Second part of my Ajax adventure was rather boring; I simply wrote standard ASP.NET application and added couple update panels to ajaxify it. This app is similar to the first one, except it writes/reads to XML instead of flat file and works specifically with links. I didn’t even need second page or service to send request to, code-behind served this purpose just fine. And this is where Microsoft Ajax strength is – it lets you write your C#/VB code and don’t worry too much about JavaScript. Well, it is to say if you doing it the easy way. You can go whole nine yards with web services and end up with totally different architecture (SOA is another buzz word) if you want to do it the right way, but it is kind of out of scope in my little research. Anyways, here is my conclusions (ok, I admit, it is crazy to make conclusions after next to nothing experience, but I’ll do it anyway; I’ve seen countries going to war with less research on their hands; my conclusions will harm no one). More...

Yes, I've heard about Ajax before - one would have to be hiding in the hole for the last year or two to avoid the buzz. I've read articles, seen videos and presentations, even used applications that utilize Ajax on a daily basis. So I’m not exactly a newbie. But somehow I managed to stay away from it - no projects I've been involved into for the last few years used Ajax. I decided it is a shame and I want to change it. Here is a plan: for starters I'll write two small applications ("gadgets", or user controls, for BlogEngine). The first one will be using "classic" JavaScript callback approach and the other one will be doing similar stuff the Microsoft way. Then I will compare experience. Sounds fair? More...

As you can read on official site, BlogEngine does support Ajax. The approach it uses - it relays on few simple helper JavaScript routines (can be found in BlogEngine.Core/Web/Scripts/blog.js) and hand-crafter JavaScript functions in the UI code to perform basic callbacks. BlogEngine does not support Ajax.Net (aka Atlas or ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions in its latest incarnation) out of the box, and for a good reason. Ajax.Net is a dependent technology. You can't just throw Ajax DLLs in the /Bin folder and hope it will work - most likely it won't. The reason is that Microsoft's Ajax libraries require full trust to run, and if this is fine on your local machine, where you can grant yourself all rights in the world, your host might (and should) be far less generous. More...