two work arounds for this, first that you manually upload the DLL files into /cgi-bin folder and include the path of the DLL’s into your code and then let us know we will setup full permissions on /cgi-bin folder. Second work-around is to setup permissions for your IIS worker process user to Temporary .net folder please tell us the version of the .net you are using and we will setup the permissions accordingly.”
Since I had no idea what the second work-around was, I manually uploaded the DLL file to the cgi-bin directory.
Same error message “The system cannot find the file specified.” After some research, I added the path info to web.config:
Same error. Next, I added tagPrefix to controls:
Same error. Decided to switch tactics and go back to registering the assembly on the aspx page instead of web.config.
<%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" %>
Same error, more research. Decided to add Src tag:
<%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" Src="cgi-bin/AjaxControlToolkit.dll" %>
New error: The directive is missing a ‘tagprefix’ attribute. Added it:
<%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" Src="cgi-bin/AjaxControlToolkit.dll" TagPrefix="toolkit" %>
New error: The directive is missing a ‘tagname’ attribute. Added it:
<%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" Src="~cgi-bin/AjaxControlToolkit.dll" TagPrefix="toolkit" TagName="ajxtool" %>
New error: The ‘assembly’ attribute is not supported on this directive when a ‘tagname’ attribute is present. More research, took out the src and tagname tags:
<%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" TagPrefix="toolkit" %>
New error, The directive is missing a ‘namespace’ attribute. Added Namespace:
<%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" TagPrefix="toolkit" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" %>
New error: The located assembly’s manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. Aha, this was new. I double checked the version of the DLL I downloaded from Microsoft. It was version 1.0.20229.20821, not 1.0.61025.0. Finally, this worked:
<%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit, Version=1.0.20229.20821, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=28f01b0e84b6d53e" TagPrefix="toolkit" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" %>
So, the ASP “Parser Error” was leading me down the wrong path. The file wasn’t missing at all, it was an incorrect version match. After all that research, I knew it had to be some basic, fundamental thing I was doing wrong (it almost always is).
I went back to web.config and made the following changes.
Finally, what a relief. And all that work just to get a modal popup dialog, sheesh!