Chapter 2. ASP.NET 3.5 and AJAX

AJAX is simply so powerful that most Web applications you build today will make some use of it. In addition to new applications, development teams are now looking back at applications built in the pre-AJAX world and looking at how to incorporate the technology to bring their applications inline.

AJAX arrived on the scene with such a splash that Microsoft was quite quick to adapt ASP.NET to handle it. Shortly after the mainstream introduction of AJAX, Microsoft released a beta for a new toolkit that enabled developers to incorporate AJAX features in their Web applications. This toolkit, code-named Atlas and later renamed ASP.NET AJAX, made it extremely simple to start using AJAX features in your ASP.NET 2.0 applications.

The ASP.NET AJAX toolkit was not part of the default .NET Framework 2.0 install. If you are using the .NET Framework 2.0, it is an extra component that you must download from the Internet. If you are using ASP.NET 3.5, you don't have to worry about installing the ASP.NET AJAX toolkit, as everything you need is already in place for you by default. Now, when building ASP.NET 3.5 applications using Visual Studio 2008, your applications are AJAX-enabled by default.