Hi r_honey,
Thanks for the feedback!!
If you use the Controls in Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer Express, the control should automatically register a new httpHandler to your web.config.
If you open your Projects web.config, you should find the following "coolite.axd" node.
Example
<httpHandlers>
<add path="*/coolite.axd" verb="*" type="Coolite.Ext.Web.ResourceManager" validate="false" />
</httpHandlers>
The above handler registration is not required, but if included, the controls will automatically clean the resource url (make it look pretty) and Gzip compress the response.
View the html source rendered to the browser with/without the above coolite.axd handler. Pay particular attention to the url's, but the difference should be obvious.
By default the coolite.axd handler also compresses the resource files using gzip. This compression reduces the "over-the-wire" size of the files by approx 70%, which produces a significant performance improvement.
Also,
which one is the more efficient method?? Uploading the files to the
server should not be a problem in case that provides any sort of
performance advantage.
Setting RenderScripts="File" and RenderStyles="File" on the ScriptManager *must* create a performance advantage because the requests would no longer be being handled/parsed our of the Assembly/.dll by the asp.net runtime. BUT...
1. From my experience the performance difference is negligible. You may find otherwise.
2. The resource files are no longer automatically compressed by the Toolkit using Gzip. That will result in a significant performance decrease. This is easy to work-around by manually handling the gzipping of files, but obviously then you have to manually handle this outside of the scope of the Toolkit controls.
It just comes down to control and convenience. You decide how much you want the Toolkit/ScriptManager to handle for you automagically. Or, you start "turning off" features and deal with the plumbing manually. The more experience you build with the Coolite Toolkit/ExtJS, the more you may decide to handle manually... and that's the beauty of the framework(s)... we give *you* that option.
Hope this helps.