Introduction ASP

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.