You've been heads down on other technology but now need to look at ASP.NET AJAX...
I encountered this scenario with a customer recently where the customer has been working other technologies but needed some quick info to get started with ASP.NET AJAX. I can certainly relate. In my previous role I spent a lot of time with BizTalk Server 2004 and BizTalk Server 2006. I also spent a lot of time working with the IBM WebSphere MQ Client on Windows talking to Unix-based Queue Managers. It is amazing how just a few technologies can consume a lot of your time, but I digress:-)…
So, the customer was looking for some quick info on getting started with ASP.NET AJAX. Here is a summary of what I shared:
The ASP.NET AJAX Extensions 1.0 download is available here:
The download at the above link is fully supported by Microsoft Support, and includes the AJAX enabled update-panel and other server controls. This posting by Scott Guthrie provides more information on the roadmap for ASP.NET AJAX as background:
https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/09/11/_2200_Atlas_2200_-1.0-Naming-and-Roadmap.aspx
There are additional AJAX enabled controls and extenders as part of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit that are available here:
https://www.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=AtlasControlToolkit
The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit is a shared-source implementation built on top of the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions 1.0 core functionality. The Control Toolkit has lots of useful and powerful AJAX controls and extenders with source code that can be used as-is in applications. The Control Toolkit has undergone quite a few updates and is actively maintained.
While the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit is not supported by Microsoft directly as a stand-alone product, it is shipped as source code. What this means is that If a customer uses the Control Toolkit, customers can modify the source code directly as well as seek help from the community / user forum resources.
Getting Started
This is the link (https://ajax.asp.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=47) to the home page for ASP.NET AJAX Extensions 1.0 and the Control Toolkit where there is additional documentation. You can view the Control Toolkit samples without installing anything online here https://ajax.asp.net/ajaxtoolkit
There are a bunch of control samples to review but I wanted to highlight two controls in the AJAX Control Toolkit, the Tabs control and the DynamicPopulate extender that may be of interest. TabContainer is an ASP.NET AJAX Control that creates a set of Tabs that can be used to organize page content.
Tabs Control Demonstration:
https://ajax.asp.net/ajaxtoolkit/Tabs/Tabs.aspx
DynamicPopulate is a simple extender that replaces the contents of a control with the result of a web service or page method call. The method call returns a string of HTML that is inserted as the children of the target element.
DynamicPopulate Demonstration:
https://ajax.asp.net/ajaxtoolkit/DynamicPopulate/DynamicPopulate.aspx
One thing to note, the ASP.NET AJAX framework takes care of most of the plumbing such as creating the XMLHTTP object, listening for the asynchronous response, error handling, cross-browser differences, etc., for the more popular browsers. To add AJAX functionality to an ASP.NET application, developers generally don’t have to worry about the low-level stuff and can instead use the UpdatePanel that ships with ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, incorporate into an existing application the controls available in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit to leverage this great functionality, or take existing JavaScript and roll it into a custom AJAX extender or AJAX server control to leverage the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 plumbing (Developers may have to worry about some plumbing such as cross-browser compatibility if rolling their own control with custom JavaScript).