Continuing my hectic week of nerd community events (two is hectic by my standards) I attended a VBUG doo in Manchester yesterday evening. The presentation was an overview of the of the newly named, and with characteristic verbosity of course, ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions and was ably delivered by Gary Rowntree.
The presentation only briefly touched on the other elements of the ‘Atlas’ framework but did cover the server side of things in a fair bit of depth, particularly the update panel and the process it utlises to weave its magic.
I have used all kinds of terribly hackish methods for doing away with obvious page postbacks in the past, which generally involved stashing a hidden page in an iframe or sneaky window, but I haven’t really scratched the surface of the frameworks that are available now. So I’m no expert but what I would say is that we should all give it a little bit of thought before using asynch callbacks for everything. Alex Bosworth has an interesting list of AJAX no nos on his blog. The ease of the update panel might make AJAX monsters of us all…
I stumbled today on a new podcast that I hadn’t listened to before and funnily enough the current episode (show, cast, release… what do you call them?) is about the client library side of the Atlas set up which is the bit that was largely absent from Gary’s talk. The podcast is by Wally McClure and can be found here and includes a demo video.
If you fancy going to any of the Manchester VBUG meetings should keep an eye on the listing or get in touch with VBUG.
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