Recently, I have started working on the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0
add-on and so many questions were coming to my mind on the best practices to
apply when adding the AJAX taste into currently existing Web applications or
even with the new ones.
Using the server-side part of the AJAX 1.0 library, which
includes the ScriptManager, UpdatePanel, Timer, and UpdateProgess controls, is
straight forward and a matter of just dragging these controls onto the page and
that is it! However, it is not always that easy and clear when it comes with
working with MasterPages and AJAX or User Controls and AJAX.
In this article we are going to illustrate to you several
ways on how you can use the UpdatePanel together with user controls, whether to
include UpdatePanel within the UserControl itself or simply embed a UserControl
inside an UpdatePanel on the host page.
We will start by developing a simple ASP.NET Web application
in which we have two UserControls, mainly the EmployeeList and OrderList
UserControls, with the old post-back model. After that we explore the different
ways of adding AJAX into the application.
In a future article, hopefully, we will illustrate the best
practices on how to use the AJAX 1.0 library with the MasterPages in ASP.NET
2.0.