Visual Studio® 2010 and .NET 4, Six-in-one

Chapter 20. ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit and jQuery

In Chapter 19, you learned about the new Ajax improvements and saw several examples of using the ASP.NET Ajax Library. You also read about jQuery library and used jQuery in a few samples.

Ajax and jQuery are primarily client-side technologies. They are built on JavaScript. If you do not have any server-side technologies, but rather just a simple web server with standard HTTP/HTTPS protocol, you can still use both of them. However, most applications work with information, and the nature of these applications is that they store and handle data at the server side — somewhere in the Internet cloud — and not at the client.

This chapter dives deeper into the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit and the jQuery technology. These are two important pieces of the full toolset that you can use together with your ASP.NET applications to improve the user experience.

This chapter covers the following main topics:

• First look at the Ajax Control Toolkit — You are going to change an ASP.NET Web Application using "flickering" postbacks to an improved one using the Ajax Control Toolkit.

• Using the Controls of the Toolkit — This section provides a detailed overview of most server-side controls and extenders shipped with the Toolkit. You learn more about them through many small samples.

• The jQuery library — In this section, you will learn about the jQuery JavaScript library that is designed to make it easier to navigate a document, select document object model (DOM) ...