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.