What so cool about ASP.net AJAX??

Imagine you are visiting a web page, and you hit on a link/button, a postback occurs and the whole page is re-rendered. How do you feel? Annoyed? This performance issue happened in most of the typical web applications. So, any solution for this? The answer is yes, this is where ASP.net AJAX comes into picture. This is one of the scenarios where AJAX dramatically changes the way how a web application gives better user experience.

ASP.net (Asynchronous Javascript & XML) is a new web development technology from Microsoft, which integrates the client script libraries and ASP.net 2.0 server-based development framework. By using ASP.net AJAX, developer can take advantage of the AJAX techniques and develops a web application with rich, responsive user interface and increases the server communication. For the scenario mentioned earlier on, ASP.net AJAX allows you to do partially rendering instead of re-rendering the whole page.

Here are some controls that you can find in ASP.net AJAX.

1. Slider DemonstrationThe Horizontal Slider is ranging from -100 to +100. The Vertical Slider ranging from 0 – 100. Clicking on the rail will cause the handle to slide with a nice animation effect. If the developer doesn't specify any parameters, the Slider is rendered with the default layout shown in the demonstration.

2.ModalPopupThe ModalPopup extender allows user to interact with content in a modal and preventing users from the rest of the page. For example, then user click on a link, a modal will pop up and grey the rest of the page. As shown as below.

3. Cascading DropdownThis extender can be attached to the drop down list control to get automatical population of a set of dropdownlist controls. Each time the selection of a dropdownlist is changed, the cascading dropdownlist externder will populate the data for second drop down list.

The three example are the extenders can be found in ASP.net AJAX. Sounds like tones of scripts need to write? Good news is all these extenders are easy to use, reduced much of codes.

Feel excited about ASP.net AJAX? Wait no more! Download the ASP.NET “Atlas” July 2006 Community Technology Preview (CTP) from here. With the condition that you should have the Visual Studio 2005 or Visual web Express Edition (which is free for downloading)

Download the ASP.net Control toolkit from here, where you can learn more on ASP.net AJAX from the examples.