In the last few articles we have been discussing the new
features in ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX 1.0. Among the new features is creating client
controls that you can instantiate on the client side, add it to the page
content, and fire and handle events defined on these client controls.
In this article we will demonstrate the new client controls
in AJAX 1.0 by creating a Grid control that allows you to create new records,
edit an existing record, and delete an existing record. You might be wondering why
we would create such a control in a time we have the GridView that has all this
functionality in which we can place it inside an UpdatePanel control and get
the Ajaxified GridView! You are right, but with the development of this new AJAX client control, it will show you in details how we can create any control you want,
add methods, properties, and events.
Figure 1 below shows the client control Grid we are about to
demonstrate in this article.
Figure 1

As you can see, when the page loads, a client control is
responsible to show a Grid-like table listing the contacts stored in the
database. In each row there are two actions, one to edit and another to delete
the current row. In addition, there is a button to create a new contact, which
when clicked will show another client control that allows the user to add a new
contact to the database.