this print for content only—size & color not accurate spine = 0.675 " 288 page count Books for professionals By professionals ® Foundations of ASP.NET AJAX Dear Reader, The web has evolved quite a bit from the days of large text and big blue links over gray backgrounds 10 years ago, and most users have come to expect a richer and more responsive user interface. Interestingly enough, the technol- ogy pillars of what we know today as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) were already in place at that time. It wasn’t until the advent of a few mainstream applications, such as Google Maps, that people started to realize the potential of these AJAX apps. In recent years, there has been a huge rise in the popularity and demand for AJAX and as such, a number of frameworks have been intro- duced to the marketplace to ease the traditionally difficult development effort associated with creating AJAX apps. Microsoft, for its part, introduced the ASP.NET AJAX framework, which is a comprehensive package of technologies addressing both client-side and serv- er-side development in addition to a suite of user interface controls (the AJAX Control Toolkit). This brought major productivity gains to AJAX development in the ASP.NET world. Its broad spectrum of features and controls, wide commu- nity support, and tight integration with Visual Studio has made ASP.NET AJAX an excellent choice for implementing AJAX applications within ASP.NET and even more so for enhancing existing ASP.NET applications. This book is a primer to this technology. It introduces you to ASP.NET AJAX, explores its main features and controls, and walks you through how to build AJAX applications quickly and easily through a series of practical examples that demonstrate the most powerful features of the technology. If you are just start- ing out in the world of ASP.NET AJAX, this is the book you need. Robin Pars Author of ASP.NET Intranets US $39.99 Shelve in .NET User level: Beginner–Intermediate Pars, Moroney, Grieb Foundations of ASP.NET AJAX The eXperT’s Voice ® in .neT Foundations of ASP.NET AJAX cyan MaGenTa yelloW Black panTone 123 c Robin Pars, Laurence Moroney, and John Grieb Companion eBook Available THE APRESS ROADMAP Pro AJAX and the .NET 2.0 Platform Pro ASP.NET 2.0 in C# or VB Foundations of ASP.NET AJAX Foundations of Ajax Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 in C# or VB www.apress.com SOURCE CODE ONLINE Companion eBook See last page for details on $10 eBook version ISBN-13: 978-1-59059-828-3 ISBN-10: 1-59059-828-8 9 781590 598283 5 3 9 9 9 Build AJAX Applications in ASP.NET [...]... 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,... you will also need the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions and the ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit, which can be downloaded from http:/ /ajax .asp.net 828-8 CH01.qxd 8/30/07 7:24 PM CHAPTER Page 1 1 Introducing AJAX W elcome to Foundations of ASP NET AJAX This book is intended to get you up and running with the new framework from Microsoft that allows you to build Web 2.0 applications that implement AJAX functionality If you’ve... in AJAX, check out Foundations of AJAX (Apress, 2005) 9 828-8 CH01.qxd 10 8/30/07 7:24 PM Page 10 CHAPTER 1 ■ INTRODUCING AJAX You will be looking at AJAX from a high level in this book and delving more deeply into how Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX will allow you to quickly and easily build AJAX- enabled applications Using the XMLHttpRequest Object As mentioned, the XMLHttpRequest object is the heart of AJAX. .. 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... benefits you receive by using an AJAX approach may be more than offset by the application development getting bogged down in thousands (or more) lines of JavaScript 15 828-8 CH01.qxd 16 8/30/07 7:24 PM Page 16 CHAPTER 1 ■ INTRODUCING AJAX With this problem in mind, Microsoft integrated the power of AJAX with the productivity of ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 to develop ASP.NET AJAX In the next chapter,... a technology evangelist at Microsoft, where he specializes in the technologies for the next generation of the Web He has been amazed at how things have progressed since Foundations of Atlas (the predecessor of this book) was published It is a better time than ever to be into technology, and the power that we have at our fingertips with technologies such at ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, and NET 3.x is... a technical specialist He is currently the lead developer of a project to migrate Reuters Messaging to Microsoft Live Communication Server 2005 Prior to that, he spent several years in Reuter’s Microsoft R&D Group and Innovation Lab, gaining experience in a broad range of cutting-edge Microsoft technologies by participating in many of Microsoft’s beta programs and developing prototypes demonstrating... asynchrony delivered by the XMLHttpRequest object, which is the core of AJAX You then built a simple example that demonstrated how it works This example was very basic and barely scratched the surface of what can be done with AJAX However, it demonstrated one of the drawbacks of using this methodology; namely, that it requires a lot of scripting JavaScript, although powerful, is tedious to write and... 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... develop ASP.NET AJAX In the next chapter, you’ll be introduced to the wonderful world of ASP.NET AJAX You will look at its architecture, learn how it allows you to use Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 server controls to generate client-side code, and see how this can give you the best of AJAX while avoiding the worst of it  . eBook Available THE APRESS ROADMAP Pro AJAX and the .NET 2.0 Platform Pro ASP. NET 2.0 in C# or VB Foundations of ASP. NET AJAX Foundations of Ajax Beginning ASP. NET 2.0 in C# or VB www.apress.com SOURCE CODE ONLINE Companion. .NET User level: Beginner–Intermediate Pars, Moroney, Grieb Foundations of ASP. NET AJAX The eXperT’s Voice ® in .neT Foundations of ASP. NET AJAX cyan MaGenTa yelloW Black panTone 123 c Robin. 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,