Implementing Microsoft Ajax should be easier

I find the whole Microsoft Ajax library powerful but still messy to implement.

It is very hard to manage all the events, trying to not get lost between what belong to the client side and what should fire a server side event.

It looks like this technology need to mature a lot and I expect that with Orcas, we should have something really usable.

One positive thing however, and this is why I stay with Microsoft Ajax, are the Ajax control toolkit.

It's true that the lists of existing controls is already impressive, and doing the sam controls out of the library would be a waste of time.

I am not totally sure, but I believe those controls will be delivered as standard in Orcas.

 

4 Comments

  • Really? I haven't found it too difficult myself.

  • The ASP.NET AJAX (atlas was such a better name) libraries I think are great. Sure you might need to know the page life cycle like the back of your hand, and a lot of client side JavaScripting to go along with it, but hey - as a developer we need to learn.

    We can't always hope for the easy way to do things, sometimes we need to do things the hard way.

  • Get the beta of Orcas, things DO get easier...

  • Initially I was very excited about Atlas. The updatepanel is a very easy way to get Ajax into your web application. However, as I started working on more complicated projects using Atlas, updatepanels are to me not the way to go. They seem to clutter the pages (especially when you implement reuse with usercontrols). What we really need are more specialized controls (datagrids,textboxes,.. etc) that support ajax out of the box. Cross browser support has already improved a lot, but still I wonder, if current javascript and HTML is up to the task of what we really want: rich dynamic web UI... Maybe it's better to start looking at technologies like silverlight?

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