asp.net - Internet Explorer's Operation Aborted and Latency Issue

Question

If you don't know what the operation aborted error is, here's a Microsoft KB Article about it, http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/927917 . There's also tonnes of posts about it but the simple answer for it's occurrence is this; the error only occurs if you try to manipulate a DOM element via JavaScript before the element you are trying to manipulate is loaded.

I know how Internet Explorer's (IE) infamous Operation Aborted occurs and know how to fix it. The problem I have is a very weird scenario. Testing locally and on a development machine with IE7, I never ever get the operation aborted error (both sites running as http).

However on our client's testing site it occurs all the time. Unfortunately my testing environment is not the same as the client's testing environment, so that adds some variables to the mix, but the main difference I see is that the client's testing site is using SSL.

Has anyone ever had the Operation Aborted error only for an SSL site?

The other thought that popped in my head was that it was a latency issue. Locally the site loads up almost instantaneously whereas on my client's testing site, the page loads slower. So with that in mind, I got Fiddler running and simulated the performance to run at old school modem speeds, still no operation aborted error locally or on our own testing server.

FYI: The site is an ASP.NET 2.0 Site using ASP.NET AJAX Extensions 1.0. The page with the issue also has the AJAX Control Toolkit's Cascading Drop Down on it.

And yes as far as I can tell all JavaScript that manipulates the DOM is at the end of the markup, not the beginning.

Any help or comments is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Well after scouring the Internet I found the issue. It has to do with a bug in the the ASP.NET AJAX client-side framework.

I'll paraphrase what I found:

The issue is a race condition that occurs due to an Internet Explorer/ASP.Net AJAX bug. The probability of encountering this issue increases when the application has a significant number of ASP.Net AJAX enabled server controls on the web page. The issue is explained here, http://seejoelprogram.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/fixing-sysapplicationinitialize-again . I have added this fix to the project I'm working on.

This fix is still required if using ASP.NET 3.5 SP1.