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What is the best way to do simple AJAX in .NET 2.0?

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afroblanca

Programmer
Jul 15, 2005
67
US
Hello all,

I am wanting to add some very simple AJAX functionality to my .NET 2.0 application.

I want to make a "tabbed panel" control, whereby you have a panel of text with tabs at the top. Clicking on one of the tabs will change the text inside the panel. This will be similar to what you see on nytimes.com or slate.com. The trick is that, like nytimes and slate, I want to do it all without having a page refresh. Thus, I want to use AJAX.

Here's what I've boiled the problem down to- ultimately, I need to be able to retrieve text from the server when someone clicks on a .GIF. I then want to display this text, which I will probably do through JavaScript, although it would be nice if I could somehow use .NET WebControls for my output.

Unfortunately, none of the AJAX options for .NET are "ready for prime time." Here are my conclusions thus far :

1) Atlas is not an option. Oops, I should say, "Atlas," since it's still a "project" and not a fully-released toolkit. "Atlas" is unusable for the following reasons:
1a) It doesn't work with Safari
1b) It creates MASSIVE javascript includes (close to 1/2 MB in my test app)
1c) It breaks some of my other javascript stuff
1d) It isn't anywhere near a full release. The estimates I've heard are on the order of 6-12 months.

All evidence has lead me to believe that Microsoft's Atlas hype (oops, I'm sorry, "Atlas" hype) was waaaay premature.

2) I don't think that AJAX .NET Professional is an option, either. As it stands, AJAX .NET Professional is the ultimate undocumented wondertool. It has next-to-no documentation at all. The examples and starter kits provided with it are no help at all. I'm still trying this one out, but I'm pretty close to giving up. If anyone here has successfully gotten AJAX .NET to work, please let me know, as I'm willing to give it a second look.

Are there any other packages out there that could help me? All along, I've been trying to avoid re-inventing the wheel. However, if necessary, I'm willing to get down to the nitty-gritty and write my own AJAX library. Unfortunately, I have very little experience with AJAX, javascript, or XMLHTTPRequest. Could somebody please point me to some good materials for getting started with this? Bonus points for materials that are aimed at .NET 2.0 and not .NET 1.1.

Thank you.
 
There are quite a few other 3rd party controls from compaines that you can plug in very easily (like telerik for example). Have a quick search on google and you'll find quite a few other similar ones...


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Telerik's controls look good, and I may eventually give them a shot.

For now, I have decided to go with the AJAX .NET Professional package. It's been out for a while, and seems to be in use in production environments. I was able to get it working with some help from the AJAX .NET Pro group on Google Groups.

However, I will most likely switch to Atlas once it's out of beta.
 
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