There are many components offered by vendors that help web pages look and feel like thick (WinForm) applications. However, this illusion can easily crumble when it comes to modal dialog boxes. How many sites have you seen where accidentally clicking on the "parent" web page will cause the dialog box page to disappear and get lost amidst other open windows on your desktop? Yes, you could use JavaScript's alert() and confirm() functions to implement true modal dialog boxes, but they have a limited range of responses, and getting the response back to your server-side .NET code could be a pain.
It was only a few weeks ago that I was investigating how to make modal dialog boxes work in ASP.NET when along came CyberSpire's WebDialogs. This product makes adding modal dialogs to your webforms as simple as dropping a control onto the webform, setting a few properties, and writing as little as one line of code. The learning curve is nearly zero! The four basic dialog types (message, input, listbox, and dropdown) supported by WebDialogs should meet most of your needs. WebDialogs also supports custom dialogs where you define the content of the dialog. Although you'll need to write the HTML page used by the custom dialog, it's nice to see that the product is extensible. I suggest checking out the interactive demo on CyberSpire's website: https://www.cyberspire.com/TryItMessageDialog.aspx
The help file provided with the product is well laid out, informative, and easy to follow. CyberSpire's support has been top notch. When I ran into a problem registering the product, they quickly diagnosed the problem, provided an updated version that resolved the problem, and reported a bug to the vendor who supplied the licensing component used by WebDialogs.
The use of modal dialog boxes can add functionality and a bit of pizzazz to your web applications. WebDialogs makes this almost effortless. It does one thing and does it well. Two thumbs up!
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