Well, AJAX is not a pure Microsoft technology nor is it a
new technology. However, AJAX is really a kind of library that is usually provided
by a provider. In our case, ASP.NET AJAX Extensions is the framework that you
can work with inside Microsoft Visual Studio and is also provided by Microsoft
for free.
There are couples of issues to remember here.
·
These Extensions were meant to be used in Visual Studio 2005 IDE
and above. This does not mean that all of the controls will not work in Visual Studio
.NET 2003, but Microsoft will not support 2003.
·
These Extensions do not provide direct controls to work with
directly, like an AJAXfied button. There is another project dealing with this
and will be a topic for future discussion.
·
Some of the available AJAX toolkit will work with ASP.NET without
problems.