There are now a number of ASP.NET AJAX books, and any of you who haven't already looked into this subject probably should do so. I'm quite sure the 3rd edition of this book will use it heavily.

Dino Esposito has a great intro book on AJAX, useful for readers who aren't completely comfortable with their ASP.NET skills:

http://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Mi...8358632&sr=8-2

Wrox has 2 books on AJAX, a beginner book and a Pro book. Most readers here can understand the Pro book:

http://www.amazon.com/Professional-A...8358575&sr=8-1

And Manning has a very fine book on AJAX:

http://www.amazon.com/ASP-NET-AJAX-A...8228163&sr=8-1

I wish the world would move a little slower. We're already diving down on Silverlight. You need to have a firm working knowledge of AJAX soon because that's the most essential core enhancement to ASP.NET in years. And Silverlight builds on AJAX in many ways.

Eric

Eric,

I've been trying to 'sympathetically' enhance my work with ajax panels and tabs (using telerik radcontrols) and have found it on the whole to be fairly painless. of course, a lot of the complexity is wrapped away and it's use is just like that of any other 3rd party control. However, even within this paradigm, i still have to work around issues with a combination of bespoke javascript calling ajax event handlers etc. So it is essential to understand how ajax works even when 'liberated' by using 3rd party controls as in my experience at one point or another, you're going to have to roll your sleeves up and get a bit dirty. That being said, such occassions probably only account for 5-10% of the ajax development that i've been involved in so far. i daresay that the more 'essential' ajax integration becomes, then the more likely it is that such bespoke shoring up will be required. That really is the main reason why it's important to understand how it all works, as 'friendly' hacks won't cut it when you're dealing with cross-browser javascript implementations in more complex pieces.

For now, of course, i'll be sticking with the telerik 'ajax wrapped controls', analogous to Word (Office 2007), i.e. i don't want to neccesarily see all the control characters that make up my paragraphs and formatting, i'm just really interested in getting good clear wysiwyg documents with all the complexity hidden from me. This is ultimately how the GOOD ajax implementations will evolve.

jimi

http://www.originaltalent.com

The client side coding in JavaScript is clearly the hardest type of programming. ASP.NET AJAX adds some cool library functions, and even a type system similar to the CLR. The best assistance it offers is in the form of debugging. That will be the topic of my next presentation at the Atlanta .NET user group. JavaScript debugging is always a pain but it's a little better now.

But no matter how good you make JavaScript it still sucks to some extent. That's why Silverlight 1.1 is such a hot ticket item. Being able to write client-side code in C# that is compiled on the server and sent down to the browser as IL code is sweet! And that can run on a Mac also. This has been my dream ever since I started learning ASP.NET.

Eric

amen!! - here's hoping that ajax and future incarnations take the same path, even if it's just event handlers with a c# 'simple' javascript library object (i.e. c# syntax) being parameterised.

jimi

http://www.originaltalent.com

re Ajax, nice article on httpModule for json compression:

http://geekswithblogs.net/rashid/arc...Bandwidth.aspx

as well as a fairly decent 'trick' for a fileupload with progress using ajax:

http://geekswithblogs.net/rashid/arc...le-Upload.aspx

jimi

http://www.originaltalent.com

try to use your code in orcas beta2. I thought this supported javascript debugging