Republished with Permission - Original Article

One of the questions I was recently asked at a user group meeting in Europe was whether it was possible to use ASP.NET AJAX within SharePoint 2007 solutions.  This was a common enough question that the SharePoint team recently blogged about their plans with ASP.NET AJAX to help answer it.  You can read their post here.

At a highlevel, official support for ASP.NET AJAX within SharePoint will be coming with the first service pack of SharePoint 2007.  This is because SharePoint 2007 shipped before ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 did, and so there is some work the SharePoint team needs to-do to make it integrate nicely.

In the meantime, though, you can read the SharePoint team's blog post here on how to install ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 on a SharePoint 2007 site and start using its functionality today.  There are some caveats to using it until the first service pack ships - but the steps in their blog post will help you start using it immediately.  Also make sure to check out Eric Schoonover's blog post on a custom AjaxBasePart web part that his team has created to help with using ASP.NET AJAX within custom web parts you build.