Foreword

ASP.NET is used daily by millions of professional developers world-wide. It runs some of the most successful websites and applications in the world, and every day thousands of new developers begin learning ASP.NET for the first time—supported by an incredible developer community of books, blogs, user groups, forums, and developer websites.

Our goal with ASP.NET AJAX is to enable developers to easily build great ASP.NET applications that fully leverage the power of the browser, and which deliver a smoother and more interactive experience for end users. ASP.NET AJAX works with all modern browsers, and allows you to easily build great web applications that work cross-platform on all operating systems. ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 is available as a free, fully supported download for ASP.NET 2.0. It will be built into the standard .NET setup package starting with the .NET Framework 3.5 release of ASP.NET.

There are several things that I think distinguish ASP.NET AJAX. The first is the productivity it delivers. ASP.NET AJAX can be used to very quickly add common AJAX behavior and functionality to an application with very minimal code. If you want smoother page updates and richer client-UI behaviors, there isn’t another AJAX framework out there that makes it easier.

What is great about ASP.NET AJAX is that it also scales to advanced scenarios. You can use the ASP.NET AJAX client-side JavaScript library to build clean, encapsulated JavaScript that makes asynchronous network callbacks to the server to build extremely rich UI (for an example of this visit: http://www.pageflakes.com). This ability to start simple, but then go deep, using a core AJAX programming model that is nicely integrated into ASP.NET, ends up being extremely powerful, and is one that enables developers to build great next-generation web applications.

ASP.NET AJAX in Action provides an excellent guide to learning and mastering all of the functionality that ASP.NET AJAX provides, and in particular it does a great job of explaining its more advanced features. Alessandro, David, and Rama are ASP.NET AJAX experts and share their experiences and insights throughout the book. They will help teach you how to fully leverage ASP.NET AJAX and build robust web applications faster and better than ever before.

Enjoy!

SCOTT GUTHRIE

General Manager, Developer Division

Microsoft Corporation