By Robin Pars, Laurence Moroney,and John Grieb
AJAX is fast becoming a de facto standard for developing responsive and rich web applications. This evolutionary step in the user experience is being used in more and more web applications from Outlook Web Access to Google maps and beyond.
But how do you write AJAX applications? Not too long ago, you had to be a JavaScript expert and use tools that are not as sophisticated as those used in standard ASP.NET development. As such, it had been difficult and time-consuming to develop, debug, and maintain AJAX applications despite their innate user friendliness. However, as the popularity and use of AJAX web applications rose, so did a number of frameworks designed to ease AJAX development by providing more out-of-the-box functionality. A few of those packages had been somewhat geared toward developers working with ASP.NET.
After a long beta period, in early 2007, Microsoft officially released the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions, which include a set of client- and server-side controls and functionality leveraging some of the existing technologies in ASP.NET. This release also included the ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit, which contains a set of control extenders that offer enhanced UI effects and built-in AJAX capabilities that can be used on a page with very little development effort. With this release, Microsoft brought about major productivity leaps to AJAX development in the world of ASP.NET.
With ASP.NET AJAX, you can easily convert your existing ASP.NET applications to AJAX applications, and you can add sophisticated user interface elements such as drag and drop, networking, and browser compatibility layers, with simple declarative programming (or, if you prefer to use JavaScript, you can do that too).
This book is a primer on this technology. It introduces you to ASP.NET AJAX, explores some of the main features and controls, and takes you into how to build AJAX applications quickly and simply, taking advantage of the IDE productivity offered by Visual Studio.
It’s going to be a fun ride, and by the end of it, you’ll be an expert in Web 2.0 and hungry to start developing for it.
Who This Book Is For
This book is for anyone interested in developing next-generation web application interfaces that make the most of AJAX-style asynchronous functionality. Anyone who has ever coded a web page will understand the latency problems associated with postbacks and arsenal by reading this book.
Some knowledge and prior experience with ASP.NET, C#, or Visual Basic .NET will be helpful to properly understand and follow along with this book.
Prerequisites
You’ll need Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008; any edition is fine. If you are using Visual Studio 2005, you will also need the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions and the ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit, which can be downloaded from http://ajax.asp.net.
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