"Pro ASP.NET 3.5 Server Controls and AJAX Components"
The Control Toolkit has lots of useful and powerful AJAX controls and extenders with source code that can be used as-is in applications or server as example code for building your own AJAX-enabled server controls or an extender control that can apply AJAX functionality to an existing server control. The .NET Framework 3.5 provides additional enhancements to ASP.NET, building on the currently available ASP.NET AJAX functionality, which we cover in Chapter 9. In this chapter, we provide a quick demonstration of writing AJAX-enabled web pages??”ASP.NET style??”through the use of the UpdatePanel control. ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel Server Control In Visual Studio 2008 with .NET Framework 3.5, a new node is available in the Toolbox window, shown in Figure 2-12. For a quick example, we??™ve copied the HtmlControls sample from Chapter 1 into the Ch02 folder in the web project and renamed it HtmlControlsAJAX.aspx. As a quick review, in Chapter 1, this example took X and Y values to dynamically build a table that had X columns and Y rows. To quickly make this page more responsive with less page flickering (i.e., to add AJAX functionality), the tag that renders as the button and the tag that serves as a container for the resulting table are moved into an UpdatePanel server control available on the AJAX Extensions Toolbox node.