Professional ASP.NET MVC 2

Chapter 7. AJAX

You're not cool if your website doesn't have Ajax implemented in one place or another. At least that's the impression you get in the post-Web 2.0 development world. For this chapter, we the authors are going to assume that you know what Ajax is and understand the technologies that make Ajax possible — in other words, we're not going to dive into the history and theory of it all.

Rather, we're going to jump right into code and show you how to implement Ajax functionality in your ASP.NET MVC application using the most popular (and free!) JavaScript libraries:

• Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax

• jQuery

A NOTE ON JQUERY

In September 2008, Microsoft announced that it would be including jQuery as part of the ASP.NET MVC default project template and all versions of Visual Studio moving forward. Not only would Microsoft include jQuery, but in the words of Scott Guthrie (Microsoft Corporate VP and Technology Legend):

We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24×7 with Microsoft PSS.

Going forward we'll use jQuery as one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit, as well as to implement new Ajax server-side helper methods for ASP.NET MVC. New features we add to ASP.NET Ajax (like the new client template support) will be designed to integrate nicely with jQuery as well.

We also plan to contribute tests, bug fixes, and patches ...