Reviews for Programming ASP.NET AJAX

1. best book I have seen about ASP.NET AJAX

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, November 12rd, 2007

   AJAX is the latest buzz word in the .NET world even though it's not a particularly new technology, being a creative use of Javascript and the creative use of its XMLHttpRequest object. The history of its emergence as the latest weapon in the web developer's arsenal is well covered in this book, Programming ASP.NET AJAX, which differs from the many books dealing with this subject by concentrating, as the title suggests, on the ASP.NET implementation offered by Microsoft. There is a distinct lack of books covering this area, as most available concentrate on AJAX used with PHP. This makes this book a valuable resource for those who do not have the time to gather the information contained within its covers through trawling the Internet.
   
   Ideally suited to the newcomer to using AJAX within .NET this volume starts with the basics of installing ASP.NET AJAX on your development machine, brief overviews of javascript and AJAX and then proceeds to cover specifics of the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions, the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit and ASP.NET AJAX Futures CTP.
   
   They say the proof of the pudding is in the eating and this is where the book perhaps does not live up to my expectations, as it is through using the ASP.NET AJAX tools in real world applications that I encountered problems that were not treated within its pages. It was then that I had to turn to the Internet rather than this book for information on the masked edit extender, the calendar extender and the reordered list extender to name a few. I would have liked more information on incorporating AJAX Toolkit items within custom controls or at least using them programmatically rather than the use of declarative aspx pages which is the main focus of the book. There is a chapter on writing your own AJAX extensions which is a useful guide and which does give some indication of the possibilities that the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions hold.
   
   Eight chapters of the book deal with ASP.NET AJAX Futures, which although interesting, is perhaps too much attention given to an implementation of AJAX for ASP.NET which is almost certainly too experimental for use in a production environment. It does give some indication of what we can expect from future releases of ASP.NET AJAX but I feel more detail should have been given on the AJAX Control Toolkit as this is what drew me to this book in the first place seeing as the official online documentation is a bit scant to say the least.
   
   This is probably the best book that I have seen about ASP.NET AJAX but is in some ways a missed opportunity, in that it could have been a comprehensive guide to the use of the Microsoft Extensions and the AJAX Control Toolkit but instead devotes too much space to Futures CTP, which many people may not want to incorporate into their applications fearing a repeat of ATLAS, where code that worked with a beta release does not work with the official release. Otherwise, a very well written book about an exciting phase of online development.