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Professional ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

Bill Evjen , Matt Gibbs , Dan Wahlin , Dave Reed
 
4.0 based on 2 reviews.

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Product Description

ASP.NET revolutionized Web application development. The platform handles many of the complexities of creating Web applications. Now ASP.NET AJAX takes the development platform even further. The lines between rich client applications and traditionally less interactive browser-based applications are being further blurred with the use of this technology.

The ASP.NET AJAX Library brings object-oriented programming to JavaScript development for modern browsers, and the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions makes it easy to write rich Web applications that communicate with the Web server asynchronously. Again, the complexities are made easy by using ASP.NET.

The new server controls that are part of ASP.NET AJAX make it simple to designate parts of the page to be updated automatically without making the user pause and wait while the data is refreshed. You can have partial page updates without writing a single line of code. Other new controls let you alert the user that background work is happening and designate regular intervals at which updates occur. In addition, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit makes it easy to make your user interface really come to life with animations, modal dialogs, transition effects, and more.

Ajax is definitely the hot buzzword in the Web application world at the moment. Ajax is an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and, in Web application development, it signifies the capability to build applications that make use of the XMLHttpRequest object.

The creation and the inclusion of the XMLHttpRequest object in JavaScript and the fact that most upper-level browsers support the use of this object led to creation of the Ajax model. Ajax applications, although they have been around for a few years, gained greater popularity after Google released a number of notable, Ajax-enabled applications such as Google Maps and Google Suggest. These applications demonstrated the value of Ajax.

Shortly thereafter, 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, makes it extremely simple to start using Ajax features in applications today.

Prior to Visual Studio 2008, the ASP.NET AJAX product used to be a separate application that developers were required to install on their machine and the Web server that they were working with. This release gained in popularity quite rapidly and has now been made a part of the Visual Studio 2008 offering. Not only is it a part of the Visual Studio 2008 IDE, the ASP.NET AJAX product is also baked into the .NET Framework 3.5. This means that in order to use ASP.NET AJAX, developers are not going to need to install anything if they are working with ASP.NET 3.5.

Overall, Microsoft has fully integrated the entire ASP.NET AJAX experience in that developers can easily use Visual Studio and its visual designers to work with your Ajax-enabled pages and even have the full debugging story that they would want to have with their applications. Using Visual Studio 2008, developers are now able to debug straight into the JavaScript that they are using in the pages.

In addition, it is important to note that Microsoft focused a lot of attention on cross-platform compatibility with ASP.NET AJAX. Developers will find that the Ajax-enabled applications that they build upon the .NET Framework 3.5 are able to work within all the major up-level browsers out there (e.g., FireFox and Opera).

This book is aimed at experienced ASP.NET developers looking to add AJAX to their applications, and experienced Web developers who want to move to using ASP.NET and AJAX together.

In this book, I assume that you already have an understanding of how ASP.NET works. For an in-depth discussion of ASP.NET, I recommend Professional ASP.NET 3.5 by Bill Evjen, et al. (Wrox, 2008). Th

Product Details

  • Media: Paperback Book, 552 pages
  • Publisher: Wrox (February 03, 2009)
  • ISBN-10: 0470392177
  • ISBN-13: 9780470392171
  • Dimensions: 7.4 x 9.2 x 1.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.8 lbs
  • Note: Some of this information came from Amazon.com

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Customer Reviews

  • Rating Good Overall Book  Mar 8, 2009 (4 of 4 found this helpful)

    There are quite a bit of books on the market about ASP.NET and AJAX. The book "Professional ASP.NET AJAX" from Wrox is a good overview of the AJAX framework. The authors of the book cover a wide array of subjects that you don't find in every AJAX book. The book covers topics like localization and globalization, custom AJAX controls, web services, the WebRequest object, AjaxControlToolkit overview, and more.
    As a professional series book, the book does cover a good amount of material to deserve the label. After introducing the reader with the basics, the book moves into the ScriptManager control and all it has to offer, including the new script combining feature. This is followed by a chapter on the back button, history points, and partial updates features.
    The book covers AJAX networking and using the WebRequest object and its ability to request information from the server, which has the ability to contact the server and receive the updated HTML as a response. This chapter surprisingly didn't cover web services, but an adjacent chapter covers the in-built application and profile services that allow profiling and login/logout functionality all in client script. The book continues to cover state management; error handling and Sys.Debug; and deployment of AJAX-enabled applications. For deployment, there was a lot of information that's important to know about deploying an application I never knew about.
    The book covers customization; it features developing a custom AJAX control that changes its content on the client-side, along with an AJAX extender using the AJAX Control Toolkit. The book looks at the basics of these, as the development approaches vary significantly. The subsequent chapter focuses on embedding AJAX code into web parts using the existing web part framework.
    Overall, the book is well-written and conveys its points clearly. I think some of the content is organized in an awkward way; for instance, the book briefly looks at localization early in the book with a good explanation, then features a full chapter later in the book. It felt like it was repeating itself in a few places. The chapters are written fluently; the reading of the book isn't dry at all, which makes for a good tech book.

  • Rating Very good introductory book updated and improved  Feb 9, 2009 (2 of 2 found this helpful)

    Updating and improving upon its predecessor Professional ASP.Net 2.0 AJAX, this book now provides fuller discussion of the AJAX Toolkit and how to build custom client- and server-side controls, and dedicated chapters on animations and localization. It also added one chapter each on how to ajaxify WebParts when building portals and how to enable browser navigation history support, a feature that is not enabled in the framework by default because of overhead in the potential need to create iframes behind the scenes for some browsers. Both additional chapters are very well written and make the book even more valuable. I would have liked to see more discussion of recommended practices addressing security and testing concerns, including availability of AJAX-aware testing tools that work well with the framework. Also, I think that removing the brief section on accessibility concerns with AJAX from the previous edition is a mistake. Overall, however, I like this book very much.

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