I’ve been looking for an easy way to add uploading to WhyYouShould for a while now. My main problem is that I built the site completely in ASP.NET, and without buying some expensive Control (or spending months writing it myself ;)), it’s hard to do uploading with a progress bar. Also, it seemed next to impossible to get away from the ugly “Browse…” button.

I came across SWFUpload on Ajaxian today. The author has solved this problem (for all frameworks, not just ASP.NET) by combining the easy-of-use of Flash 8 for image uploading, with some tie-ins to Javascript. When you click your “browse” button (which can be skinned however you like), Javascript launches the file browser built into a hidden Flash file to select a file (or multiple files at once). Then, when you are ready, the hidden Flash file starts the upload and displays the upload progress. The file upload itself is done via a POST, so it will work for any web framework.

Pretty slick, eh! I know Jay is going to say, “Yah, Flash is awesome for file uploading. Didn’t you know that?”

SWFUpload