The last paragraph on page 155 of ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX is very confusing and omits considerable explanation. (1) explain the two-step sequence - the code apparently shows two independent ways of getting at the JSON data, (2) explain the eval processing for getting the XML data - are you saying that eval works in a different way when run under ASP.NET AJAX? There's a lot of mystery here with the eval execution.

I don't have the book with me right now, but will check out page 155 when I get home. The key point with our use of eval is that it's part of Javascript. There isn't anything unique about how it works with ASP.NET AJAX. In the future, I expect that we will actually wrap our use of eval with a preliminary step that requires parsing the code first for additional security, but as it stands now, we simply use the script engine to eval the JSON as it is returned.