AJAX: Relief for the Heartbreak of Server Postback

ASP.NET developers know the heartbreak of postback too well. Web page refreshes are a slow, wasteful pain in the butt. Even if the page responds adequately on the corporate LAN, you have to pity the poor dial-up user. He’s afraid to change a textbox value for fear of triggering an autopostback that causes yet another boring refresh. These delays are enough to drive you back to the snappy performance of a rich client – deployment hassles and all.

Fortunately, ASP.NET server controls are getting richer and smarter by employing sophisticated client-side JavaScript and AJAX.

You should see what the guys at ComponentArt are up to with their leading edge stuff. They’ve just released betas of grid, calendar and callback controls in Web.UI 3.0.
If you’re curious about AJAX, look at the Callback samples. Updating parts of a Web page with fresh server-side data - without reloading the whole page - still seems like magic to me. 

By way of full disclosure, ComponentArt is a client of my freelance technical writing business. I can’t tell you much yet about how to use the AJAX wrapper found in the Web.UI 3.0 beta controls because I’m still writing documentation samples and code walkthroughs for the new Charting components.

Ken 

Microsoft MVP [ASP.NET]