About AJAX Control Toolkit

Microsoft has a complicated relationship with Ajax. On the one hand, the company wants
to provide its existing ASP.NET developers with an easy way to implement Ajax functionality
without having to learn JavaScript. On the other hand, Microsoft recognizes that the
future is on the client. Therefore, it wants to provide web developers with the tools they
need to build pure client-side Ajax applications. For these reasons, Microsoft has both a
server-side Ajax framework and a client-side Ajax framework.
If you want to retrofit an existing ASP.NET application to take advantage of Ajax, you can
take advantage of Microsoft’s server-side Ajax framework. To take advantage of the serverside
framework, you don’t need to write a single line of JavaScript code. You can continue
to build ASP.NET pages with server-side controls in the standard way. You learn how to
take advantage of the server-side Ajax framework in this chapter.
The advantage of the server-side framework is that it provides existing ASP.NET developers
with a painless method of doing Ajax. The disadvantage of the server-side framework is
that it doesn’t escape all the problems associated with a server-side framework. You still
have to run back to the server whenever you perform any client-side action.


-- Nikhil Kumar