Visual Studio® 2010 and .NET 4, Six-in-one

Chapter 19. ASP.NET Ajax Improvements

If you hit the Wikipedia website and search for the term "Ajax," you will find that it may refer to more than 50 things in mythology, sports, vehicles, fiction, and music. The name itself is not new (Homer first mentioned it in his Iliad). However, as we use it today in the scope of IT, the term characterizes this decade's revolution in the history of web programming.

In its current context, the term "Ajax" (which is actually an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) was coined by Jesse James Garrett in 2005. It refers not to a single technology, but rather to a group of technologies that existed well before the dawn of Web 2.0 and rich internet applications (RIAs). Nevertheless, new interactive web applications have incorporated these technologies into a single programming approach, and with that came the need for a better user experience.

Because the overall user experience is one of the features that can help to make a website unique and to beat the competition, over the last few years, AJAX-enabled websites have become so mainstream that even the word "Ajax" now appears in the English language. This chapter provides details about how Ajax works under the hood, and how you can use ASP.NET to control it with a high-level programming approach.

After reading this chapter, you will be familiar with the following:

• Using the ASP.NET Ajax server controls — Originally, ASP.NET targeted server-side developers, and so it is not a surprise that, although ...