ASP.NET AJAX Ships

ASP.NET AJAX extensions, released in Jan. 2006 as a free toolkit, help Web developers build applications with some of the responsiveness and user interface (UI) features normally associated with desktop applications.

AJAX is a common acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and describes a technique in which JavaScript in a Web page downloads small amounts of XML data in the background so that the entire page doesn’t have to be refreshed when anything changes. For example, both Google Maps and Microsoft’s Live Local Maps use AJAX technologies to allow users to scroll a map in a Web page by clicking and dragging. New sections of the map are downloaded in the background and the page can display a new section of map without reloading the page.

ASP.NET AJAX has the following major components:

• Extensions to ASP.NET that make it easier to implement the server portion of an AJAX application
• The Microsoft AJAX Library, a library of client-side JavaScript code that supports a variety of