LinkTogether: Coproduced by You and Network Solutions

If there’s one thing I’m not sure the world needs, it’s yet another AJAX library or set of custom controls for web development.  Having said that, a review of the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX framework reveals it to be a powerful addition to virtually any ASP.NET developer’s toolbox because it not only provides a set of common controls that can be used to standardize development in a user-friendly, cross-browser fashion but it will also significantly reduce the amount of code that the average developer has to write in order to deploy an application.  We’re all used to the standard set of HTML components offered by most server-side control libraries, such as buttons, lists, tables, and image controls.  However, what we get via ASP.NET AJAX can bring a whole new level of cross-browser interactivity to your web application.  I’ll point out a few of my favorites in this blog post.

The Accordion control contains multiple panes of content, with only one that is actively displayed at a time.  Clicking on the header for any pane, expands, that pane while minimizing the previous active pane.

The Autocomplete control extends a basic text box by populating a drop-down list with the results of a web service call based on the text the user has entered into the text box itself.

DynamicPopulate extends standard ASP.NET controls by tying the results of an action on one control to the population of data into another control.  Like other ASP.NET AJAX controls, it can be used to retrieve the results of a web service call and populate those results into a target control.

The NoBot control provides CAPTCHA-like validation on user input, without actually requiring the user to read an image and input text.  Instead, it performs various checks via JavaScript (such as IP address tracking and timing the amount of it takes to submit a form) in order to attempt to verify that the form is actually being submitted by a human.

There are nearly 40 controls, in total, as part the ASP.NET AJAX library.  If you’re interested in seeing all of the ASP.NET AJAX controls in action, visit http://www.asp.net/ajax/AjaxControlToolkit/Samples.