AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. This enables us to build more dynamic and interactive webpages on the limited bandwidth that we have today. ASP.NET AJAX framework provides a very good controls to integrate AJAX into your current ASP.NET page. You could download the framework from here.

AJAX allows you to update necessary part of the page instead of reloading the page. We can achieve this easily with the AJAX framework on ASP.NET 2.0.

This video gives you a very basic understanding on how to use AJAX framework component like ScriptManager and UpdatePanel. There is only one ScriptManager in ASP.NET page for AJAX, and the selected update components are placed in the UpdatePanel. In this case, only the components in the UpdatePanel will be updated. It is also possible to make sure of the <trigger> tag to set the triggering from a control item and the corresponding events.

Another cool feature is to include UpdateProgress component into the ASP.NET page, this allows waiting message like “Loading….” to be shown while the selected part of the page is loading from the server.

This is just the basic overall view on ASP.NET AJAX framework. There are many videio illustrations that can be found on http://www.asp.net/ajax/ 

Hope that my next post will have a better explaination and example on ASP.NET AJAX.